The AI Revolution in SEO: How Perplexity Labs and Google's Latest Updates Are Reshaping Our Industry

Welcome to another edition of SEOs Diners Club. I'm Mert Erkal, and after 15 years of navigating the ever-changing waters of SEO, I can confidently say we're witnessing the most significant transformation our industry has ever seen. The convergence of AI capabilities with traditional SEO practices isn't just changing how we work—it's redefining what it means to be an SEO professional.

Perplexity Labs: The Next-Generation AI Tool That's Changing Everything

The rapid evolution in the tech world continues to expand the role of artificial intelligence in our daily lives. Smart Personal Assistants have become an integral part of our existence, appearing in smartphones, smart home systems, and e-commerce platforms. These assistants are defined as AI-powered software that can provide users with accurate and fast responses, behave proactively, and learn from experiences. Through natural language processing capabilities, they can interact with users through voice, text, and visual means.

Today, the vast majority of professionals are turning to artificial intelligence tools to enhance their performance and automate routine tasks. According to research by Michael Page, 65% of professionals in European countries, including Turkey, use these tools for performance enhancement, while 49% use them for automating routine tasks.

For business professionals, marketers, and sales specialists who may struggle with intense data flow and complex projects, productivity tools like Perplexity Labs offer an important solution. This platform combines many capabilities under one roof, from comprehensive research to coding, from design to analysis, enabling users to implement their projects faster and more efficiently.

What is Perplexity Labs?

Perplexity Labs is an artificial intelligence productivity tool developed by Perplexity AI that gives users the feeling of having an entire team. Unlike traditional AI chatbots, Labs operates on the principle of working like "an extra pair of hands" rather than "an extra brain."

This tool is designed as an AI-powered workspace that can undertake complex projects from start to finish and create detailed reports, financial dashboards, and even applications within minutes. Perplexity Labs has the potential to reduce work that could take business professionals days to potentially minutes.

The most striking feature of Labs is its combination of advanced capabilities such as deep web crawling, code execution, instant design capabilities, and graphics and image creation on a single platform. The system remains transparent while working, offering users the opportunity to pause, skip, or improve each sub-task. This way, users can have full control over the process instead of waiting for a one-time response.

All created assets—from CSV-supported charts to HTML/CSS packages—drop into the "Assets" panel and become ready for instant download or editing.

Perplexity Labs is much more than just the "Deep Research" mode that provides comprehensive answers to in-depth questions. It's designed to create dynamic outputs using multiple tools like coding, headless browsing, and design. This approach also shows Perplexity's goal of going beyond being just a search engine.

How Perplexity Labs Works

Perplexity Labs is currently accessible only to Pro users. Getting started is quite simple: just click the light bulb icon in the chat box on Perplexity's website and write a prompt stating what you want done. The system conducts research and generates code within a few minutes. After completion, you can interact with the created mini-application through the "Application" option in the top panel.

This process is usually completed faster than 9 minutes, but some complex tasks can take up to 20 minutes. Labs' working principle is to bring together multiple agents: performing different operations like web crawling, PDF research, and writing code for specific tasks with a single prompt.

This "agentic" element is the fundamental difference that separates Perplexity Labs from traditional search engines and chatbots like ChatGPT. Labs not only provides information but also creates content, produces visuals, and presents them as structured reports, charts, and interactive dashboards.

Practical Applications for SEO and Digital Marketing Professionals

Perplexity Labs can significantly increase productivity in routine tasks for SEO agencies and digital marketing specialists. Here are the main advantages this tool offers:

Competitor Analysis and Trend Monitoring

In the constantly changing nature of digital marketing, closely monitoring trends and competitor strategies is critically important. Perplexity Labs quickly compiles and analyses current SEO and digital marketing trends from numerous sources, helping you understand your competitors' content strategies and ranking factors.

The biggest advantage of AI in trend analysis is its ability to process large datasets much faster than traditional methods. Perplexity Labs allows you to gain a broad perspective by bringing together information from different data sources. Determining market trends from social media data or predicting future demand trends with sectoral data can be performed much more effectively with this tool.

Labs automates your routine research work by scanning competitor sites or news sources at specific intervals and extracting current content summaries. This way, you can quickly analyse what topics your competitors are producing content on, which keywords they're targeting, and the performance of their content.

Content Research and Optimisation

Content marketing forms the foundation of digital marketing strategies. Perplexity Labs plays an important role in this process by accelerating and optimising content production.

Labs can collect information from different sources for keyword research and creating SEO-compatible texts, offering original content suggestions. Using machine learning and data analysis techniques, it conducts in-depth analysis on user search terms and trends. This helps you better understand your target audience's search behaviours and develop appropriate content strategies.

Determined keywords help content creators produce more effective headlines and texts. Through AI-powered automatic content optimisation, Labs contributes to making content SEO-compatible. With text and language analysis capabilities, it determines the emotional tone, keywords, and topics of texts, ensuring content reaches the target audience more effectively.

Automated Reporting and Visualisation

Reports presented to clients can be a time-consuming task for SEO agencies. Perplexity Labs significantly simplifies this process.

With Perplexity Labs, you can create SEO performance reports, charts, and dashboards and easily present these reports to clients. Labs can transform raw data (for example, a sales CSV file) into interactive graphs and web-based dashboards. These dashboards can automatically update themselves when the original file changes.

Labs present analyses and findings in visually attractive ways. It can create market share visualisations from complex financial data or market analyses. This helps clients understand complex data more easily while increasing the impact of reports.

One of Labs' most striking features is its ability to create interactive mini-applications and dashboards. By creating applications like "Global Economic Indicator Tracking Dashboard" or "AI Adaptation Dashboard," you can allow users to dynamically explore data by selecting different data points. This enables you to establish real-time interaction with your clients and make reports more dynamic.

Workflow Automation and Micro-Audience Marketing

Perplexity Labs offers groundbreaking capabilities not only in individual tasks but also in automating entire workflows and focusing on micro-audiences, which is the future of digital marketing.

Labs is an AI productivity agent that can manage complex projects from start to finish. It combines deep web crawling, code execution, instant design, and visual creation capabilities to automate workflows. It can help SEO agencies automate routine research and reporting tasks. For example, it can scan competitor sites or news sources at specific intervals and extract current content summaries.

The future of digital marketing is shifting from broad audiences like "ideal customer profile" (ICP) to personalised marketing targeting much more specific "micro-audiences." Perplexity Labs stands out as an invaluable tool in implementing this strategy.

Labs can take your basic customer profile and break it down into smaller, more targeted segments called "micro-audience cards." It can search external sources like LinkedIn job postings for specific signals like the KPIs or technology stack of companies you want to target. For example, it can find companies that don't use a CRM like HubSpot but use similar tools like Calendly and Slack, and determine in which areas these companies are hiring for new KPIs.

How Much Coding Should SEO Experts Know? Google Answers

Last week, Google's senior figures Martin Splitt and Gary Illyes answered the question "How much code should SEO professionals know?" Splitt and Illyes emphasise that writing code isn't mandatory, but understanding how the web works is critical. Based on my experience, this approach can be the key to strengthening communication between developers and SEO teams and minimising technical glitches encountered in the field.

Key Highlights

Google recommends that SEO specialists don't need deep coding skills, but should understand basic concepts like HTTP protocols, HTTPS, header tags, and JavaScript's effect on page functionality. The level of technical knowledge you'll need varies according to your role; while writing code isn't mandatory for content strategists, it becomes more important for those doing site migrations and technical audits. The disconnect between developer and SEO teams can lead to major "crawl budget" problems, such as a calendar plugin creating 100 million new URLs.

What You Can Do

Learn basic web protocols by understanding the differences between HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 and analysing page loading processes. Master JavaScript interaction by observing how dynamic content on pages is rendered and ensuring critical SEO elements (titles, metadata) aren't hidden by JS. Strengthen developer communication by planning regular meetings with technical teams to identify potential risks early. Evaluate your role—if you're focused on content or international SEO, you don't need deep technical knowledge.

Based on my experience from countless projects since 2009, I can say that the technical knowledge level should gradually increase in parallel with your area of expertise. Writing code isn't essential, but understanding the fundamentals of the web should be every SEO professional's weapon.

URL Inspection Tool Offers Deep SEO Control and Opportunities

Google Search Console's URL Inspection Tool now provides more data. Critical error diagnosis and performance optimisation opportunities for SEO specialists.

Google has gone beyond checking indexing status with the tool and further enriched the page health report. The new version offers detailed metrics such as crawl errors, rendering issues, and improved structured data warnings, making it possible to quickly identify and solve technical SEO problems.

Key Highlights

The URL Inspection Tool now provides detailed crawl error descriptions and page health scores. Users can see real-time page status with "Live Test," allowing the impact of code changes to be monitored instantly. Errors detected in schema markups are shown directly in the interface with solution suggestions provided. Proactive notifications come for HTTPS, mixed content, and other security issues, allowing you to make corrections without risking SEO performance and user trust.

What You Can Do

You can quickly fix errors by prioritising crawl errors through detailed descriptions. You can test your published updates instantly with live page testing, preventing potential indexing problems. You can detect faulty structured data tags and improve your schema markups for rich results. You can monitor HTTPS and content security errors to protect user trust and your rankings.

Google Personalises Top Stories with "Preferred Sources"

Google is testing allowing users to mark favourite publishers in the Top Stories section in the US and India through Search Labs, personalising news sources. What's the impact on SEO specialists?

This week, we learned that Google is testing a new feature called "Preferred Sources." Our experience shows that every small change in search engines requires us to reconsider visibility strategies.

Google offers an experimental feature that allows users to select the news sources they want to see in the Top Stories carousel. After joining Search Labs, users can mark their favourite publishers by clicking the star icon next to the headline. Content from marked sources appears more frequently alongside algorithmic results and is highlighted with a small star next to the title.

This test is currently limited to English-speaking users in the US and India. Google aims to personalise the news feed by considering user preferences beyond the algorithm. Additionally, a secondary carousel called "From your sources" can be displayed under the main Top Stories section.

This initiative is part of Google's effort to strike a balance between completely algorithmic discovery and user-focused personalisation. Although still in the experimental phase, this step shows that Google is exploring giving users more say in how information is presented without abandoning its ranking systems. If this feature is widely released, it may create a need to reshape visibility strategies in Google Search for publishers and marketers. Brands with passionate and directly engaged audiences may stand out through "Preferred Sources," while small or new ventures may have to resort to more creative methods in this area.

This Week in the AI World: Tools, Services and Tips

Artificial intelligence is leading innovations in digital marketing. Let's look together at the latest developments and applications that accelerate its impact on marketing.

• GPT-5's arrival in July is beginning a new era in artificial intelligence. It's now defined not just as a language model, but as an "artificial intelligence operating system" that works across all platforms. This version, which can process text, visual, video, audio, and code in a single model, has approached the level of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). In other words, thinking, analysis, production, and task execution capabilities are now together and at an expert level. While GPT-5 performs tasks where it's stated to perform better than human experts, it works like a digital assistant that remembers and continuously learns thanks to its personalised memory. This model, which works seamlessly across devices, can perform every task from video editing to data analysis simultaneously and without delay. In summary, the rules of the game are being rewritten not just for SEO, but for all digital work practices. Get ready: everything is about to change once more within a month.

• Sam Altman emphasises that ChatGPT is no longer just a "Google alternative" but has become much more. According to him, users use ChatGPT not just for information search, but for many different purposes such as decision making, writing, and generating creative ideas. Altman says that future search engines will become much more interactive, context-sensitive, and versatile than the "single box, single answer" model. This necessitates smarter content production focused on user experience and intent, not just ranking battles in SEO strategies.

• Claude's new memory feature adds continuity and contextual depth to conversations by remembering previous user interactions. Suggestions will become consistent, and follow-up reminders will be reliable; in long projects or content planning, it will be possible to continue from where you left off in each session. The Artifacts canvas enables creating mini-applications without requiring coding knowledge through a drag-and-drop interface. Quickly developing and testing prototypes from simple automations to complex workflows becomes easier. Application templates and customizable memory settings will make it easier to offer solutions suitable for every sector. These two innovations transform Claude from just a chat assistant into a powerful no-code development platform.

• YouTube is testing two experimental AI features to enhance search and content discovery. The AI-powered search slider offered to Premium subscribers shows prominent videos with short summaries in shopping, travel, and local queries. This tool, accessible on iOS and Android, enables quick discovery of relevant videos in queries like "best wireless headphones" and will be active until July 30th. The other innovation is a chat-based assistant opened to certain free accounts in the US, enabling users to ask questions and get suggestions about watched videos or test themselves in educational content. Content creators can become more visible in the AI slider, especially with commercial-focused videos. However, being in the testing phase with only limited user groups may delay widespread adoption. These are the first steps of YouTube's vision to improve discovery with AI.

• Disney and Universal made headlines with their copyright lawsuit against AI image generator Midjourney. In the June 26, 2025, episode of the Uncanny Valley podcast, the studio characterised Midjourney as "an infinite plagiarism pit" and argued that their iconic characters were reproduced without permission. Universal's participation further escalated the case. This process could clarify the boundaries of AI models using copyrighted content as training material. While Midjourney stands out with its broad user base and video features, it draws attention to metadata-free flow on the internet. The confrontation is poised to reshape the AI and copyright world.

Final Thoughts

As we navigate these transformative times in SEO and digital marketing, one thing becomes crystal clear: the professionals who embrace AI as a strategic advantage while maintaining their core expertise will thrive. The tools we've discussed today—from Perplexity Labs to Google's evolving features—aren't just conveniences. They're fundamental shifts in how we approach our craft.

After 15 years in this industry, I've learned that adaptation isn't optional. It's survival. The question isn't whether AI will change how we do SEO—it's how quickly we can evolve to lead this change rather than follow it.

The future belongs to the AI-driven SEO professional who combines technical understanding with strategic thinking and leverages these powerful tools to deliver unprecedented value to clients and businesses.

Until next week, keep innovating.

Mert Erkal
Founder, Stradiji
AI-Driven SEO Leader

Would You Like to Support My Newsletter?

I love sharing the latest developments and strategies in the SEO world with you. If you find my content useful, you can support me by buying me a coffee. ☕ Click on 'Buy Me a Coffee' to contribute to knowledge sharing. Let's achieve more together!

© 2022-2025 SEOs Diners Club by Mert Erkal