Google has the search community worried with new recipe feature

Google testing a new button on a few recipes isn’t that noteworthy, right? We’re not so sure.

Barry Schwartz first reported this in Search Engine Roundtable. And it’s since blown up in the SEO community. Put simply, this new feature serves you a recipe straight from the results pages. It extracts the full recipe and lays it out for you – with no need to visit the website.

Now admittedly, searching for recipes can be a struggle. Scrolling through lines and lines of introductory info (SEO-focused waffle) is very frustrating. So for all the aspiring cooks out there, this new feature is probably great news.

But it’s a different story altogether for recipe publishers. If people can view their recipes without visiting their website, it would be catastrophic for their businesses. Traffic would plummet. Sales would plummet. And ultimately, they would close.

What does this mean for digital PR?

If this feature does get introduced, the search community will be sent scrambling.

Yes, a lot of existing content isn’t very user-friendly. But does that mean Google has the authority to take all that traffic for itself? Imagine if all your content was visible without needing to visit your website…

Our view is that instead of making drastic changes like this, Google should simply reward user-friendly content. It should incentivise publishers to create easy-to-use recipes without the over-optimised waffle. Because if Google starts implementing these features, where will it end?

SearchGPT integrating into ChatGPT by the end of the year

We’ve been getting AI overload here at Energy. But there’s been some big news this month. OpenAI just announced that it’ll be integrating SearchGPT (its AI search engine) into ChatGPT.

This is basically the launch of a new search engine. But instead of starting from 0, it’s starting with 200 million weekly users.

Now does this mean that Google’s about to usurped? No. But it could be a pivotal step in the future of search.

What does this mean for digital PR?

It’s widely accepted that the days of the ’10 blue links’ are coming to an end. In their place, AI-powered answer engines (like SearchGPT) could be the future. And as digital PRs, we’ll need to adapt accordingly.

Do we need to shift our focus to these answer engines? If so, how do we ensure our clients are visible in them? Will our approach to digi PR need to change? And how do we measure this? It’s time to find out.

brightonSEO October 2024

We just had the biggest SEO event of the year: brightonSEO. Two days, over 150 talks and 5,000 people.

There were so many ideas and insights shared – too many to list. But for us, the key digital PR takeaways were:

• Audience-first is the future. Our strategies should always start with our audience. Who are they? Where are they? What do they want? How do they think?

• Digital PR is still competing with paid link building. This really surprised us. We’re firm believers in the benefits of earned media and fundamentally don’t agree with buying links. But this showed us that as an industry, we’ve still got work to do to educate all corners of the market on the value of high quality digi PR.

• Search is transforming. AI has altered the world of SEO and digital PR forever. Search is changing in a massive way. How? No one really knows!