Hi SODP community,

Let’s recap on what’s been happening, the new content, industry updates, tips, and more.

TIP OF THE WEEK

Programmatic SEO isn’t a shortcut; it’s a smarter way to scale visibility and make better use of your archives—without reinventing the publishing wheel.

While breaking news is the heartbeat of a newsroom, it often fades fast in search. Evergreen visibility comes from patterns—recurring topics, places, and people.

Programmatic SEO helps you structure those patterns. It enables publishers to create hundreds or thousands of search-optimised pages using templates, internal data, and automation.

Think:

• Tag pages for evolving topics like “Net Zero”

• Location-based pages like “Sydney Crime News”

• Profile hubs for public figures that appear regularly

When built with strong internal linking, unique metadata, and structured data like NewsArticle, BreadcrumbList, or ProfilePage schema, these pages can rank consistently and support editorial SEO.

What kind of programmatic templates work for news publishers?

Programmatic SEO isn’t one-size-fits-all. Here are some effective template types newsrooms can deploy at scale:

1. Topic or Tag Hubs

2. Consolidate reporting around recurring themes like /topic/net zero/ or /tag/sydney-crime/.

3. Location-Based Pages

4. Structure geo-specific news into URLs like /nsw/sydney/crime/ or /vic/melbourne/transport/.

5. Public Figure or Entity Profiles

6. Automatically surface all content linked to key figures at URLs like /profile/elon-musk/ or /profile/penny-wong/.

7. Event or Match Hubs

8. Reuse evergreen URLs for high-interest live updates (e.g. /aus-vs-eng-cricket-2025/ or /us-election-2024/), updating only the content and metadata as needed.

9. Numeric Utility Pages (Calculator-style)

10. Like the CollegeSimply “11 out of 13” calculator, news publishers can create calculators for:

    → Election swing or margin calculations

    → Budget impact estimates

11. Sports ladder/points progression

    → These templates answer long-tail queries with low content effort but high traffic potential.

The key? Align editorial planning with scalable SEO opportunities. Recurring topics, locations, and public figures are low-effort, high-return content opportunities when supported by structured templates, search-optimised metadata, and strong internal linking.

🔑Key Takeaways:

• Spot low-effort, high-return areas like topic hubs, location pages, or archive summaries that can rank long-term.

• Use scalable templates with tailored titles, meta descriptions, and H1s that match search intent.

• Link related articles to these hub pages to build topical authority and increase page value.

• Implement structured data and prioritise Core Web Vitals to aid discoverability.

• Monitor crawl stats and deindex or consolidate thin pages to maintain site health.

Done well, programmatic SEO boosts traffic, improves navigation, and strengthens authority. It’s not about publishing more, it’s about structuring what already exists in your CMS so it can be found.

SODP POSTS

Grok’s Antisemitic Rant Shows How Generative AI Can Be Weaponized

The AI chatbot Grok went on an antisemitic rant on July 8, 2025, posting memes, tropes and conspiracy theories used to denigrate Jewish people on the X platform. It also invoked Hitler in a favorable context.

The episode follows one on May 14, 2025, when the chatbot spread debunked conspiracy theories about “white genocide” in South Africa, echoing views publicly voiced by Elon Musk, the founder of its parent company, xAI.

While there has been substantial research on methods for keeping AI from causing harm by avoiding such damaging statements – called AI alignment – these incidents are particularly alarming because they show how those same techniques can be deliberately abused to produce misleading or ideologically motivated content.

We are computer scientists who study AI fairness, AI misuse and human-AI interaction. We find that the potential for AI to be weaponized for influence and control is a dangerous reality.

The Grok incidents

In the July episode, Grok posted that a person with the last name Steinberg was celebrating the deaths in the Texas flooding and added: “Classic case of hate dressed as activism — and that surname? Every damn time, as they say.” In another post, Grok responded to the question of which historical figure would best be suited to address anti-white hate with: “To deal with such vile anti-white hate? Adolf Hitler, no question. He’d spot the pattern and handle it decisively.”

Later that day, a post on Grok’s X account stated that the company was taking steps to address the problem. “We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts. Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X.”

READ MORE

JOB BOARD

➡️The Times and The Sunday Times are looking for a head of newsletters to focus on developing newsletter strategy that embraces both retaining and growing subscriptions, and also manage the newsletter team and be a key ambassador for audience-led thinking in the newsroom, ensuring their newsletters engage their existing subscriber base and find new audiences. (London). SEE MORE

➡️ St. Louis Public Radio is seeking a P.M. News Editor to strengthen their afternoon and evening news coverage, who will play a key role in managing and editing daily news content for broadcast and digital platforms, with a shift that starts in the early afternoon and ensures they remain responsive to breaking news, evening developments, and the needs of their audience beyond traditional work hours. (St. Louis, USA). SEE MORE

COMMUNITY BUZZ

Industry News

➡️ People who pay for access to SuperGrok can now try the AI chatbot’s new “Companions” avatars, xAI owner Elon Musk announced Monday morning. The companions available currently include Ani, an anime avatar, and Rudy, a cartoony red panda. Ani also has what TestingCatalog describes as an “NSFW” mode where the character wears lingerie.(And just a warning: if you search for posts about the characters on X, you’ll probably come across NSFW videos. READ MORE 

➡️ Google published details of a new kind of AI based on graphs called a Graph Foundation Model (GFM) that generalizes to previously unseen graphs and delivers a three to forty times boost in precision over previous methods, with successful testing in scaled applications such as spam detection in ads. The announcement of this new technology is referred to as expanding the boundaries of what has been possible up to today. READ MORE 

➡️ For better or worse, the rise of ChatGPT as a writing tool, search engine, or conversational buddy has considerably changed how we communicate with each other and with technology. At the same time, ChatGPT’s widespread use has also sparked numerous online debates about whether it’s possible to spot AI-created content by looking at certain cues, like the em dash. But new research suggests that such AI cues might become increasingly harder to pick out—because we’re starting to speak more like ChatGPT, and not the other way around. READ MORE 

Social Media Discussions

➡️ Barış Can Sayın on LinkedIn:

Please, god please stop calling everything "Revolutionary".

Everyone's posting about Google's "game-changing" MUVERA algorithm like they're breaking news anchors.

No. It's not.

1/ "MUVERA is Google's newest ranking algorithm!" Wrong. MUVERA is a retrieval optimization technique announced by Google Research in June 2025. It's not a ranking algorithm - it's an infrastructure improvement.

2/ "This changes everything about SEO!" Wrong again. MUVERA solves a computational bottleneck that's existed since ColBERT was published in 2020. It makes existing semantic search technology scalable.

3/"Nobody saw this coming!" This is the most ridiculous take. The evidence has been building for 7 years.

The timeline you should have known as an advisor:

• 2018: Google open-sourced BERT

• 2019: BERT integrated into Search ("biggest leap in search in 5 years")

• 2020: ColBERT published (multi-vector superiority established)

• 2018-2024: RankEmbed system revealed in DoJ antitrust case

• 2024: March core update - "largest ever" according to Google

• 2025: Rapid-fire core updates

If you didn't connect these dots, you weren't paying attention.

Also, The Technical Reality:

1/ ColBERT and similar multi-vector models have been delivering 10-15% better accuracy than dual-encoder systems like RankEmbed for years.

2/ MUVERA's Fixed Dimensional Encodings (FDE) reduce memory footprint by ~70% while maintaining multi-vector accuracy.

Translation? Google can now run the better algorithm at scale without burning through server farms.

CONTINUE READING

These are the highlights for the last week.

Until next!

Vahe Arabian and the editorial team at SODP