Keeping Up With AI: What You Need to Know Right Now
If you’ve been trying to stay across all the AI announcements lately, you’ll know exactly how overwhelming it feels. It’s like drinking from a fire hose. There is so much coming out, and it’s not slowing down.
Anthropic’s New Model Is Too Powerful to Release
The latest buzz is around a new model from Anthropic, the company behind Claude. They have been shipping product at an incredible pace — and even recently launched their new managed agents on top of everything else. But their latest model is something different. Anthropic is saying it’s simply too powerful to release to the public just yet.
Before they make it available, they’re doing something quite remarkable. They’re going around to major software providers around the world and telling them to patch their systems, because the new model has already found vulnerabilities in software that literally runs the web. Now, some people are saying this is just hype — a marketing move to build excitement around the model. OpenAI did something similar with GPT-2 back around 2019. So, we’ve seen this kind of thing before.
But here’s what we do know: these models are genuinely getting smarter and smarter. They’re training, learning, and building on themselves. We’ve entered a stage of recursive development, where the improvements compound on each other. And it’s worth keeping in mind that open-source models — the free ones that anyone can download — are typically around six months behind the latest state-of-the-art models. That means by the new year, we could very well have a freely downloadable model with the same kind of power that Anthropic is currently saying is too dangerous to release. Anyone will be able to use it. That’s how fast this is moving, and it really does feel like we’re entering uncertain times.
Google Makes Agentic Search Official
The other big development this week is Google officially confirming what many of us have suspected for a while: agentic search is the future of search. Back in January, when Google released WebMCP, it looked like they were heading toward some kind of agent built into the browser. Well, that’s now a reality. The new version of Chrome has Google Gemini built directly into it. It can access your browser and the web page you’re currently on. You don’t need to worry about separate logins either — if you’re already logged in somewhere, Gemini is logged in too. It can see what it needs to see.
Stop Creating AI Content at Scale
Alongside all of this, there’s been a growing wave of businesses and individuals pushing the idea that you should be using AI to create a huge volume of content — content at scale. This is not a strategy that works. It might appear to work for a short time, but search engines eventually figure out that you’re spamming them, and there are plenty of recent examples of sites being flagged for exactly that.
Think about it this way: with AI models getting smarter by the day, do you really think pumping out content that nobody is going to read is a good idea? People are doing it in the hope that it will surface them in Google and large language models and generate clicks. But nobody is reading that content. At best, an AI agent will use it to generate a brief summary of your 2,000-word AI slop, and that’s it. Even some big names in the AI space, like Replit, have endorsed this kind of activity, which is baffling — it’s just creating noise.
What Good Content Actually Looks Like
Great content is still important — don’t get that wrong. But what great content means has changed. For e-commerce especially, great content means giving people everything they need to know about your product. Weight, colour, dimensions, materials — all of it, easily accessible so someone can find what they need in a split second. The easier and faster you make it to buy, the more people will buy. That principle hasn’t changed.
And we’re now moving into a stage where the checkout is coming directly to the search experience. Google already has a checkout feature appearing in some of its tools, and OpenAI discussed something similar for ChatGPT just last week. The old model of clicking a blue link, reading a page, hitting the back button, and browsing around is going away. Some SEOs have pushed back on this by pointing out that tools like ChatGPT and Claude are still small compared to Google’s traffic — but Google itself is moving away from those ten blue links. The shift is happening everywhere.
What the Bots Are Telling Us
Something that has been genuinely fascinating to observe recently is bot activity across client sites. Using SKAW — which is available to download on Shopify now, with a WordPress version coming shortly — you can see exactly what the AI bots are doing when they visit your site, which products they’re looking at, and what that activity corresponds to in terms of sales.
Just in the last month, there’s been a significant uptick in the Claude bot visiting client sites. A lot of that bot activity is user-driven: if you have a popular product that people buy frequently, you’re naturally going to see more bot traffic to that product because people are using AI tools to find it.
What’s really interesting, though, is looking at why some categories are converting really well from this traffic, while others are getting solid bot visits but not converting at anywhere near the same rate. That’s where the opportunity lies. Across multiple sites and different categories, we’re starting to see patterns — what the bots are looking at, what the content looks like, and what the defining factors are for conversion.
What we can say with confidence is this: the more chatbots visit your site, the more you will sell through those chatbots. But conversion still depends heavily on the quality of the information you’re providing to the agent or the user. That is where your content focus should be. Not on creating a thousand blog posts — please, if you’re doing that, stop now. Focus on the information that matters: the product details, the specifications, the answers to the questions people are actually asking.
If you’re curious about what’s happening on your own site, download SKAW on your Shopify site and take a look at what the bots are doing. SKAW has also recently added a Google Shopping button, as well as tracking for the new Google user agent — which covers visits from Google products like NotebookLM, where a user has instructed an agent to do something and that agent comes out to your site. All of that activity will be tracked.
These are genuinely interesting and uncertain times. If you have questions about where things are heading, or if you’re feeling confused by all of it — leave a comment. Everyone is confused right now. But if we all share what we’re seeing and learning, we’ll figure it out together. If you want to reach out and chat, you can contact me at jim@stewartmedia.biz.
The post You can scale content with AI! Please don’t. Here’s why. appeared first on StewArt Media.