Youtube gives and takes away with AI, AI self-identification, and OpenAI browser launching soon.
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Youtube AI Demonetization
YouTube announced that they've begun to demonetize certain types of potentially AI-generated content as of July 15th.
Specifically, they're discouraging content that is:
AI-narrated videos with no human commentary or analysis
Auto-generated subtitles or visuals without added context
Recycled formats, scripts, or styles that lack variation
Superficially altered content (e.g., filters, crops, or color tweaks), non-transformative videos
Mass-produced videos with little to no creative involvement
AKA, they'd like less "AI slop" on their platform, which strikes me as extremely reasonable, but also, a lot of these formats pre-date the AI wave.
Two important things to note:
This isn't an actual ban on AI-generated content but just "low-effort AI-seeming" content. If your AI content is good enough, you're still good. To me, this feels a lot like how we don't register if digital visual effects are used in a movie unless they're really bad.
Notably, they're not removing or banning the content. So, if you're trying to mass generate influential content to improve your AI SEO rankings, you're still likely good.
So, while YouTube is demonetizing AI-seeming content, on the flip side of things, the second largest search engine on the internet is also rolling out new AI search tools.
Currently previewing with YouTube Premium subscribers, they've now added an "AI-powered search" carousel and expanded their conversational AI interface.
Of the two, I think the conversational mode is more flashy but less impactful to search marketers.
YouTube explicitly targets the type of high-value, bottom-of-the-funnel, comparison-type content that we encourage people to track in Knowatoa, which they're then using AI to build custom video carousels and collections.
Grok is the xAI chatbot that's funded by Elon Musk. So it's not a surprise that for controversial content, Grok is checking public statements made by Elon.
What is surprising is that:
This doesn't appear to be programmed behavior, but rather that Grok has gathered knowledge of who owns it from the wider Internet (there aren't any directions in the underlying system prompt saying "ask Elon")
This may show that the AI models are starting to gain a sense of self-identity.
AI models of all kinds may be identifying specific people's opinions and statements more heavily than previously thought.
This last point is the most interesting to SEOs in the commercial and ranking sense as it points to certain sources and individuals having more authority and rank similar to traditional SEO.
OpenAI has had an official ChatGPT browser extension for a while now (5,000,000 users), but it seems like they're on the cusp of releasing their own browser.
Google launching Chrome was a big inflection point for both the web and search, and I'm hopeful that OpenAI's browser will be the same for AI search.
In my own wild UX dreams, I'm hoping that it really takes a different approach to Chrome and centers having AI agents and chat search as the core of the experience.
This week, I wanted to shout out two podcasts that were nice enough to talk to me about how AI search is changing the way we do SEO and how Knowatoa is helping brands make the transition from traditional SEO to AI search.