From Our Linkedin Newsletter 404: Strategy Not Found
For the past few years, generative AI image and video tools have taken liberties with intellectual property. From adorable little sorta-minions to iconic kinda-princesses, AI graphics tools have generated countless fakes of popular Disney and Universal characters. There were basic keyword protections, but many LLMs could be easily tricked into creating trademarked characters and materials for free. Some tools had almost no restrictions on art or IP. Those days may be coming to an end.
Disney and Universal announced a joint lawsuit this summer that might signal a turning point. Is this the “Napster” moment for generative AI tools like Midjourney? For those unaware, Napster was basically giving away trademarked music on MP3 until it was sued by artists. Shortly after litigation, Napster was shut down.
GPT-5 Takes Notice
Have AI companies finally met their final boss, the IP lawyers? AI companies may already be changing their image generation models for compliance. LLMs were once easy to trick, but it’s now becoming much harder. My recent tests on GPT-5 have mostly failed after past successful attempts to generate art with sorta-wookies and Bart Simpson-like graphics with relative ease. Now anything remotely space wookie-like gets denied.
Cloudflare Strikes Back
In July Cloudflare announced more features for publishers to control AI bots and provide a pay-to-crawl model. LLM bots can no longer crawl content from major news outlets for free. China continues to block OpenAI trademark applications. This may be just the beginning.
GEO Is Just SEO
Google’s Gary Illyes announced in July there is no reason to do anything differently to rank in AI Overviews. Basically, everything you’re doing to rank well in SEO is going to help with AI SEO or GEO. Countless articles have been written this past year claiming SEO is dead and GEO / AI SEO has replaced traditional search engine marketing strategies (shame on you, Forbes). These myths are being pushed by agencies and software companies trying to lure business away from more respectable agencies. Sure, clicks have gone down for Google searches featuring AI Overviews but this doesn’t mean they’re all moving to LLMs because of these GEOs. Sorry GEOs, there’s no secret sauce to ranking or getting your clicks back from these LLMs.
Sorry GEOs, there’s no secret sauce to ranking or getting your clicks back from these LLMs.
When looking at AI optimization vs SEO, the differences are usually minor. Indexing vs crawling are typically noted as the biggest differences between search engines and LLMs. LLMs have been shown to directly reference Google search results for some queries. Web citations are important to both, but perhaps a bit more important to LLMs. Many times the rank and listings in AI Overviews and LLMs is different than Google search. This may be one reason why people are assuming that traditional SEO is dead.
The landscape is changing, but the same strategies apply. The biggest losers to the AI shift at Google are companies that went all-in on SEO (or paid ads) and failed to build a brand. Branding and audience building still matter.
Reddit Wants To Be A Search Engine
Reddit announced it wants to be the primary way people get answers. Reddit Answers, their LLM chatbot-like search engine, is a tool the company plans to feature. The strategy is to grow search visitors directly through their platform, which has over 70 million weekly users.
“Expanding Reddit Answers globally, integrating it more deeply into the core search experience, and making search a central feature across Reddit”
Reddit’s push may be in response to Google AI Overviews taking more clicks away from Reddit results in organic search. At some point in the future, the share of clicks from Google going to Reddit may be greatly impacted by changes at Google. This seems more like a way to future-proof Reddit’s business than an attempt to take market share directly from Google.
It’s also no secret Reddit has been working with other partners to help drive more engagement and visitors to their website. LLMs have been using Reddit to train for a few years. Noted ZipTie.dev’s @TomekRudzki the share of Reddit LLM Search results are growing.
Is Big Tech Propping Up The Economy?
Capital expenditures by large cap tech companies on AI are reaching and going above dot-com levels. Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are essentially in an AI space race.
“Spending on AI infrastructure has already exceeded spending on telecom and internet infrastructure from the dot-com boom—and it’s still growing”
“Capex spending for AI contributed more to growth in the U.S. economy in the past two quarters than all of consumer spending”
The question now is, how long will this last?
Amazon Cuts Google Shopping
Amazon has cut back on Google Shopping significantly. This could be an opportunity for smaller brands or, as some have noted, a sign of an overall slowdown in consumer spending. Very similar to the Google Ads Covid shutdown cuts the company made early in the pandemic. Perhaps the executives at Amazon want to see the impact before ramping back up this fall for the holiday. The timing does seem rather odd, shortly after prime day and in the middle of back-to-school season.
Bose Pauses PPC Spend
Bose, in a move that rarely makes sense for 99% of brands, pauses a large portion of brand spend. This type of move makes headlines, but it is usually not a good strategy for most companies. Sure, brands like Bose can turn off the PPC ads for a few months and see no change in sales. They’re already a household name with decades of marketing in the past. Pausing for a few months or even a full year will likely not make a big difference.
This type of cut is usually done by executives looking to “shake things up” or simply cut the marketing budget after a poor sales year. Cutting large chunks of marketing to see if it “works” isn’t a strategy. It’s like removing some air from half of your tires to see if the car still “works” on a long road trip. Sure it will work for a short time but you may end up stranded on the West Virginia turnpike.