Google’s August Core Update – What are they doing with AI?

As of early September, Google has completed its August Core Update.

“This update is designed to continue our work to improve the quality of our search results by showing more content that people find genuinely useful and less content that feels like it was made just to perform well on Search.”

So, what have we learned?

It has been a mixed bag when it comes to these core updates. Even without making any changes, your website’s traffic can plummet to almost nothing. On the other hand, it can suddenly spike for no apparent reason. While we do not fully understand what happens behind the scenes at Google (hint: no one really knows), our team at Websites Made With Love regularly crawls the web and learns from Google experts about what’s happening.

In the last year or so, we have learned how impactful artificial intelligence (AI) can be when prompted correctly. Enter a prompt, get a response, and away you go, right? Wrong.

As it turns out, people aren’t that creative when it comes to prompts. Not to mention, tools like ChatGPT need to be double-checked to make sure what it is spitting out is accurate and true. AI takes in a ton of information, more than any human can comprehend, organizes it, and then spits out what it “thinks” is most relevant. This isn’t always right, but will likely improve over time. Yet, we can use AI to our advantage despite its infancy.

First, we don’t know what AI will pull to determine rankings on search engine result pages, but we do know it will pull as much as it can find before making that decision. We can use this to our advantage by spreading ourselves in places like online directories, a Google Business Profile, social media accounts, and so on. The key is to ensure all the information matches perfectly. This is nicknamed NAP – name, address, and phone number. If Google can see matched instances of your business’ NAP features across the board, it may help in domain authority. To be frank, we don’t know what Google will choose so best to be prepared, right?

Secondly, it has always been our goal at Websites Made With Love to create website content primarily for the visitor, not the search engine. We work with our clients to figure out what content they want on the website, then we tweak it to make it easier for search engines to read and understand. By focusing on the structure, length, and quality of content, we help boost the probability of being indexed for the target keywords and audiences. Now that Google has revealed they are pushing towards more helpful content instead of automated ChatGPT responses, we feel we are ahead of the curve for many of our past and current clients.

Some agencies rely heavily on plugins to automatically add internal links as a method to slip in keywords. We prefer to manually review each page for tweaks such as these. Why? Well, we’re writing for people and hey, we’re people, not plugins! Having that personal touch and the care to take the time to do things right is important to us. We look at what other competitors are doing and put ourselves in the shoes of a potential visitor. What would we want to see? What works and what doesn’t? From there we can make the best website possible for people to use and search engines to find.

By the way, the impact of third-party websites like Reddit is starting to matter more and more. Why? It’s usually a direct source of content that is (usually) not flooded with AI responses. Each subreddit is specific to a particular topic, which helps narrow the focus for finding information. We won’t be surprised if we see more third-party websites having more of an impact on rankings than the target website itself.

So, while AI can be a helpful tool to help build content for a website, it can do more harm than good if not handled correctly. If you’re looking for a website truly made with love, let’s chat.