Would You Let Google Be Your Tour Guide?

GOOGLE'S TRYING TO CAPTURE ALL OF YOUR AUDIENCE'S ATTENTION

Have you noticed that the world's largest search engine seems to be finding new and creative ways to prevent you from clicking out to any website that isn't Google-owned? It's a troubling trend that creates disadvantages for small businesses and threatens to force everyone to pay the Google-toll, or else be left out of the world's most powerful sales channel.

The latest industry in Google's cross-hairs is tourism, and in the short-term it may just make your Summer travel plans a bit easier to book.

Most of us are already familiar with Google Flights, and we know that we can compare hotel prices in search results. Now Google is taking it a step further with 3 new features that aim to keep your attention (and purchases) within Google properties:

1. Hotel Stories — when a traveller searches for a hotel on mobile, they’ll be greeted by a familiar row of thumbnails that offer content that they can swipe through to get a better idea of what each is all about.
2. Flight price guarantees — there are already indicators on Google Flights of whether a price is low, typical, or high, and now Google is going to stand behind those ratings. When it believes that it’s showing you the best price you’re going to get on a particular flight, it will offer a price guarantee badge. Then, if the price does come down in the future, you’ll get the difference as a rebate.
3. Tours and Attractions can sell tickets on Google — Until now, tour providers had been left out of the direct-booking game. Google Places for hotels, restaurants, and many other businesses would have a button to allow people to book and pay right from their search results. Now, through a series of partnerships, Google is extending that ability to your favourite fishing guide, suspension bridge, or museum.

For travel businesses, these are all important tools that are sure to deliver results in the near term. As an industry, however, we have to ask ourselves if an all-Google travel experience is one that allows for small businesses to thrive, for people to discover local experiences, and for brands to own their relationships with their guests.

Learn more about the new features here

COULD SUBSTACK NOTES TAKE ON TWITTER?

ELON SURE SEEMS TO BE WORRIED ABOUT IT

Notes is a brand new feature from newsletter platform, Substack, that allows users to send short messages that appear to their subscribers. At first glance, it looks an awful lot like other microblogging platforms (ie. Twitter). It claims to provide a more intimate, positive, and uncensored alternative to Twitter's fast-paced communication, which may turn out to be an oxymoron.

Elon and the crew at Twitter have drawn a lot of attention to the new feature by blocking people from interacting with Tweets about Substack, and even removing the ability to search for the term “Substack” on Twitter.

Right now, we’re into the vibe on Notes, where the conversation seems to be much more productive than elsewhere on the Internet, and it’s much easier to hack through the noise to get to the really good stuff.

It’s too early to say whether enough people will take their attention over to Notes in order to make it a viable Twitter competitor, but for now it’s a welcome bit of calm in the storm that is pretty much every other social media channel.

Read the announcement from Substack here

GOOGLE'S ANSWER TO AI-GENERATED SEO CONTENT

SPOILER: THE ROBOTS HAVEN'T COMPLETELY TAKEN OVER (YET)

This has been a hot topic of discussion in the SEO community recently, and the opinions have been mixed. One prominent SEO recently tweeted, “Should we use Chat GPT from now onwards for publishing content on our website??? It giving 80% unique content.” That sounds reasonable, but then Google spokesperson for search, John Mueller, tweeted back: “It's like food with only 20% toxic chemicals? Sounds tasty.”

The conclusion we’re drawing is that it’s absolutely fine, and probably a great idea, to have tools like ChatGPT generate blog post ideas, outlines, and drafts, but that brands who try to game the system by deploying bots to write and publish content on their behalf without any human intervention are probably going to get penalized.

Source: SEO Round Table

Read Google Search's guidance about AI-generated content

3 THINGS TO KNOW THIS WEEK

STUFF YOU CAN PUT TO USE RIGHT NOW

• A thread filled with useful marketing productivity tools, by @AlexaKilroy
• Microsoft keeps adding more ad units – this time one specifically for Professional Services
• How Google is defending against fake AI-generated reviews on Google Maps & Places

Written by Conner Galway, Junction Consulting