SODP Dispatch - 30 January 2025

DeepSeek: How A Small Chinese AI Company Is Shaking Up US Tech Heavyweights

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek has sent shockwaves through the tech community, with the release of extremely efficient AI models that can compete with cutting-edge products from US companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Founded in 2023, DeepSeek has achieved its results with a fraction of the cash and computing power of its competitors.

DeepSeek’s “reasoning” R1 model, released last week, provoked excitement among researchers, shock among investors, and responses from AI heavyweights. The company followed up on January 28 with a model that can work with images as well as text.

🎤 FIPP World Media Congress 2025

21-23 October 2025 | Madrid. The event will celebrate a century of FIPP uniting global media leaders and technology innovators. This edition will bring together top speakers from globally renowned companies, exploring the evolving media world across platforms and audiences.
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🔍️ SearchAtlas SEO by LinkGraph

This 100% free Chrome extension, ‘LinkGraph's SearchAtlas,’ allows you to use powerful SEO tools on any of your webpages. You can run Technical SEO Audits of Landing Pages, find broken and redirecting links, identify opportunities to improve HTML meta tags and headers, and spot issues hurting the SEO of any webpage.
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By Vahe Arabian

🤖 AI Agents’ Impact on Publishing

AI agents aren’t just changing the game—they’re rewriting the rulebook for publishers.

With OpenAI's launch of the "Operator" AI agent, the publishing world is buzzing with questions: Will this technology create a traffic vacuum as users bypass traditional search engines? Or will it push publishers to prioritise hyper-personalisation, delivering richer, more customised audience experiences? As The Drum highlights, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman describes Operator as a “paradigm shift” in how people interact with information. By offering direct, conversational answers, AI agents could significantly reduce reliance on traditional search platforms, posing a challenge for publishers still heavily dependent on organic traffic.

Here's another crucial insight: Google is also introducing AI agents through Project Mariner, which takes personalisation a step further by allowing AI to browse the web on your behalf to provide custom, contextually relevant answers (NewsBytes). This means that AI agents aren’t just presenting static, pre-selected information—they’re actively browsing and curating answers based on real-time user interactions. Publishers must evolve their strategies to keep pace with this kind of dynamic content delivery.

But here’s the thing—this doesn’t mark the end for publishers. It’s a pivotal moment to recalibrate, innovate, and build stronger, more direct relationships with audiences. Instead of seeing AI as a threat, why not view it as an opportunity to rethink how we engage with readers?

Here’s what publishers need to focus on:

• Reinvent audience development strategies: Relying on a single channel is no longer sustainable. Instead, build direct connections with your audience through owned platforms like newsletters, apps, and exclusive memberships. These aren’t just optional—they’re critical. Also, understand at what stage of the reader funnel the platform/channel is most valuable to you and your audiences.
  

• Embrace personalisation: AI tools can work for you, not against you. Leverage them to create tailored content, gain real-time audience insights, and deliver adaptive user experiences that keep readers engaged.
  

• Leverage partnerships and innovation: Collaborating with pubtech and providers and investing in emerging tools will help you confidently navigate this shifting paradigm.

HubSpot’s SEO collapse: What went wrong and why? | Search Engine Land

Organic traffic appears to have declined sharply, dropping from 13.5 million in November to 8.6 million in December, according to Semrush. HubSpot’s blog seems to have taken most of the impact. It may be that Google wants to stop rewarding websites that publish content outside their area of expertise – that lack depth and topical authority on.
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Google Launches Open-Source “Meridian” Marketing Mix Model | SEJ

Google launches Meridian, an open-source marketing tool using advanced modeling to optimize ad budgets and measure campaign effectiveness.
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Substack introduces a $20M funding guarantee to entice creators to migrate to its platform | TechCrunch

Substack announced the launch of its Creator Accelerator Fund, which provides a $20 million funding guarantee aimed at helping creators grow their audience and move their paid subscribers from another subscription-based platform (Patreon, Supercast, and others) to Substack.
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Google Removes Breadcrumb From Mobile Search Results Snippets | Search Engine Roundtable

The desktop search results will continue to have the breadcrumb and domain in the snippets. Google said this is to provide a "cleaner, more streamlined look for how URLs appear in search results." Google added this is a global launch and will affect all mobile results in "all languages and regions."
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Audience editors offer advice for “dispiriting” times in social and search | NiemanLab

Newsrooms have seen steep declines in traffic from Facebook and Twitter as platforms build higher walls to keep users in-app by deprioritizing news and external links.
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