Search Disrupted Newsletter (Issue 8)

Gemini is the new Google Assistant

Someday, all of Google’s confusingly named services will be squished together into a hive mind of features. However, until that day, we all still need to struggle with their renaming, re-categorization, and shifting.

Google Assistant is being phased out of Android phones, and Google Gemini is being phased in as your new…assistant.

For SEOs → this is just one more reason to ensure that questions of brand sentiment, knowledge, and competition are set for the companies you care about.

For users → this is going to be a nice upgrade as Assistant had a lot of interesting contextual pieces of your life (where you’re at, what you’re doing) but was never really able to put those together well. Gemini has the brains to take advantage of that information in a way that I think will be genuinely helpful.

Mr. Beast AI Dubs

It’s easy to dismiss Jimmy “Mr. Beast” Donaldson (the most subscribed creator on YouTube), but even if you’re not a fan of his content, which skews very young and very “shouty,” I think there’s a lot to learn from his approach to content production.

His “How to Succeed in Mr. Beast Production” is genuinely one of the best pieces of business writing I’ve read in the past year.

But what brought him back on my radar this week was this YT short describing how they’re using AI to re-dub his content into other languages in his own spoken voice. There’s also a more in-depth video of his multi-language strategy in his Creator Insider interview

Build your own LLM Search Agent

I try to include “build your own” projects in these newsletters as I think doing so is the fastest way to understand how these new technologies work and how SEOs can take advantage of them.

This week, I’ve got a project for you to build your own LLM search agent. This is fantastic as it is a great representation of what ChatGPT, Google, and Perplexity are doing with their agents.

Aka - if you really want to understand how Google’s new “AI Mode” works? Take a half hour and work through this tutorial.

The SEO vs Sysadmin Divide

I’m regularly on calls where I try to persuade SEOs that “Yes. It is possible to get sites indexed in AI search tools,” to their general disbelief, as there aren’t any equivalents to Google Search Console for these new tools.

However, in the other online world that I live in (the cybersecurity and sysadmin world), everybody is generally freaking out with how often AI tools are scraping their sites for data collection purposes.

For the most part, these appear to be Chinese-based services that disregard robots.txt directives and pump out tens of thousands of requests an hour.

You might be tempted to think this is a “them” problem, but it’s rapidly becoming an “us” problem for SEOs as web hosts, CDNs, and other services are cracking down on all AI scraping requests.

Within Knowatoa, we have an “AI Search Console” that helps you monitor whether your site is having scrapers blocked. We’ve seen a big uptick this month, and if your site can’t be indexed (scraped), then you’re not going to rank.

There’s a much more in-depth writeup on TheLibre.news, including this interesting screenshot of Anubis, an anti-bot scraping tool that makes clients do expensive math problems to get access to sites.

Claude Web Search

Anthropic’s Claude is secretly the number two most viewed AI tool on the internet (after Google and their AIOs) as they are literally on every single page of Amazon’s website (Claude is what runs the “Rufus” shopping assistant feature).

They’re also number one in my heart as their Claude Sonnet 3.7 model is what I use for Knowatoa development in Cursor.

This week, they added a proper “Web Search” feature to compete more directly with Google and Perplexity. It’s a “Feature Preview,” so it’s currently only available on paid plans.

Thanks this week

Big thanks to Bernard Meyer and all of the incredibly nice folks over at Omnisend for letting us present to them this week.

A challenging aspect of AI search is that it’s much more multidisciplinary than traditional SEO. To win, you need to execute across all of your organization’s marketing disciplines.

We’ve started offering Knowatoa customers a free internal webinar/kickoff that gets the whole team up to speed on where AI search is right now, how their actions today will impact their search rankings tomorrow, and how they can win.

Cheers!

p.s. It would really help me out if you could Follow me on LinkedIn