First of all, we want to wish you a happy new year on behalf of the entire team at CLICKTRUST! May you have a fantastic 2023!

So what happened in December? OpenAI launched ChatGPT,  the long awaited landing page report was rolled out in GA4, Google introduced its link spam update and rolled out major updates to its quality rater guidelines, and much more!

Let's get you up to speed.

CLICKTRUST Brainfood

From around the web

AI & ChatGPT

ChatGPT and How AI Disrupts Industries
- Harvard Business Review
"Late last month, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a new AI tool that can tell stories and write code. It has the potential to take over certain roles traditionally held by humans, such as copywriting, answering customer service inquiries, writing news reports, and creating legal documents."

Google's management has reportedly issued a 'code red' amid the rising popularity of the ChatGPT AI
- Business Insider
"CEO Sundar Pichai has reportedly redirected some teams to build out AI products as concerns rise over ChatGPT's threat to Google."

Google: We Have Algorithms To Detect & Demote AI Altered Plagiarized Content
- Search Engine Roundtable
"Duy Nguyen from Google's search quality team said in the Google office hours video that Google has "algorithms to go after" those who post AI plagiarized content, then the algorithms can "demote site scraping content from other sites."

We Evaluated ChatGPT vs. Google on 500 Search Queries
- Surge AI
"We measured ChatGPT vs. Google, and found that ChatGPT crushes Google on coding queries and ties it on general informational queries — despite not being optimized for a search experience at all. Dive into this post to learn more about OpenAI’s existential threat to Google."

All-knowing machines are a fantasy
- iai news
"Large language models like Galactica, ChatGPT and LaMDA are not fit for purpose as information access systems, in two fundamental and independent ways."

Why You Should (or Shouldn't) Use AI Content Generators in 2023
- Sitechecker
"In the last few years, AI has gone from futuristic to reality in many fields of our lives. SEO is no exception. In spite of lively discussions over Google’s reaction to generated content, more and more people are testing and trying to adapt AI to their niches. So should or shouldn’t you add AI content creation tools to your SEO strategy for 2023? Let’s dive right in!"

Why SEO Pros Need To Master Prompts: The ChatGPT Revolution
- Search Engine Journal
"Content generation has grown exponentially in recent years, and prompts have become a must-have tool for SEO professionals. With these simple instructions, it’s possible to generate articles, images, videos, and more."

ChatGPT for SEO: 20 Ways to Leverage ChatGPT in your SEO Activities
- Aleyda Solis
"There are many use cases for ChatGPT to support our day to day SEO activities -important to highlight the “support” role here, rather than letting it run them completely in autopilot. As many of you, I’ve been playing with ChatGPT in the latest weeks to identify ways to leverage in SEO tasks. Here are 20 of them that you can use as a reference."

Ways to Use ChatGPT for SEO
- Joe Youngblood
"If you ask ChatGPT, it’s the perfect SEO tool. When I inquired about how to use it for SEO, ChatGPT told me it could be used for everything from keyword research to voice optimization. In fact, with a little prodding ChatGPT spit out 20 ways to use it for SEO and it probably would have kept going if I kept pushing."

Google-related updates

The 10 Biggest Changes to Google Ads You Need to Know for 2023
- WordStream
"In this post, we’re going to highlight the 10 biggest changes to Google Ads from this past year that you should know about going into 2023, and for each one, share practical tips for adapting your strategy."

4 new features on the Google Insights page
- Search Engine Land
"To help advertisers navigate the holiday season and optimize their inventory, Google has launched four new features on the Insights page

• Search terms

• Assets

• Audiences

• Change history"

Google Analytics 4 Rolling Out Built-In Landing Page Report
- Search Engine Journal
"Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is rolling out built-in functionality that allows users to generate landing reports.Used to determine the effectiveness of landing pages, these reports collect data about visits to a site, allowing webmasters to test and optimize their landing pages."

Turning data into results with data-driven attribution
- Google Ads & Commerce Blog
"We will soon be launching a simulation tool to eligible advertisers that will allow you to see how automated bidding would have reacted to data-driven attribution over the last 7 days. This will help you understand the effects of data-driven attribution on your account before making the switch.

Lastly, we’re continuing to bring data-driven attribution to more advertisers and more ad types. We are expanding our support to app conversions and will begin supporting Discovery formats (including those in Performance Max) next year."

SEO

Introducing the Google Search Status Dashboard
- Google Search Central
"Today, we're introducing the Google Search Status Dashboard to communicate the status of Search going forward. This dashboard reports widespread issues occurring in the last 7 days, with some details and the current status of the incident. A widespread issue means there's a systemic problem with a Search system affecting a large number of sites or Search users."

Have Content Load First For JavaScript Heavy Sites Says Google
- Search Engine Roundtable
"Gary Illyes from Google posted a PSA (public service announcement) of sorts on Mastodon and LinkedIn for sites that are heavy with JavaScript. He said that you should try to load the content, including the "marginal boilerplate" content, first when you have a JavaScript-heavy site."

Survey Of 755 Link Builders Shows What Works In 2022
- AuthorityHacker
"Google recently came on record saying that links may be less important in the future than they are today. And while this is an interesting point for futurologists, it’s also an admission that links still play a MAJOR role when it comes to your site ranking on top of the #1 search engine today.

So we decided to anonymously survey 755 professional link builders on how they build links, what works best / worst for them, and what it really takes to make link building work for your business."

December 2022 link spam update releasing for Google Search
- Google Search Central
"Today, we're leveraging the power of SpamBrain to neutralize the impact of unnatural links on search results. SpamBrain is our AI-based spam-prevention system. Besides using it to detect spam directly, it can now detect both sites buying links, and sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links."

Google Unleashes December 2022 Link Spam Update With SpamBrain AI
- Search Engine Roundtable
"Google began rolling out a revised link spam update on December 14, 2022, named the December 2022 link spam update. What is new here is that this is not just a spam update but how SpamBrain uses AI to detect link spam."

Our latest update to the quality rater guidelines: E-A-T gets an extra E for Experience
- Google Search Central
"Now to better assess our results, E-A-T is gaining an E: experience. Does content also demonstrate that it was produced with some degree of experience, such as with actual use of a product, having actually visited a place or communicating what a person experienced?"

E-E-A-T and major updates to Google’s quality rater guidelines
- Search Engine Land
"Google has made significant changes to its Quality Rater Guidelines (QRG) for search. While there are dozens of important details about what changed, arguably the most important change was the introduction of the letter E to the start of the popular acronym E-A-T. The addition of “experience” indicates that content quality can also be evaluated through the lens of understanding the extent to which the content creator has first-hand experience in the topic."

Other news

Meta Will Continue to Invest Big in the Metaverse in 2023, According to CTO
- Social Media Today
"Meta intends to keep spending big on the metaverse, whether people can see the end game or not – which makes sense, but could also see Meta’s stock value continuing to decline for some time yet."

TikTok Faces US Ban After Discovery that Chinese Officials had Used the App to Spy on US Journalists
- Social Media Today
"TikTok’s future in the US is looking a lot less certain, after an investigation found that parent company ByteDance had been spying on several American journalists whom it believed had been in contact with ByteDance staff, and gained access to commercially sensitive information."

Rubio, Gallagher Introduce Bipartisan Legislation to Ban TikTok
"U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) introduced bipartisan legislation to ban TikTok from operating in the United States."

Tools

Generate Google Sheets Formula with AI
- Sheetformula.com

Simple ML for Sheets
- Google

Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) Tutorial in Google Spreadsheets
- Growth FullStack

ChatGPT for Google
- chatgpt4google.com