Hey friend!

Check out this recent headline from Fortune:

Not a totally wild claim when you consider the new AI models appearing every week or so—like, for example, “Nemotron” from Nvidia. More on that and other AI and content news below! 

–Thenuka

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What’s new in AI and content?

🛒 Google Shopping is getting an AI facelift

Google is enhancing its Shopping tab with AI, introducing features like personalized product feeds and shopping briefs. The AI briefs give tailored advice and specific product suggestions based on factors like material or climate suitability. For example, searching “men’s winter jacket for Seattle” will get you a brief with “the most important things you should know before investing in a new coat for this climate” as well as product recommendations with short explainers. You can also expect from the new interface a personalized scrollable feed with shoppable products and videos, plus dynamic filters, price comparisons, and deal-finding tools. All of these updates are designed to make shopping a more personalized experience and, in Google’s words, let you “shop every store in one place.”

• What this means for you: For now, Google says e-commerce shops and marketers don’t need to do anything to participate in its new AI-powered Shopping experience. But down the road, we suspect more users will turn to Google Shopping than browse the top organic search results. This could eventually mean some SEO tweaks to your product pages for optimal visibility. 

🤖 Nvidia releases an open-source AI model that beats GPT-4o

Say hello to another player in the AI arms race: Nvidia. The tech company best known for designing and manufacturing GPUs has made a big leap in the AI landscape with the release of its new model, Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct. It’s said to outperform leading models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Anthropic’s Claude-3 across various benchmarks, though there really isn’t a clear methodology for ranking AI model performance. Still, researchers note that what sets Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct (or “Nemotron”) apart is its ability to learn from and adapt to human preferences to generate more contextually appropriate responses.

• What this means for you: If you recall last month’s news about Molmo, it’s clear the AI arms race is well underway. Nvidia’s open-source approach with Nemotron could mean broader AI adoption and innovation across more industries like healthcare and finance. Nvidia’s emphasis on customization might also allow for more tailored AI solutions to specific campaign needs, aka more personalized and effective marketing strategies. 

⚡ Bing is revamping its Webmaster Tools

Bing Webmaster Tools has introduced a new "Recommendations" feature, which includes deeper data analysis, actionable steps, and real-time updates for SEO optimization. It’s an upgrade from its previous “Top Insights" section, with the goal of helping e-commerce, blogs, and other sites make data-driven decisions more easily. Another positive change: Bing’s Search Performance report now provides 16 months of data (up from six), allowing for more long-term trend analysis and strategy development. Finally, Microsoft also announced it’ll be integrating Copilot in Bing Webmaster Tools soon so that webmasters can ask questions and get real-time answers through a chat interface.

• What this means for you: We know—not a lot of you even bother with Bing. But it may be worth digging into in the near future, especially with the Department of Justice wanting to break up Google’s search monopoly. 

Expert Insights

🔍 Danny Sullivan: “AI Overviews are constantly evolving… It’s just like with Google Search generally—we’re always experimenting with things.”

In his interview with Aleyda Solis on the Crawling Mondays podcast, Google Search Liaison Danny Sullivan offers some insight into developments from Google over the last year, including AI Overviews. Though he describes search as ever-changing, Danny consistently emphasizes the importance of relevance and experience. For example, when asked why forums are appearing more prominently in search results even when the content doesn’t have strong expertise, Danny explains, “People are trying to get more authentic information. They want to hear from other people with experiences. They value that type of thing and we want to show it when it’s relevant.” 

>> Listen to the episode

Playbooks & Guides

🤥 Google does not penalize AI content—it’s a myth!

The false belief that Google penalizes AI-generated content keeps many marketers from dipping their toes into AI. But in reality, as long as your content meets Google's E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) guidelines, it has the potential to rank well. That’s because Google’s focus has always been on delivering helpful content to users, regardless of the method used to create it. We explain more, like how this myth came to be and what Google has to say about it, in our latest guide.

>> Find out more