Hey friend!

Today, we’re diving into a few big updates from OpenAI and the growing debate over AI summaries—not whether they’re actually helpful, but whether they violate antitrust laws. Oh, and we’ve also got two new SEO playbooks in the daydream library worth checking out. 

Without further ado, let’s get to it!

–Thenuka

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What’s new in AI and content?

🍓 OpenAI’s “Strawberry” is here

OpenAI has released o1—also known by the code name "Strawberry"—a generative AI reasoning model designed to tackle complex problems. ChatGPT Plus and Team users already have access, while Enterprise and educational users will get it soon. And though no firm timeline has been set, OpenAI plans to eventually make its smaller version, o1-mini, available to free users. 

• What this means for you: Tentatively, o1 is better suited for solving technical problems in science, coding, and math. When it comes to writing and editing, GPT-4o maintains a slight edge. However, others report o1 doing better than GPT-4o on tasks like analyzing legal briefs—so don’t count it out on content just yet.

🫤 Early reviews call SearchGPT from OpenAI underwhelming

OpenAI’s SearchGPT, a prototype search engine and direct threat to Google, is getting lukewarm reviews from its 10,000 early testers. While it shows potential, the tool struggles with specific tasks like local queries and sometimes provides inaccurate or “hallucinated” information.

• What this means for you: Reports show that Google still dominates in online searches for shopping and local information. Still, we’re holding our breath to see how AI transforms the search experience. No big changes to SEO best practices yet, but agency leader Beth Nunnington predicts SearchGPT will mean “fewer clicks for informational terms” and make search much more conversational.

🏛️ U.S. senators accuse AI summaries of being anticompetitive

A group of Democratic senators led by Amy Klobuchar is urging the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice to investigate AI tools that summarize online content for potential anticompetitive practices. Their concern: AI-generated summaries on platforms like Google and Meta let companies profit from content creators' work without directing traffic back to the original source. 

• What this means for you: We’ll be keeping tabs to see how this unfolds. Google has been no stranger to antitrust suits, especially in the last year, and this investigation opens many questions on what regulations on AI content could look like.

Playbooks & Guides

🏠 Zillow dominates the real estate space with pSEO

Zillow gets more than 33 million visitors per month—maybe not a surprise given how doomscrolling property listings is a favorite millennial pastime. But besides capitalizing on our penchant for browsing real estate, a key ingredient to Zillow’s success is programmatic SEO. In fact, the majority of the site’s almost 5.2 million pages are programmatically created. We break down Zillow’s pSEO strategy in one of our latest playbooks.

>> Find out more

🤝 How Semrush leverages M&A for SEO

As a staple of many companies’ content arsenal, it should be no surprise that Semrush itself is a master at SEO. However, you might be surprised to find that one of its strategies for getting results is through mergers and acquisitions (M&A). One prime example: Semrush’s acquisition of Backlinko in 2022. Check out our Semrush playbook to learn how this move has enhanced their SEO.

>> Find out more