By now, many of you, not all of you, have played with both Bing Chat and Google Bard. So far, about 70% of SEOs find Bing Chat to be better than Google Bard, based on a small Twitter poll by Brodie Clark.

I posted my early opinion on Bard, basically saying it is a bit underwhelming compared to Bing Chat and ChatGPT. Heck, even the CEO of Bing said Bard is pretty behind Bing Chat.

And now if you see this poll of 381 SEOs on Twitter, about 70% said Bing Chat is better than Google Bard. Here is the poll:

Google vs. Bing

If you have access or seen screenshots, which AI Chat beta is best in your opinion?

— Brodie Clark (@brodieseo) March 21, 2023

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Microsoft has fixed the missing data in the Bing Webmaster Tools API. As a reminder, there was a bug that caused the Bing Webmaster Tools API to stop working, then Microsoft fixed it but about a weeks of data was missing. Now, Microsoft has filled the data gap with the missing data.

Fabrice Canel from Microsoft confirmed the issue with the missing data was resolved late Sunday night, saying on Twitter, “And the API now reports on all missing days.” Glenn Gabe, who first spotted this data issue, confirmed the following day that the data was indeed backfilled:

Thank you! I just quickly checked and all of the dates are there. I appreciate your help with this, Fabrice!

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) March 27, 2023

Again, here is the previous issue:

Thanks for reporting Glenn, business travelling back from SMX Munich, I will have the team looking at this ASAP.

— Fabrice Canel (@facan) March 17, 2023

Just checked now and the week of 3/10 is missing. Any way to get that back? Thanks again Fabrice! pic.twitter.com/Q8v2CfsCCV

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) March 21, 2023

So now, it is a good time to go back in and request the data from the API so you can fill any missing data gaps you have in your software.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Google updated the Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console on March 27, 2023. The update may have resulted in a change in the number of URLs in your Core Web Vitals report, the search company wrote.

Google wrote, “You may see a change in the number of URLs in your Core Web Vitals report. This is because more URLs are now being reported on due to a new origin group that contains data for URLs that previously fell below the data threshold.”

You should see a little marker notifying you of this update in the report, here is what it looks like:

Here is more about URL Groups from the Google help document:

URLs in the report are grouped into pages that have a similar user experience. The LCP, FID, and CLS status applies to the entire group. Some outlier URLs might have better or worse values on some visits, but 75% of visits to all URLs in the group experienced the group status shown. It is assumed that these groups have a common framework and the reasons for any poor behavior of the group will likely be caused by the same underlying reasons.

In order to respect user privacy, a URL group must have a minimum amount of data to be shown in the report. If a URL group doesn’t have enough information to display in the report, Search Console creates a higher-level origin group that should contain enough URLs and data to show in the report. This origin group contains data for all URLs in the same protocol://host:port group. For example, if the URL https://m.example.com/a/b/c.html is part of a group that doesn’t have enough data to show, then Search Console will create the origin group https://m.example.com. This origin group contains data for all URLs under https://m.example.com, whether or not the URL also belongs to a group with sufficient data.

Note, I don’t think Core Web Vitals are that vital to SEO, so I wouldn’t get bogged down in these reports for SEO or ranking reasons.

Forum discussion at Twitter.