Google has unveiled BARD, an AI chatbot designed to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s chatbot in their Bing search engine.

In a blog post, Google describes Bard as an early AI experiment to enhance productivity, accelerate ideas, and foster curiosity.

You can use BARD to get tips, explanations, or creative assistance in tasks such as outlining blog posts.

With BARD, Google aims to solidify its presence in the AI chatbot space while maintaining its dominance in the search engine market.

BARD’s Technical Details

BARD is powered by a research large language model (LLM) – a lightweight and optimized version of LaMDA.

It will be updated with more advanced models over time. As more people use LLMs, they become better at predicting helpful responses.

BARD is designed as a complementary experience to Google Search, allowing users to check its responses or explore sources across the web.

Operating as a standalone webpage, BARD consists of a singular question box instead of being integrated into Google’s search engine.

This strategic move is to adopt new AI technology while preserving the profitability of its search engine business.

Cautious Rollout Amid Unpredictability Concerns

Google’s cautious approach to BARD’s release is in response to the concerns over unpredictable and sometimes unreliable chatbot technology, as demonstrated by competitors.

Google recognizes LLMs can sometimes produce biased, misleading, or false information.

To mitigate these issues, Google allows you to choose from a few drafts of BARD’s response.

You can continue collaborating with BARD by asking follow-up questions or requesting alternative answers.

Screenshot from: blog.google/technology/ai/try-bard/, March 2023.

Google’s Race to Ship AI Products

Since OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT and Microsoft’s introduction of chatbot technology in Bing, Google has prioritized AI as its central focus.

The company’s internal teams, including AI safety researchers, are working collaboratively to accelerate approval for a range of new AI products.

Google’s work on BARD is guided by its AI Principles, focusing on quality and safety.

The company uses human feedback and evaluation to enhance its systems. It has implemented guardrails, such as capping the number of exchanges in a dialogue, to keep interactions helpful and on-topic.

Screenshot from: blog.google/technology/ai/try-bard/, March 2023.

In Development Since 2015

Google has been developing the technology behind BARD since 2015.

However, similar to OpenAI and Microsoft’s chatbots, BARD has not been released to a broader audience due to concerns about generating untrustworthy information and potential biases against certain groups.

Google acknowledges these issues and aims to bring BARD to market responsibly.

BARD Availability

You can sign up to try BARD at bard.google.com.

Access is initially rolling out in the US and UK, with plans to expand to more countries and languages over time. It’s possible to get around the limited rollout with a VPN.

Google requires users to have a Gmail address to sign up and doesn’t accept Google Workspace email accounts.

Sources: Google, The New York Times

Featured Image: Muhammad S0hail/Shutterstock

It happens every couple of years.

First, it was Jason Calacanis and Mahalo, then the early social platforms.

We saw it again with voice search and smart assistants. For a minute, it was TikTok’s turn. Then the metaverse jumped the line.

Now, it’s ChatGPT and AI.

I’m talking, of course, about “SEO killers.”

Every now and then, a new technology comes along, and three things inevitably happen:

• Thousands of SEO professionals publish posts and case studies declaring themselves experts in the new thing.
• Every publication dusts off its “SEO is dead” article, changes the date, and does a find and replace for the new technology.
• SEO continues to be stronger than ever.

Rinse, repeat.

It would seem that search has more lives than a cartoon cat, but the simple truth is: Search is immortal.

How we search, what devices we use, and whether the answer is a link to a website will forever be up for debate.

But as long as users have tasks to complete, they’ll turn somewhere for help, and digital marketers will influence the process.

Will AI Replace Search?

There’s a ton of hype right now about AI replacing both search engines and search professionals – I don’t see that happening. I view ChatGPT as just another tool.

Much like a knife: You can butter bread or cut yourself. It’s all in how you use it.

Will AI replace search engines? Let’s ask it ourselves!

That’s a pretty good answer.

Many SEO professionals (including me) have been saying for years that the days of tricking the algorithm are long gone.

SEO has been slowly morphing into digital marketing for a long time now. It’s no longer possible to do SEO without considering user intent, personas, use cases, competitive research, market conditions, etc.

Ok, but won’t AI just do that for us? Is AI going to take my job? Here’s a crazy idea: Let’s ask ChatGPT!

Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

AI Isn’t Going To Take Your Job. But An SEO Who Knows How To Use AI To Be More Efficient Just Might

Why? Let’s dive in.

I still see a lot of SEO pros writing articles that ask AI to do things it’s simply incapable of – and this comes from a basic understanding of how large language models actually work.

AI tools, like ChatGPT, aren’t pulling any information from a database of facts. They don’t have an index or a knowledge graph.

They don’t “store” information the way a search engine does. They’re simply predicting what words or sentences will come next based on the material they’ve been trained on. They don’t store this training material, though.

They’re using word vectors to determine what words are most likely to come next. That’s why they can be so good and also hallucinate.

AI can’t crawl the internet. It has no knowledge of current events and can’t cite sources because it doesn’t know or retain that information. Sure, you can ask it to cite sources, but it’s really just making stuff up.

For really popular topics that were discussed a lot, it can get pretty close – because the probabilities of those words coming next are really high – but the more specific you get, the more it will hallucinate.

Given the extreme amount of time and resources it takes to train the model, it will be a long time before AI can answer any queries about current events.

But What About Bing, You.com, And Google’s Upcoming Bard? They Can Do All Of This, Can’t They?

Yes and no. They can cite sources, but that’s based on how they’re implementing it. To vastly oversimplify, Bing isn’t asking for a pure chatbot.

Bing is searching for your query/keyword. It’s then feeding in all the webpages that it would normally return for that search and asking the AI to summarize those webpages.

You and I can’t do that on the public-facing AI tools without hitting token limits, but search engines can!

Ok, Surely This Will Kill SEO. AI Will Just Answer Every Question, Right?

I disagree.

All the way back in 2009 (when we were listening to the Black Eyed Peas on our iPhone 3Gs and updating our MySpace top 8 on Windows Vista), a search engine once called Live was being renamed to Bing.

Why? Because Bing is a verb. This prompted Bill Gates to declare, “The future of search is verbs.”

I love to share this quote with clients every chance I get because that future is now.

Gates wasn’t talking about people typing action words into search engines. He meant that people are trying to “do” something, and the job of search is to help facilitate that.

People often forget that search is a form of pull marketing, where users tell us what they want – not push marketing like a billboard or a TV ad.

As digital marketers, our job is simple: Give users what they want.

This is where the confusion comes in, though.

For many queries that have simple answers, a link to a website with a popup cookie policy, notification alert, newsletter sign-up popup, and ads were never what the user wanted.

It’s just the best thing we had back then. Search engines never set out with the end goal of providing links to websites. They set out to answer questions and help users accomplish tasks.

Even from the earliest days, Google talked about how its goal was to be the Star Trek computer; it just didn’t have the technology to do it then. Now, it does.

For many of these queries, like [how old is Taylor Swift?] or [how many megabytes in a gigabyte?], websites will lose traffic – but it’s traffic they were probably never entitled to.

Who owns that answer anyway? These are questions with simple answers. The user’s task is simply to get a number. They don’t want a website.

Smart SEO pros will focus on the type of queries where a user wants to do something – like buy Taylor Swift tickets, get reviews of her album or concerts, chat with other Swifties, etc. That’s where AI won’t be able to kill SEO or search.

What ChatGPT Can Do Vs. What It Can’t

ChatGPT can accomplish a lot of things.

It’s good at showing me how to write an Excel formula or MySQL query, but it will never teach me MySQL, sell me a course, or let me talk with other developers about database theory.

Those are things a search engine can help me do.

ChatGPT can also help answer many “common knowledge” questions, as long as the topic isn’t contested and is old and popular enough to have shown up in the training data.

Even then, it’s still not 100% accurate – as we’ve seen in countless memes and with one famous bank being called out for its AI-written article not knowing how to calculate interest properly.

AI might list the most talked about bars in NYC, but it can’t recommend the best place to get an Old Fashioned like a human can.

Honestly, all SEO pros talking about using AI to create content are starting to bore me. Answering questions is neat, but where ChatGPT really excels is in text manipulation.

At my agency, we’re already using ChatGPT’s API as an SEO tool to help create content briefs, categorize and cluster keywords, write complicated regular expressions for redirects, and even generate XML or JSON-LD code based on given inputs.

These rely on tons of inputs from various sources and require lots of manual reviews.

We’re not using it to create content, though. We’re using it to summarize and examine other pieces of content and then use those to glean insights. It’s less of an SEO replacement and more of a time saver.

SEO Is Here To Stay

What if your business is built around displaying facts you don’t really “own”? If so, you should probably be worried – not just about AI.

Boilerplate copy tasks may be handled by AI. Recent tests I’ve done on personal sites have shown some success here.

But AI will never be capable of coming up with insights or creating new ideas, staying on top of the latest trends, or providing the experience, expertise, authority, or trust that a real author can.

Remember: It’s not thinking, citing, or even pulling data from a database. It’s just looking at the next-word probabilities.

Unlike thousands of SEO pros who recently updated their Twitter bios, I may not be an expert on AI, but I have a computer science degree. I also know what it takes to understand user needs.

So far, no data shows people would prefer auto-generated, re-worded content over unique curated content written by a real human being.

People want fresh ideas and insights that only people can provide. (If we add an I to E-E-A-T, where should it go?)

If your business or content delivers value through insights, curation, current trends, recommendations, solving problems, or performing an action, then SEO and search engines aren’t going anywhere.

They may change shape from time to time, but that just means job security for me – and I’m good with that.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Elnur/Shutterstock

If you’re looking to build more backlinks to your website, checking how your competitors built and earned their backlinks is a good starting point.

That’s because understanding how they got links can help inform your link building strategy. 

In this post, you’ll learn how to find, replicate, and learn from your competitors’ backlinks.

You need an SEO tool like Ahrefs to do this, which is consistently voted top dog in SEO industry polls. 

Free method (top 100 backlinks)

Head over to our free backlink checker and plug in your competitor’s domain or URL. You’ll see the total number of backlinks and referring domains (linking websites) and the top 100 backlinks (referring page, anchor, and target URL).

Paid method (all backlinks)

Sign up for Ahrefs, plug your competitor’s domain or URL into Site Explorer, then go to the Backlinks report. You’ll see all their backlinks. In this case, over 80,000 of them. 

If you want to hone in on specific backlinks, such as those from English pages on websites with traffic, use the filters.

Not sure who your competitors are?

Enter your website or webpage’s URL into Site Explorer and go to the Organic competitors report. You’ll see a list of websites or webpages that rank for the keywords as your target.

It’s impossible to replicate all of your competitors’ backlinks, but there are ways to get some of them (or similar ones) for yourself:

1. Find and copy their replicable links
2. Find and copy the link building tactics that are working for them
3. Find links that you can loot from them

Let’s take a closer look at how to do these three things.

Finding your competitors’ replicable links

Most of your competitors’ backlinks will be extremely hard to replicate like for like, but it’s usually possible to replicate some of them. Let’s look at a few ways to do this.

Find competitors’ directory links

Directory links are far from the most powerful links, but they’re easy to replicate. Many SEOs believe they help with “map pack” rankings for local businesses too.

Here’s the easiest way to find them:

1. Enter your homepage into Site Explorer
2. Go to the Link Intersect report
3. Enter a few competitors’ homepages in blank fields
4. Set the search mode for all pages to “URL”
5. Hit “Show link opportunities”

This will show you the websites linking to one or more of your competitors’ homepages, but not to yours. It’s then just a case of eyeballing the list for sites that look like niche and local directories. 

If you’re not sure whether a site is a directory, click the caret in one of the competing page columns to see the referring page, anchor, and backlink. You can usually tell from this.

If you’re still unsure, click on the page to check manually. 

Replicating these links is usually as simple as signing up for an account and adding your business. 

Find listicles where competitors are mentioned, but not you

If competitors are mentioned in listicles of the best tools/restaurants/whatever your business does, there’s a chance you may be able to get mentioned in that same listicle (and a mention usually comes with a link).

These kinds of listicles are usually easy to spot in a competitor’s Backlinks report. 

However, the best opportunities come from listicles mentioning multiple competitors because the topic of the page is more likely to be relevant to your business.

Here’s an easy way to find these:

1. Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
2. Search for “competitor 1” “competitor 2” “competitor 3” -“your business name”

It’s then just a case of sifting through the results and pitching the authors of listicles where it makes sense to add your business. 

Here’s what that pitch might look like for Aweber:

Hey [Name],

Just came across your list of the best email marketing tools and noticed Aweber wasn’t included. Is that because you didn’t like our platform or haven’t tried it?

If it’s the latter, I’d love to hook you up with a free account so you can give it a shot.

What do you think?

[Name]

Note that the email doesn’t explicitly ask the author to add anything to their list. It just asks if they’re familiar with the sender’s tool. This is intentional. It’s easier to ask for inclusion after you win folks over. 

Find competitors’ links from interviews and podcasts

Interview and podcast links are more common in some industries than others, so you may not find any among your competitors. But as they only take a minute to search for, it’s well worth a quick check. 

Here’s an easy way to find them:

1. Go to Site Explorer
2. Enter the Twitter profile URL of your competitor’s CEO, CMO, or whoever the most prolific marketer is within the company
3. Go to the Backlinks report
4. Filter for results where the referring page URL contains “podcast,” “episode,” or “interview”

You then just need to pitch the same interviews and podcasts. 

Find competitors’ guest posts

Guest posting is the third most popular link building tactic, according to Aira’s 2022 State of Link Building report, so it’s probably a tactic that at least some of your competitors are using. 

However, while you can find them in a competitor’s Backlinks report, they can be hard to spot. 

For example, one of the links below is from a guest post and the other isn’t. But there’s no way to tell this from the link profile itself.

With that in mind, here’s an easier way to find a competitor’s guest posts:

1. Go to Content Explorer
2. Search for topic + author:“name of your competitor’s prolific marketer”
3. Filter for one page per domain

Most of the results should be guest posts by that person. Replicating them is as simple as reaching out and pitching the same websites.

Finding and copying link building tactics that work for competitors

If your competitors have lots of backlinks from directories, podcasts, interviews, or guest posts, these link building tactics are clearly working for them. So don’t limit yourself to replicating only the exact links they got. Pursue other links from these tactics too.

Here are some tutorials to help: 

However, there are two more commonly used tactics worth checking for. 

Check for links from journalist requests

Bloggers and journalists often use services like Help A Reporter Out (HARO) and MuckRack to source quotes for upcoming stories—and they usually link to their sources.

For example, here’s someone from “Martha Stewart Living” asking for a quote about how plumbing leaks occur in the home.

Max Rose from Four Seasons Plumbing was one of the people to respond to this, and he received a quote and backlink from the article in return.

Here’s how to check if your competitors are building backlinks this way:

1. Go to Site Explorer
2. Enter a competitor’s homepage
3. Set the search mode to “Exact URL”
4. Go to the Backlinks report
5. Look for quotes in the “Anchor and target URL” column

If you spot a few quotes from the same person, like “Max Rose” in this case, filter for that name in the anchor and surrounding text to hone in on these kinds of links.

If you see a fair number of links from quotes, there’s a good chance your competitor is actively responding to journalist requests—and that it’s working. So it’s probably worth responding to requests via HARO and similar platforms yourself too.

Check for passively earned links from linkable points

Linkable points are things like facts, statistics, and unique ideas that resonate with the linkerati and attract backlinks. Even if your competitors aren’t consciously using this tactic to earn links, it could still be one of the ways they’re earning them—so it’s worth checking.

Here’s how to do that:

1. Go to Site Explorer
2. Enter one of the top-ranking pages for your target keyword
3. Go to the Anchors report
4. Look for anchors relating to facts, figures, or unique ideas

For example, the Anchors report for a page ranking for “seo copywriting” mentions the “APP” method/formula a few times:

This is a term coined by the post’s author, and it has earned him some decent links.

Because of this, when we wrote our own guide to SEO copywriting, we decided to coin a similar term in an effort to earn some passive backlinks.

If we check the Anchors report for our page, we can see it’s earned us a couple of links so far: 

This is not astonishing by any stretch of the imagination, but they’re two links we wouldn’t have unless we included proven, linkable points.

We had more success with this method when creating our list of SEO statistics (we documented that process in this link building case study), which has earned links from over 1,700 referring domains in under two years.

Finding links you can loot from competitors

Your competitors may have links that no longer make sense for them to have. If you can provide linkers with a better alternative, you can often take these links for yourself.

Here are a few tactics that revolve around this idea:

Broken link building

Broken link building is where you find a dead page with backlinks, create your own resource on the topic, then ask linkers to link to that instead.

For example, this page about SEO tips can’t be found:

If we plug that URL into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, we see it has backlinks from 177 referring domains:

If we were to create our own list of SEO tips, we could reach out to these 177 websites and suggest replacing that dead link with a link to our list. 

But how do you find your competitors’ broken pages with backlinks in the first place?

If you have a specific competitor in mind, do this:

1. Go to Site Explorer
2. Enter your competitor’s domain
3. Go to the Best by links report
4. Add a “404 not found” HTTP code filter

You’ll see a list of dead pages on their website, sorted by the number of referring domains pointing to them. 

If you don’t have a specific competitor in mind, do this:

1. Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
2. Search for a topic
3. Filter for broken pages only
4. Filter for pages with referring domains (the minimum number is up to you)

You’ll see a list of broken pages related to the topic with at least the minimum set number of referring domains.

Regardless of which method you use, the process from there is the same: 

• Check what the page used to be – To do this, plug the URL into the Wayback Machine. It needs to be something you can create similar content about.
• Check the quality of the page’s backlinks – To do this, run a backlink audit in Site Explorer. If it doesn’t have good links, it’s not the best opportunity for a broken link building campaign.
• Reach out to linkers and suggest they swap the link – To do this more easily, use an outreach tool like Pitchbox or BuzzStream.

301 redirect link building

301 redirect link building is where you look for your competitors’ irrelevant redirects, then pitch a replacement to linkers.

For example, this page about the Google Penguin Update on Search Engine Land has backlinks from 1.2K referring domains:

But, for some reason, it redirects to a page about “Google SEO”:

This is a problem because people clicking through from those 1.2K websites will end up on a completely unrelated page. For that reason, there’s an opportunity here to pitch a link swap to linkers (same as with broken link building).

But how do you find your competitors’ irrelevant 301 redirects in the first place?

1. Go to Site Explorer
2. Enter a competitor’s domain
3. Go to the Best by links report
4. Add a “3XX redirect” HTTP code filter

It’s then just a case of double-checking what the page used to be in the Wayback Machine, auditing the quality of the page’s links, creating a relevant replacement, and suggesting it to linkers. 

Run a competitor link analysis

Some of your competitors’ “lootable” links won’t fall neatly into the box of a known link building tactic. The process of finding them is quite nuanced and takes some experience, but you’ll often find unique pitches this way.

For example, say we wanted to build links to our list of Google ranking factors. If we check the top-ranking results for this keyword in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer, we see that many of them have hundreds of (potentially “lootable”) backlinks from hundreds of domains: 

When I plugged one of those competing URLs into Site Explorer and checked the Backlinks report, alarm bells started to ring when I saw the anchor and surrounding text for this link:

It claims that bounce rate, dwell time, and repeat visits are ranking factors.

Not true.

Given that this link must be based on advice from the linked (competing) page, I decided to take a look myself. What I found was a page giving lots of dangerously bad advice: 

I’m not sure how much linkers would care, but I think there’s an opportunity here to reach out to all worthwhile prospects, explain that they’re linking to an inaccurate post, and suggest linking to our list of ranking factors instead. 

Even if only a fraction of them care, we win a few links while combating misinformation. It’s a win-win. 

Final thoughts

Finding your competitors’ backlinks is easy. Getting the same ones to your site is less easy. 

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. Start by replicating the easy ones, then find and copy the link building tactics that work for them, and finally take any links they no longer deserve for yourself.

Got questions? Ping me on Twitter.