SEO News: ChatGPT coming to Bing Search and Google to introduce chatbot for healthcare queries
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Show notes
This week, Jack Chambers-Ward is flying solo and brings a quick update of the latest SEO news including:
- Microsoft launches new Bingbot in January 2023
- Microsoft to add ChatGPT features to Bing search
- Top non-profit domains that grew in visibility in 2022
- Google to introduce ChatGPT-like model for healthcare
Transcript
Welcome to episode 51 of season two of the Search With Candour podcast, our first episode of 2023. My name is Jack Chambers-Ward. I am your host for this week and I am all on my own. I'm afraid it is a solo episode to kick off the year. In this episode, I'll be talking about:
- Microsoft launching their new Bingbot
- Microsoft adding chat GPT features to Bing search
- The top nonprofit domains that grew in visibility in 2022
- and Google introducing a chat GPT like model for healthcare
It's the start of 2023 and we are once again supported by SISTRIX the SEO's toolbox. You can go to sistrix.com/swc if you want to check out some of their fantastic free tools such as their SERP Snippet Generator, the Hreflang validator, if you want to check out your site's visibility index, and of course the Google update radar. You can also go to sistrix.com/trends to get Trend Watch, which is a fantastic monthly newsletter that will deliver the latest trends direct to your inbox every single month. I'll be talking about something from sistrix.com/blog later on in the show and I'll be talking about the top nonprofit domains that grew in visibility and trust in 2022.
Microsoft launches new Bingbot in January 2023
Let's start off 2023 with some Bing news, shall we, because why not? Way back in 2019, Microsoft announced that new Bingbot user agent names that will basically fit better into the more evergreen Bingbot kind of system that they're using for crawling and rendering. They'll be coming very soon. Very, very soon turns out to be about now. All the way back in 2019 and now through to January, 2023, we will have the new Bingbot user agents launching. Possibly by the time you hear this episode of the podcast, they may already be out, because they said early January, 2023. As of about Christmastime, this new user agent was responsible for about 50% of the crawls from Bing. By the time this is finished rolling out, like I said, apparently early January, 100% of the crawls will be done by this new Bingbot user agent.
Keep an eye on your crawl stats, whether that's on search console or if you are checking your log files or whatever you're doing to monitor this kind of thing. Keep an eye out for the new desktop and mobile Bingbot crawlers that will be crawling around your site. Keep an eye out for the user agent names. I won't read them out on the show, it's not a particularly exciting set of letters and numbers and things, but I will leave a link in the show notes to the search engine land article, of course by the wonderful Barry Schwartz, that gives you all of the details about the announcement and the specific names for these user agents. Like I said, a fairly quick piece of news to kick off, but if you are keeping an eye on Bingbot crawling your website, please do check out the link in the show notes, which is search.withcandour.co.uk and you'll get all the information you need about the new Bing user agent that will be crawling your site very, very soon.
Microsoft to add ChatGPT features to Bing search
Sticking with Bing for the second piece of news, of course we're going to talk about chat GPT as well because that is what everybody is talking about, even here in 2023. Microsoft is going to add chat GPT features to Bing search. I say going to, it's kind of rumored but insider sources, as reported by the information, again, I'll leave a link for the full report in the share notes at search.withcandour.co.uk have stated that Microsoft are planning to integrate OpenAI's chat GPT into Bing search in the coming months.
Two different sources have said this is a very, very likely thing to happen essentially because Microsoft have invested a billion dollars into OpenAI. They are going to work with them much more closely and I believe a lot of people are suggesting this is going to be kind of a way of Microsoft trying to battle against Google and essentially try to out flank them and get ahead of them with a lot of the chat GPT stuff that seems to have caused a lot of a stir around the SEO industry. There was also reports and rumors that had caused a bit of a stir at Google, however reliable those reports are of course.
Yeah. I think it's a very interesting topic, because I know the SEO world and SEO Twitter and Mastodon that are on everything have been absolutely a blaze with chat GPT discussion. I said this at the end of the year in our last episode, I think Bing do interesting stuff. They do experimental stuff. They get away with a lot of interesting stuff that Google won't do essentially and they're a bit more experimental. They're more willing to push the boat out on and take a risk on some new technology. IndexNow being a perfect example of that. I think Bing have seen such a positive reaction to IndexNow such a positive result for them in terms of indexing and crawling and things like that. Them working with OpenAI, again, Microsoft has a significant investment into OpenAI so they can work pretty closely together. I am not surprised that this is kind of happening and this kind of collaboration's going to happen.
Like I said, this is very early news. This is all speculation from insider sources, but I thought it was very, very interesting since the world has been set ablaze by the discussion of chat GPT over the last few weeks. Keep an eye out on that. Like I said, stay tuned for any updates and I'm sure we will keep you up to date on all of that in the coming weeks and coming months as well.
Top non-profit domains that grew in visibility in 2022
The first article we have from SISTRIX in 2023 is all about the top nonprofit domains that grew in 2022. If you are working in the nonprofit space, this is the article to pay attention to. I know a lot of colleagues and a lot of friends who have worked or currently work in the nonprofit space would be very interested in this data. SISTRIX have done a lot of calculations. If you're new to the show, first of all, thank you very much. Hello and welcome. I promise not every episode is just me talking on my own for 10 to 15 minutes. I do have guests and co-hosts who are much more interesting than me.
Essentially what SISTRIX have done, they have taken over 400,000 registered domains and they are the .org.uk variety, so this is UK-based visibility and they have essentially analyzed their visibility, their trustworthiness, all that kind of stuff, a bunch of different metrics and measured how much they've grown in the last 12 months. Using their specific measurement, which is the visibility index, which is a thing specifically for SISTRIX, is a fantastic measurement of the overall visibility of a site and the overall visibility of a domain. It doesn't just take in positions and rankings, it also features a lot of other calculations in there. I will leave a link for the full calculations for Visibility Index. It's a really interesting article that SISTRIX have done.
In this article in particular, Steve, the wonderful Steve Paine over at SISTRIX, has gone through and highlighted a hundred .org.uk domains that have grown significantly. Some have declined to clarify, but that are in the most visible domains in the UK in 2023, as of the 2nd of January, 2023. There is a very clear sign of growth, which is kind of why I slipped and said everything has grown over the last year. That's not necessarily true, but we are definitely seeing a growth in this space. I think there is a very, very clear idea of this trustworthiness being built into that kind of domain. Those kinds of domains don't guarantee trustworthiness because you can now register that domain for any company or any site, essentially, you don't necessarily have to be a nonprofit organization, to have a .org.uk domain, but they have kind of proven themselves.
Essentially, this is not Google treating in-country, top-level domains differently, but they are seeing significant growth pretty much across the board. I think there are some really, really good examples of ways to build up your EEAT or double EAT as we're calling it now. Talking about who we are, their careers pages, their proper mission statements, their contact pages, all this kind of stuff that is clearly stating all the policies and statements and establishing this organization as a trustworthy, real organization that is an authoritative and honest and open and experienced and expertise laden domain and group of people and company. Yeah. If you're working in this space or if you're not, I still think this is a really, really interesting study. Going through everything from sort of nutrition.org.uk to oxfam.org.uk, there is a variety of case studies and different domains in here that are worth looking at. Interestingly, Oxfam is one of the probably best known charities here in the UK, but they actually lost 25% of their visibility over the last 12 months, quite possibly because they have done quite a lot of migration. As Steve highlights here, these changes started in September, 2020 and have had a really pretty significant impact shifting around their different directories and things like that and moving from the HTTP to HTTPS and then also moving their shop side of things to now in a sub-domain rather than a subfolder. It is a very interesting shift there.
Nutrition.org.uk is another interesting one. It's the classic kind of thing that we're talking about with the YMYLL, your money, your life kind of content. If you get nutritional information wrong, that can be a big, big issue. SISTRIX previously had noted that Healthline's nutrition directory is as big as a top hundred domain just by itself. Healthline was one of their visibility leaders and winners. There's a reason for that, because Healthline, in my opinion, does a lot of this stuff better than almost anyone else. Interestingly, the nutrition.org.uk basically has the opposite story of the oxfam.org.uk domain as it seems to be recovering for some serious issues that happened in 2021 and again, migrations and things like that. Yeah. They're seeing some growth there. I think it's a really interesting study.
Like I said, there is a lot more information, I'm kind of giving you the highlights and the brief here, but Steve from SISTRIX and the team over there, the fantastic data journalism team, have gone through and got you a lot of data and a lot of really interesting things to have a look at and have a dive around because these are examples of domains in this nonprofit space that are doing incredibly well in terms of visibility. Something to kind of set your standard by and to be able to point an example to your colleagues or your superiors or whatever it is and say, "This is what this site is doing, maybe we should incorporate some of this, because this is working for them as well." Like I said, go to sistrix.com/blog or click in the link in the show notes at search.withcandour.co.uk and you can find a link there for the full study from SISTRIX.
Google to introduce ChatGPT-like model for healthcare
Let's finish off this very brief episode. I apologize, it is very brief. I am not feeling a hundred percent after the Christmas break and Mark is unavailable at the moment. Yeah. I'm trying to do this myself. I'm trying to whip through as quickly as I can. Hopefully, enough of an update for you on Monday morning. Yes, let's finish off with some Google news. Google is introducing chat GPT-like chatbot for healthcare. This is interesting because this is kind of the polar opposite of what I was talking about at the beginning with Bing possibly introducing chat GPT into their Bing search side of things. This is Google's kind of working with other big tech companies and building language models of their own.
I'll read the summary here from analytics India mag.com. There's a very interesting article here. With the release of large language models like GPT3 and PaLM, which is another language model if you're not aware of it. Big techs have been experimenting with large language modules for quite some time now, as we already know. Blah blah, blah, blah, blah. Recently Google has also joined the party in response to chat GPT with something called Med-PaLM, specifically for answering medical queries. Google Research and DeepMind recently introduced Med-PaLM, an open-source large language model for medical purposes. It's benchmarked on multi-med QA and newly introduced open-source medical question-answering benchmark. It combines health search QA, which is a new free response data set of medical questions with six existing open-question answering data sets covering professional medical exams, research and consumer queries. Med-PaLM is a very, very interesting introduction. I think, again, this is tying into Google being so hot on the YMYL stuff, specifically healthcare being an incredibly important thing to get the correct information on.
This is clearly Google trying to really get to the bottom of this. The fact that when Google kind of touched on this and announced collaborations with a lot of hospitals in India, this was the Google for India 2022 event towards the end of the year last year, they are really talking about working closely with companies like the Mayo Clinic, Ascension, Northwestern Medicines, Stanford Medicine, a lot of these huge, huge healthcare and pharmaceutical companies around the world. They clearly want to get their information correctly and they want to ensure people are getting that information very quickly as well.
The resulting model, in this case being Med-PaLM, it claims to perform really, really well. A group of doctors determined that 92.6% of the Med-PaLM results were on par with the clinician-generated answers, whereas just 61% of the long-form Flan-PaLM answers, which is the other side of this, were deemed to be in line with scientific agreement. Google are leaning towards the shorter, more straightforward kind of things with Med-PaLM. Again, I'll put a link to the full article here with some really interesting examples, including how do you know if your ear pain is serious. It gives a really interesting little kind of snippet answer there that I think seems pretty straightforward and pretty obvious. Hopefully, it seems pretty reliable. Yeah. Like I said, it's being reviewed by medical professionals and they're asserting that it seems fairly reliable.
Interestingly, when you go for the longer form answers, which she's using the Flan-PaLM model, which is essentially a slightly different version of a language model that's different to the Med-PaLM that they've been using. Like I said, I won't read the whole thing. Please do go to the link in the show notes and check out the full review and full research article about Med-PaLM and how Google is planning to introduce that for healthcare-related searches in the very near future.
Outro
That about wraps us up for this week. It's a very, very quick one. Like I said, just a quick solo show to get you some of the latest Bing and Google news. Yeah. Hopefully next week I'll be back with either a guest or with Mark. I've got some very interesting interviews lined up for the rest of 2023. I'm already planning through into February with some of the interviews and guests I've got coming up. Mark and I will also have our regular catch-ups where we'll talk about all of the SEO and PPC news that has been happening. We will also be launching our regular live streams in partnership with SISTRIX. They will also be part of the main podcast feed as well. If you're unable to tune in on YouTube or LinkedIn when we are streaming, don't worry, you will still pick that up as normal in the podcast feed as well. So you won't miss anything, please do stay subscribed. Please do share the show around. If you have any questions or anything like that, please do message us, we are Candour Agency on Twitter. I am, personally, JLW Chambers on Twitter. If you'd like to come on the show, if you have any questions, please do hit us up. Like I said, I'll be back next week either with Mark or a guest. Until then, have a lovely week.