Search Disrupted Newsletter (Issue 15)

Gemini's doing it Live, Knowatoa updates, Google's offering AI certification, Prompt Engineering for SEO, and local AI models are on the rise

May 16, 2025 • Michael Buckbee

Android + Gemini Live

Google’s Gemini is shaping up to be the core Google experience. Google announced new Gemini Live features for Android in the run-up to their I/O conference.

Gemini is being baked deep into the Android experience across not just phones, but their WearOS watches, TVs, Auto, and of course, phones.

Something that was shared at the SEOWeek conference was that a significant percentage of Google searches now come from voice and image searches (Lens).

Looking at the UX advancements showcased, it’s clear why this is happening: it’s just a better experience, of which search is now a facet of what the user is trying to accomplish.

As SEO, we see this as a compression of the search journey.

In the demonstration, they use the camera to ask about a makeup product and how to use it. They didn’t search for the brand name, then the product name, or whether it was waterproof. They just asked the “true” question they were trying to get an answer to: “Can I eat lunch without messing up my makeup?”.

As an industry, we need to shift to this task intent mode of thinking if we’re going to thrive in the new era of AI search.

Link - https://youtu.be/l3yDd3CmA_Y?t=521

Knowatoa Updates

I could save an hour a week if I made a keyboard shortcut saying “the search ecosystem is changing.” I’m writing about it so often.

Because the ecosystem is changing so rapidly, we’re constantly adding new Knowatoa features, fixing issues, and tweaking how the platform works so that you can get the most out of it.

To help communicate all the updates we’ve been making, there’s now a dedicated product updates page at https://knowatoa.com/updates.

Three recent updates:

Link - https://knowatoa.com/updates

Prompt Engineering for SEO profit

Many SEO skeptics I’ve met tried an early AI service from a couple of years ago. They asked it a hyper-specific and tricky question, got a wrong answer, and mentally slotted AI into the same “overhyped” category of the regular tech nonsense.

Now, though, there is much more information on where and how best to apply AI in our day-to-day SEO tasks and in the workplace in general.

Guides from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic all give you amazing details on how to wring the most usefulness out of their AI tools.

Learning the basics of prompt engineering is a core skill for SEOs that will be just as important as the ability to use a spreadsheet or discern opportunities from a keyword list.

You should check these out:

Google offers AI certification

It’s a sign of the times when Google has begun offering AI certifications.

Specifically, they’ve announced a new Google Cloud certification for Generative AI Leader.

While the course targets a non-developer audience, it’s still pretty technical and leans more towards how Google’s AI Cloud platform works.

My recommendation would be to breeze through the first module on “Fundamentals of Generative AI”, learn what you can and then take the $99 exam fee and treat yourself to something nice as (it’s almost summer, maybe a cold margarita?) while I’m all for learning, I don’t the actual value of the certification justifies the cost.

Link - Google Cloud Generative AI Leader

Local AI Ubiquity

Google’s Gemma model (a lighter version of Gemini) has been downloaded 150 million times.

Developers embed models like this in their apps for secure enterprise applications and a way to contain costs, and train models for their specific tasks.

Consider something like an AI that looks through bank records for fraud. You wouldn’t want to ship all your customer data to a third party, and even if there were no privacy implications, it would be costly.

Having the model locally solves for this.

On the consumer side, millions of people are using apps like Ollama to run models (like Gemma) on their laptops for similar reasons of cost and privacy.

We’re already facing massive issues in tracking SEO metrics, and the rise of local AI models will only make this worse, as they’re just, by definition, not going to provide any attribution.

We haven’t yet added Gemma to the Knowatoa platform, but we’re tracking it, as the usage is climbing steeply.

Link: Ollama