Sean Walsh
Sean is a Director at Intelligency heading up our digital marketing and client services operations. Sean has 15+ years experiencing working both in-house and agency with brands including Lloyds, Alstom, Hitachi, Lufthansa, Viaplay, DFDS Seaways and Mercedes-Benz.
Good Afternoon, welcome back to our weekly roundup of the latest digital news and trends at Intelligency.
This week, Google finished the produce review update, Auto-GPT took the news by storm, and TikTok launched its shop.
Let’s dive right in and learn some more about each.
Google’s April Product Review Update Finishes Roll Out
This week, Google’s April 2023 Product Review update finished rolling out. Due to the scope of this update, many publishers were affected for better or worse.
Google announced the end of the rollout on the Search Status Dashboard.
“Incident affecting Ranking
Released the April 2023 reviews update.Incident began at 2023-04-12 09:00 and ended at 2023-04-25 11:24 (all times are US/Pacific).
DATE TIME DESCRIPTION
25 Apr 2023 11:24 PDTThe rollout was complete as of April 25, 2023.”
What changed in the update?
The main change is that product review updates will affect more than just products in the future.
The algorithm that’s improved in these updates is called the “reviews system”. It scans review-based content such as recommendations for physical products, services, films, and more.
Google’s guidance on the reviews system can be read below:
“The reviews system is designed to evaluate articles, blog posts, pages or similar first-party standalone content written with the purpose of providing a recommendation, giving an opinion, or providing analysis.
It does not evaluate third-party reviews, such as those posted by users in the reviews section of a product or services page.”
Google’s review system examines content on a page-by-page basis, however, if the primary content of a site is reviews, it can carry out a whole-site examination.
If you want your review content to be rewarded by Google and to rank higher, then it’s worth reading Write high-quality reviews.
Update reception
The reception to the update was less than positive, one WebWasterWorld forum member posted this about the update
“Umpteenth review update is finished:
Nothing positive to say, so I won’t for now.”
And another member talked about how the recent updates have affected them
“Seeing big drops again. We recovered to the same levels as before the March core update now taking big swings again.
Our mobile traffic is up a bit and desktop traffic is way down.
Conversions seem to be steady but much less impressions and clicks shown in GSC.
Not sure what’s going on but I could really use some stability for a while.
Our company is going through a lot at the moment and this is certainly not helping.”
One other member responded
“Seeing big drops again. We recovered to the same levels as before the March core update now taking big swings again.
Our mobile traffic is up a bit and desktop traffic is way down.
Conversions seem to be steady but much less impressions and clicks shown in GSC.
Not sure what’s going on but I could really use some stability for a while.
Our company is going through a lot at the moment and this is certainly not helping.”
Remember: always follow Google’s guidance and webmaster guidelines!
What is Auto-GPT?
In the midst of all of the AI craze dominating SEO and marketing news, it only makes sense that we have more in store.
Auto-GPT is a pretty groundbreaking AI technology. It adds new abilities to Chat-GPT, which allows it to complete tasks by itself by giving itself prompts.
Auto-GPT’s buzz has been causing it to trend on Twitter for the last few days.
But what is it?
Well, Auto-GPT is an experimental open-source interface, similar in nature to GPT-4. The technology included in the interface allows it to complete tasks.
All users have to do is provide the interface with a list of tasks, and it will complete them.
This is different from Chat-GPT, which requires multiple, detailed prompts because Auto-GPT can generate its own prompts to complete the tasks you’ve provided.
It can even access websites, use search engines, and can self-evaluate its own accuracy. If it finds information to be incorrect, it will discard it and try and find more, accurate information
Due to the self-generating prompts, Auto-GPT is referred to as an autonomous AI agent.
Github’s Auto-GPT describes the tool as such:
Auto-GPT is an experimental open-source application showcasing the capabilities of the GPT-4 language model.. This program, driven by GPT-4, chains together LLM “thoughts”, to autonomously achieve whatever goal you set.. As one of the first examples of GPT-4 running fully autonomously, Auto-GPT pushes the boundaries of what is possible with AI.
How do I access Auto-GPT?
Accessing Auto-GPT is fairly straightforward.
First, you’ll sign up for a paid open AI account. You can do this by signing up to or logging into OpenAI.
After you’ve got a paid subscription, you’ll need to acquire an OpenAI API. Once acquired, it will connect Auto-GPT to your account, and charge you for whatever amounts you use.
The API (Application Programming Interface) allows Auto-GPT to talk to GPT-4 and ChatGPT.
“The OpenAI API can be applied to virtually any task that involves understanding or generating natural language, code, or images.
We offer a spectrum of models with different levels of power suitable for different tasks, as well as the ability to fine-tune your own custom models.
These models can be used for everything from content generation to semantic search and classification.
…The API is powered by a set of models with different capabilities and price points.
GPT-4 is our latest and most powerful model.
GPT-3.5-Turbo is the model that powers ChatGPT and is optimized for conversational formats.”
How does Auto-GPT pricing work?
You can set hard limits on how much OpenAI will charge you, what your word limit is, and when it will stop working for you.
You can set soft limits, which trigger an email warning, and a hard limit, which is when it will stop.
Pricing is based on a token-per-charge. A token is:
“For English text, 1 token is approximately 4 characters or 0.75 words.”
One hundred tokens cost a fraction of 1 penny.
What can you do with Auto-GPT?
OpenAI users have been experimenting with Auto-GPT to carry out a variety of tasks, such as:
Here’s what happened next:
“First: It went straight to google to find the top 5 waterproof shoes reviews. Once it found links, it created questions for itself like:
“What are the pros and cons of each shoe”
“What are the pros and cons of each top 5 waterproof shoe”
“Top 5 waterproof shoes for men””
and
“It continued to analyze the various sites, with a combination of googling, updating its queries, until it was happy with the results.
Here’s an example of when it thought “critically”.
It knew that some reviews could be biased to fake, so it had to validate the reviewer.”
The entire process took 8 minutes and 10p
The power of AI is truly astonishing, and it will only continue to get more powerful as funding and research increase.
TikTok Shop Beta Launches
Sellers on Tiktok received an invite to try out the TikTok shop this week.
Here’s what the email looked like:
What is TikTok Shop?
It’s an e-commerce section of TikTok designed to boost brand growth and sales on the platform. Users can discover products and purchase from their favourite creators and brands in a smooth experience.
If you join as a seller, then you can use the platform to sell, provide feedback, and use 0% referral fees for 90 days,
To signup, use this signup link.
Here’s what it looks like on the platform:
This beta provides creators on the platform a new way to generate revenue, and for users to support their favourite creators.
We’ll have to see how it plays out to see if it’s worth signing up, creating videos, and selling on Tiktok once the beta is in full swing.
