Search Disrupted Newsletter (Issue 4)
Cohere Sued, Grok3 looks good, Voices of Search, Rabbit Agent, and The SEO Community
Cohere Lawsuit
A variety of news publishers are suing Cohere AI for scraping their content, summarizing it, and then presenting it to their users.
It’s unclear to me how this differs from Google’s featured snippets or the entire blog + reaction industry, but we will see.
This is a much bigger deal than last week’s Thompson Reuters lawsuit as this is closer to the core functionality of AI search.
Voices of Search
This week I was on the Voices of Search podcast (twice!) to talk about different aspects of AI search. We covered how, despite all the hype about up-and-coming AI search tools, it’s actually Google who has decided that AI search is the future, as well as practical advice on how to start moving your content strategy to optimize for AI search.
Grok3 Looks Good
Even as someone who is up to their eyeballs in AI stuff, I quickly grow tired of the non-stop announcements of new AI models (the latest being Grok3).
That being said, while these are all incremental improvements, looking at the cumulative overall progress in AI search is amazing.
Grok3 isn’t publicly out yet, so it’s not in Knowatoa, but we should be adding Grok models soon as, unlike many other AI systems out there, it is publicly available (for users of Twitter/X).
Rabbit Agent
Rabbit is the company that released the Rabbit R1 device. I’ve got one on my desk that I admire more as a design artifact than a useful everyday device.
They’ve now released a new AI agent called Rabbit Agent that works on Android (as does the R1), and it is a really useful example of how AI agents can be used.
In the video, they show it doing a variety of tasks, including searching the web, creating a spreadsheet, and even playing a game.
But what’s interesting here, and that’s really hard to convey is that this is generalizable. So much of the promise of AI tools and agents is held back by a lack of data access (APIs) into every part of your digital life.
Rabbit is doing the exceedingly hard work of trying to make a tool that downloads and uses any app without having a custom API integration.
For instance, I use Fastmail for my email + calendar, which isn’t supported by many of the AI tools, the promise here is that their agent could interact directly with the Fastmail app and use it to help me with scheduling, sending emails, etc. and not require a separate API.
The SEO Community
If you’re looking for a community of SEOs that “get it” concerning AI and the future of search, I’d recommend joining the SEO Community Slack.
Noah Learner has done a great job of curating a community of people who genuinely help one another. I am highlighting two people in particular who have helped me recently.
Mike Lepistö who provided invaluable feedback on our first SEO Payrank report and Tory Gray who was kind enough to educate me on why people do client-side rendering with Javascript and the many implications this has for SEO.
Thanks, everybody!
Mike
p.s. It would really help me out if you could Follow me on LinkedIn
p.s. It would really help me out if you could Follow me on LinkedIn