We’re at the half way point for the year. I’m going to hold your hand when I ask this…. Fellow digital marketers, are you ok?

Following on from our Q1 update last quarter, for everyone else not chronically online, here’s a quick list of the things that kept me up at night this Q2. The SEO industry is pulling its hair out over opaque AIO attribution and dropping traffic, and a rule for marketing Less Healthy Foods in the UK got bumped to next year. Instagram is about to open its content to search engine crawlers, so consenting users could see their pictures and stories appear in AI Mode and ChatGPT. Yikes. WhatsApp has announced Ads are coming, TikTok still hasn’t gone away (everyone’s lost interest in that story anyway), and a Google rep referred to the internet as the human-created web… not at all unsettling, or a glimpse into a dystopian nightmare.

Fittingly, the big updates this quarter are centred around AI.

SEO is now AEO, AIO, SXO, GEO…

As LLMs like ChatGPT reach 1 billion daily searches, and AI overviews on your search engine of choice emphatically get placed front and centre, the work to get your content under the right eyes has gotten exponentially harder, and full of newer acronyms.

Remember the days when seo was just about on, off and technical? Those columns have now been redrawn into Answer Engine Optimisation, AI Optimisation, Search Experience Optimisation and Gen Ai Engine Optimisation. 

What does this mean for people who don’t work in SEO but know it’s important? Things are complicated and traffic is dipping while impressions appear to be growing. Search engines are adding the AI facility of interpreting results, and moving the indexing of said results further down the page. This leads to less traffic, although one would hope the traffic is of higher quality. That remains to be seen just yet.

As for traffic data from the AI Mode rolled out by Google in America, or the AI Overview? Murky.

AI Asset Generation for Google, Meta & TikTok Ads

A mixed blessing comes this quarter, with the big platforms introducing Gen AI support for asset creation within their ads. Features will vary across platforms, from some that will change images into videos, to full on generation of a model wearing your item from a basic stock picture.

This is great news for marketers who have shoestring resources and SMEs in the same boat, but what this means for user experiences and responses to the ads is unclear. 

Hopefully by this time next quarter we’ll have some more data on it. And in the meantime if your feeds start feeling samey, you’ll have an idea as to why.

Instagram Is Fighting To Stay In The Game

There’s been a flood of new features from Instagram lately, too many to list in the Q2 update to be honest! Rearranging your grid and linking to your Spotify is fine. But the real upgrades are more interesting. You can now post quietly without notifying followers, which I’m calling stealth mode. Data roundups are getting easier to access. And the rollout of trial Reels is one to watch. I wasn’t sold on the password-protected content, but anything that opens up A/B testing gets a thumbs up from me.

We’re just waiting on a proper UK release for most of these.

Final Slice

So that’s Q2. Confusing, a bit chaotic, occasionally promising. The big theme? AI is creeping into everything, whether we’re ready or not. SEO is having an identity crisis, ad platforms are pushing gen AI tools without clear answers on effectiveness, and Instagram is trying its hardest to stay in the group chat. We’ll see what sticks. 

In the meantime, take a deep breath, hydrate, and don’t believe everything your traffic report tells you.