Google Just Dropped an AI Update for Search Console (And It’s Huge)

Two things for you on this mega episode of the show. One, Google just quietly dropped its biggest Google Search Console update in many, many, many, many years changes the game. And two, been talking a lot about this on the podcast. The potential of this happening and now it looks like it's not. And this is big news. Chat GPT is abandoning aiccommerce. And that is crazy. Lots of SEOs were wondering would aentic not even would when aentic commerce would come within chat GBT what that would mean for SEOs and now it looks like it's being abandoned. The first thing this huge Google search console news it is so much fun. If you don't know Google search console Google's own tool for accessing their search index. You can submit your website to it individual pages on your site to it. See different issues within Google on on your site. see what your site is ranking for. Get all the SEO stats around your site with Google Search Console. Amazingly, infinitely valuable tool that is a fundamental part of any SEO's toolbox, but it has just quietly dropped the biggest update in forever. And so, go to your search results within Google Search Console to your full report. And you'll see that next to add filter, there is a blue button. And this blue button says customize your performance report using AI. And you use natural language. You prompt it to tell it what you want to see. You can ask things like, "How is my traffic compared to last month?" "Show me queries containing how to or what is?" "What is my USA pages CTR last week?" But I went further. I I I got some prompts for you. So, how about looking at transactional searches that you are already ranking for? Use show me queries with strong buying intent. What if you're a local business? Try show me queries with local intent or comparison searches. Show me comparison and evaluation queries. Product research intent. Show me queries containing best, top, review, rating, recommended. Pricing intent. Show me queries containing price, cost, pricing, how much, quote, estimate. Now, I particularly like the transactional prompt. Show me queries with strong buying intent. These are the keywords that are going to drive purchases, that are going to drive users, that are going to drive leads. So, put this in, click apply, and then go one step further. Toggle on average position. Click filter position is greater than three. Now, you are seeing the transactional queries that you rank for, but the ones that you are not ranking in the top three positions of Google for. These keywords, they are called lowhanging fruit keywords. Google knows that your site is ranking for them and because of that and you're already ranking kind of high, but just by using the keywords exactly or taking these keywords exactly and using them higher up on your page, you can rank much better for these keywords that bring actual customers. And you can do this you you can do this sort of thing with all of the prompts that I just gave you. Transactional searches, local buyer intent, comparison searches, product research intent. This update is so major. There's going to be, and honestly, it's still getting better. There's lots of prompts that it can't pull off. There's one that I I just tried to do, show me queries with average position where average position is between 8 and 20 with high impressions and it didn't work. So, this this just released and it's only going to get better. And you're going to be able to do more and more things. You're going to be able to query Google Search Console more and more with more sophisticated prompts. It is so major and it will I hate this word unlock because unlock has become a chat GPT buzzword but it will unlock so many insights that you would not have thought to get yourself. But with all of this language, take the language. If you're not using it high on your page and you care about the language, use it high in your page. If you don't have any really relevant pages for the language, create a new page. your site is already ranking for this stuff. So, it is a lot easier to rank higher and get more clicks. All right, next thing. And that it's really I can't I can't emphasize it enough that it is a major major update from Google Search Console. A very welcome update. This next part, this is a post from I am not going to be able to pronounce your name, but I'm going to try. Quoas Kazukenos. It's I mean, this is pretty crazy. I've had multiple podcasts with lots of different SEOs. What will a gentic commerce from chat GPT mean for for the SEO industry speculating speculating my position was my position was you know I think it's a little bit too soon to say but let's see and this is what this is what is happening. So WAS says chat GPT is abandoning aentic commerce. It's been barely 5 months since they announced it, and they are already giving up after hitting obvious short-term roadblocks. Quote unquote, OpenAI staff had realized that while ChatGpt users were researching products to buy in the chatbot, they weren't using the chatbot to actually help them make purchases. One person familiar with the project said, "Last September, they introduced instant checkout, which added buy buttons to shopping results. So many SEOs were worried about this. Okay, it's done for SEO. You could you can just buy right there in ChachiPT. That's what lots of people are saying. ChachiPT launched with Walmart and Etsy, then slowly added a dozen Shopify merchants, but they seemingly couldn't figure out how to scale that and solve the headache of normalizing cataloges across the universe of e-commerce retailers. Only Google Shopping has done this at scale. The change means that instead of purchasing directly from a product listing, a shopper will either need to pay through a retailer's app or be redirected to the retailer's own site. This is similar to Facebook undoing its efforts to bring shopping inapp through Facebook shops and also reminds me of Google killing its buy with Google checkout experience. Facebook, Google and now chatpt will only drive traffic to retailers websites. Chat GPT is giving up too early and it shows lack of conviction. The next step after realizing that while Chat GPT users were to actually help them make purchases is that it is up to Chat GPT to change that. That's why AI platforms in China like Alibaba's Quen spent hundreds of millions of dollars recently to kickstart shopping behavior. It takes force to change user behavior, which then hopefully kickstarts a flywheel incentivizing retailers to figure out data integration. The other thing is lots of people are afraid to to give an AI agent access to their credit card. Lots of people don't have enough cushion with money where they can afford for a chatbot to make a bunch of mistakes, costly mistakes. People want to do their own research. They want to get the most bang for their buck. They want to save money. Look at the amount of people who are trying to use OpenClaw and who are sharing devastating reports of how OpenClaw spent all their money, deleted all their files, all these things that are going wrong. And how do most people prompt? They don't give very deep prompts, very sophisticated, detailed prompts. They give a prompt that is less than a sentence. They know what they want. They think it's obvious that the AI will know what they want. And that's not always the case. And that can be costly. Now, some people don't agree with me on this. Some people think that the roadblock is normalization and checkout across millions of SKUs. This is from Mannanish who Manis Chowderi who said, "The friction here is not discovery. It is catalog normalization and checkout orchestration across millions of SKs. Google solved that with merchant center feeds over a decade. Everyone else is still stitching APIs. until an AI platform owns product feeds directly it will mostly be a traffic router not a transaction layer because the thing is even if you are look this that's a huge point but also like just consumer behavior even if you are doing research within chatpt a lot of people don't want to buy right there within chatpt they want to actually go into the page and look it's not just about giving the credit card and letting the AI go off on its own and do things they want to go in and look at the pages but also yeah normalization AC across tons of merchants And Google built this out over a decade. I'm not saying this won't come at some point. I'm saying it's too early to freak out. Way too early to freak out. Last comment on this I'll share. It's from Michelle Evans who said, "And Michelle specializes in retail, ecom, and shopper insights." Michelle said, "Seems naive on many fronts. Shoppers are using these platforms to research products because they are using these Genai search engines for wider needs. expecting they will execute purchases there requires more of a change in consumer behavior. That takes years, not months. Again, I'm not saying this won't come in the future, but it seems to me a bit too soon to freak out, but it is really big news. Regardless, if you are optimizing for transactional queries, that's going to get you covered a lot in AI search. And you can use the new AI insights button in Google Search Console to find those transactional queries. Super cool. You can also use compact keywords, my SEO course that specifically focuses on targeting searchers who are looking to purchase something now, use something now, make a discovery call. These people are in heat. These searchers are in heat. They're coming to search engines or using AI search because they know exactly what they want. They just don't know the brand that will give them what they want and that is your brand. Compact keywords. My SEO course shows you how to find these searchers. How to target them with conversion-based SEO landing pages, not blog posts. How to structure your site for these pages. How to do link building. How to do a technical audit so you have a very strong defensive foundation before doing offensive SEO. It is a 0 to 100 SEO course that works for LLMs, gets surfaced and cited in LLMs. Lots of people are loving it and you're going to love it too. That is at compactkeywords.com. 13 and 1/2 hours long. I spent a year making it. I update it over every week. Like I usually update it probably once every couple of days cuz I have a different idea for how just a little thing I can add to make it better and I do that every couple of days cuz I'm constantly trying to make it the best SEO course there ever was. I hope you will check it out. And that is everything that I got for you on this episode of the show. This is episode 977 of the Edward Show. 977 days in a row doing this podcast. If you watch us on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening and I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.