AI Overview Legal Trouble, GoogleOther Crawlers, In-Game Ads

Google’s AI Overview is a hot topic, surrounded in controversy and legal troubles, but is it really that bad? Also, Google adds two new GoogleOther crawlers for research and development for images and videos. And we can’t forget Reddit partnering with OpenAI after just partnering with Google back in February. All this and more in this week’s Coffee & SEO.

Google AI Overview Controversy and Legal Ramifications

If you go to Google and search for pretty much anything at this point, you will probably see the AI Overview at the top of the results. These overviews are a culmination of indexed content pages, pieced together to give the person searching a complete overview response to their query. Sounds great, right?

AI Overview Is Not Always Accurate or Helpful

There have been many reports of AI Overview inaccuracies. For example, one report was made that Google’s AI Overview suggested low ‘blinker fluid’ as a possible issue if your blinker was not making noise. For those would be, could be, and current car owners & aspiring mechanics: blinker fluid is not a thing. To fact-check this, we went to Google and typed “blinker not making noise” to see what results we would get. Google did not disappoint.

Since last year, Google has emphasized the importance of accurate, helpful content. In fact, with the latest Core and Spam updates, they reported that 45% of content was deindexed due to being spammy and unhelpful. So, it is surprising that Google is providing AI Overviews that are less than accurate and, in turn, unhelpful.

Is Google AI Overview Legal?

With ChatGPT, CoPilot, and Gemini, the question of who owns the output of AI search and chatbots has been front and center for some time. France recently fined Google over their use of news and publications without providing publishers a way to opt out of Google using their content. Yes, website publishers could use robots.txt to tell the crawlers not to index a specific webpage, but then the website would lose search visibility and the ability for searchers to find those webpages.

What Does AI Overview Mean for SEO and Website Owners

We hear the ‘doom and gloom’ about websites no longer being at the top of the search results pages (SERPs), but hear us out: Links are still being shown.

We’re not saying that AI Overview isn’t faulty because, well, blinker fluid, but what we are saying is that there is still a reason to fight the good fight. If your website is providing helpful content, then you can still be showing in AI Overview links. In fact, keeping with the blinker fluid topic, if we look at the first three links offered, JustAnswer, Good Sam Community and Nissan Murano Forum, we see that the first five website results below the AI Overview include JustAnswer and Good Sam Community.

How to Opt Out of AI Overview

If you don’t want your website content to be used, you have options, but they are not without some type of impact on indexing and SERP rank.

 

• Using the nosnippet Meta Tag

You can use the nosnippet meta tag to prevent Google from creating and displaying any snippet for your page in search results. This will also prevent your content from being used in AI Overviews.

HTML

<meta name=”robots” content=”nosnippet”>

 

• Using the max-snippet Meta Tag

If you want to specify the maximum length of the snippets that Google can create, you can use the max-snippet meta tag. This can indirectly control the amount of content that might appear in AI Overviews.

HTML

<meta name=”robots” content=”max-snippet:[number]”>

 

• Using the data-nosnippet Attribute

To prevent certain parts of your page from being shown in a snippet, you can use the data-nosnippet attribute on specific HTML elements.

HTML

<div data-nosnippet>

This content will not appear in snippets.

</div>

 

• Use the robots.txt file

You can try adding the following line to your website’s robots.txt file to instruct Google’s crawler (Googlebot) not to access your site for the purposes of generating AI content:

User-agent: Google-Extended

Disallow: /

 

• Use noindex meta tags

You can add noindex meta tags to the pages of your site that you don’t want to be included in search results or used for generating AI content. Doing this tells search engines not to index a specific page. However, it may also make that page disappear in regular Google search results.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

Google Launches Two New GoogleOther Crawlers

Google has released two new GoogleOther crawlers, GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video. These crawlers focus on binary data instead of HTML or text, which was previously the intended use of other crawlers. They are specifically for research and development.

What This Could Mean for SEO

Right now, there is no way for Google or other search engines to ‘see’ what images and videos are. They rely on HTML tags like alt text to correlate the relationship between the content on a webpage and the image or video.

It could be inferred that Google is working on a way to use AI to ‘see’ images and videos, which makes sense considering chatbots like Perplexity offer video and image results with their responses to queries.

With Google AI Overview newly integrated on the SERPs, this could also be something that Google is looking to provide, using GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video to research and develop a way to resource those items to add to their responses.

Google AdMobs Comes to In-Game Advertising

Google AdMob has entered the in-game advertising market, which saw $8.84 billion in advertising spend in 2023. This is a major endorsement of in-game advertising, opening up as a mainstream advertising option.

In-Game Ads and SEO

For SEO and digital marketing, Google AdMob’s inclusion of in-game ads means that we, as marketers and business owners, might want to consider adjusting our strategies to integrate them. In-game ads offer a unique opportunity to reach a highly engaged audience with an expected market volume of $169.40 billion by 2029.

By placing ads within the gaming environment, we can create seamless and enticing brand experiences, improving engagement rates and better brand recall compared to traditional digital ads because they are non-clickable, creating a more natural user experience. Additionally, the real-time data provided by AdMob’s API can help us optimize our campaigns more effectively, creating ads that are relevant and timely.

In-Game Ads Further Audience Insights

The impact of in-game ads on digital marketing goes beyond visibility and engagement, opening up new resources for data collection and audience insights. Analyzing how players interact with in-game ads can provide insights into consumer behavior and preferences (data! data! data!).

This data can be used to create optimal targeting strategies and create more personalized marketing campaigns. Plus, the integration of in-game ads with other marketing channels, like social media and search ads, can create a more complete advertising ecosystem.

As the market for in-game advertising continues to develop, it will likely become an important part of our digital marketing strategies.

Watercooler Highlights

Google may offer a lot with their AI services, but branded AI images are not one of them. And apparently, Google wasn’t enough. Reddit has now partnered with OpenAI. Get all the details below.

Reddit Now Partners with OpenAI

OpenAI and Reddit have partnered. The partnership highlights using AI to enhance user experiences on both platforms. OpenAI will use Reddit’s data to improve its AI tools, while Reddit will introduce new AI-powered features and advertising.

Because Reddit is a community-based platform, the partnership will allow community posts and conversations to be shown and used on ChatGPT, similar to the partnership forged between Google and Reddit earlier this year.

Google Ads AI Will Not Create Branded Images

If you ask Google AI to create a general image, maybe a bagel with cream cheese on a cafe table, you’ll get it. But, if you ask Google AI to create an image of a bagel with cream cheese on a cafe table with a Central Park Café logo in the background, you will get an error message instead of the image you’ve requested.

This is because Google AI will not generate images with any logo or brand on the image. For that you would need to generate the image and then use a photo editing software like Adobe to add the logo after the image is generated.