SEO secrets, Google News updates, and Reddit's preferential treatment (again)

An Italian AI news experiment fails to impress, while LLM.txt could point the way. All this and more in this week's Content Aware.

Published: 15:09, 03 April 2025

Corbidge comments on... Rebooting Copyright
As the Tony Blair Institute pushes for AI's free rein over copyrighted works, recommending an opt-out model over explicit permissions, one has to wonder what lies beneath the dressed up verbiage of AI and innovation. GPP’s copyright sheriff is on the case to find out.
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Audience engagement Q&A with GPP!
GPP's barely-in-the-news duo Denis Haman and Rich Fairbairn sat down with State of Digital Publishing (SODP) to chat about first-party data, audience management, and Glide Nexa. With well over 50 years of media and publishing experience between them - yes, really - they had plenty to say in their typically reticent style.
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SEO rules? For moi?
There's a reason publishers don't really like machine translations without any human input: Google says it will penalise it. (It's one of the reasons our translation tools in Glide CMS work as they do.) So surely a ranking surge by fully-automated Reddit translations is an error soon to be rectified? Unlikely, given how cozy the pair are. Another asterisk in the SEO rulebook!
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Google News changes
News publishers: seen swings in your site's Google News visibility? Check for recent updates in your Publisher Center. AI is taking more of a role in how it shows off your work, and removed many config options you had to control how your work was displayed.
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March 2025 core update
SEO guru Barry Adams takes a look at the impact of Google's March 2025 core update rollout. ''Fairly uneventful'' for UK news sites.
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Ranking fluctuations
Wonder why new topics on your site sometimes rank well, then drop away? A Googler explains.
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SEO weighs in on GEO
GEO is an emerging field, but one that’s generating plenty of interest. There’s no accepted standard for GEO yet, though it will likely follow the same best practices as SEO: a well-structured site, clear content categorisation, content quality, and easy navigation. The Athletic’s Shelby Blackley breaks down why it matters, how publishers should approach it, and teases upcoming GEO tactics.
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LLMs.txt
Meanwhile, Australian technologist Jeremy Howard has proposed a new standard for letting your content be crawled and used by large language models - LLMs.txt. While the proposal has generated interest, it has its critics.
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Magical creations or a privacy nightmare?
The latest trend of AI-generated Ghibli-style artwork may be charming social media users, but it’s also setting off privacy alarm bells left and right. Experts warn of the risks - data breaches, misuse of personal information, and the potential exposure of sensitive data - all because these images will inevitably be fed back into AI training models. So, is a cute image, lost in an endless scroll of equally forgettable images, really worth sacrificing your privacy?
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Post-AI creative edge
In the midst of the AI boom not so long ago, those who jumped on it early stood out. Fast forward to today and it's no longer a novelty - everyone’s got it, everyone’s using it. But as Rob Schwartz writes for Print Magazine, once AI has given us all it can, it’s the creatives who will rise above the noise.
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Ital-AI-n newspaper
In a daring experiment, the Italian newspaper Il Foglio rolled out Il Foglio AI, a daily edition entirely generated by AI, with human journalists merely supervising. Unsurprisingly, the result is a shallow imitation of the paper's style, lacking any meaningful substance. Humans are vital to the loop, as we often say.
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AI lawsuits mapped out
News publishers and creatives worldwide are taking legal action over AI’s use of their work, with the NYT vs OpenAI saga grabbing most attention and NYT now demanding OpenAI hand over its profit documents. For those who prefer a visual breakdown, here’s a world map showing this and all other copyright lawsuits against AI companies to date.
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Success story of the week: Direkt36
Direkt36’s co-founder András Pethő walked away from Origo when turned it into Hungary's political megaphone. Now, he’s leading Direkt36, one of the few remaining independent voices, proving that independent journalism still has some fight left in it.
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