With all the talk about ChatGPT and other AI bots, did you know that there is an OpenAI ChatGPT bot and it respects the robots.txt protocol? So if you want, you can block OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot from crawling, indexing and using your content and data from your website. This will block the ChatGPT plugins specifically.

Mike King spotted this and posted about it on Twitter, you can see the official documentation over here. It reads:

ChatGPT-User is used by plugins in ChatGPT. This user-agent will only be used to take direct actions on behalf of ChatGPT users and is not used for crawling the web in any automatic fashion.

User agent token: ChatGPT-User
Full user-agent string: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot
To allow plugins to access your site you can explicitly add the ChatGPT-User to your site’s robots.txt:

Here is a screenshot of the document, in case it changes in the future:

Again, if you don’t want OpenAI to use your site’s data for its AI and ChatGPT, you can disallow it in your robots.txt file. Although, I am not sure how real-time this is and if once OpenAI consumed the content, will it then remove it after-the-fact?

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Google may be showing less site names and brand names in the title of the search results snippet. Yes, Google has a sitename and favicon change for the search results, so maybe Google is less likely to repeat the site name in the title of the search result snippet because of that new search result layout design?

Google may be showing fewer site names and brand names in the title of the search results snippet. I received a couple of complaints about this and now the Screaming Frog team also noticed it. So I think this is legit and maybe it will stick, maybe it won’t but SEOs and site owners are noticing the lack of site names in the title of the snippet.

For example, search for Air Jordan shoes return Nike.com and as you can see from the snippet, it just says “Jordan Shoes” in the title. Yes, the favicon and site name are above, but the title tag says “Jordan Shoes. Nike.com” but Google just shows “Jordan Shoes” in the snippet.

Similar with this American Airline snippet, it shows “Find New York to Miami flights” but the title tag says “American Airlines® – Find New York to Miami flights.”

Here is what Screaming Frog posted:

Looks like over the last week, Google has started showing less brand names at the end of SERP titles. Makes sense with site names already. pic.twitter.com/blh0d4Thd4

— Screaming Frog (@screamingfrog) March 28, 2023

The logic makes sense:

Yup, not really needed as much with site names!

— Screaming Frog (@screamingfrog) March 28, 2023

John Mueller thinks that is why:

Isn’t this just a side-effect of showing the site name a line above the title? https://t.co/v1RMUGoPyK

— johnmu likes 🥚 staplers 🥚 (@JohnMu) March 28, 2023

In any event, this may be happening intentionally and SEOs are noticing.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Several weeks ago, Google enabled the ability to export your Google Search Console data in bulk, automatically, to Google’s BigQuery. Now, Google announced that you can do this across multiple properties in Google Search Console into a single Google Cloud project.

Google said on Twitter, “Following feedback from the community, today we’re updating bulk data exports to allow multiple GSC properties to export to one Cloud project. To do so, you need to customize your dataset name when setting up your export to have a unique dataset name for each export.”

Here are those tweets:

Following feedback from the community, today we’re updating bulk data exports to allow multiple GSC properties to export to one Cloud project. To do so, you need to customize your dataset name when setting up your export to have a unique dataset name for each export. https://t.co/AdSVgSeSG7

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) March 27, 2023

As a reminder, you can initiate a daily export of all your Google Search Console property performance data to BigQuery using this new feature. This is a daily export and includes all the daily data used by Google Search Console to generate the Search Console performance reports you see in the web interface. The data is exported to Google BigQuery, where you can run SQL queries for advanced data mining and other data analytics.

Google said that this feature is useful for large sites with many brand or other unusual queries that are beyond the 50,000 daily row limit of the API, and performance data for large sites, which can reach gigabytes within months.

Forum discussion at Twitter.