Search Engine Roundtable launches a screenshot tool for new SERP features

An SEO team spots a strange panel in a client's Google result and wants to know if the feature is actually new or whether the search press has already written about it. Until this week the answer meant waiting for a reply from Barry Schwartz, who has been covering Google and Bing for twenty-three years. Schwartz, the editor of Search Engine Roundtable, has put the lookup behind a new AI tool at seroundtable.com/is-it-new.

The tool takes a screenshot, a short description and an optional highlight of the part of the image that matters. It then classifies the image, looks for the feature in an index of every non-hero image Search Engine Roundtable has published since 2003, and returns the matches that fit best. A built-in form lets a user send a finding back for a manual review by Schwartz.

How the index is kept current

The site ran one pass with an AI model over every image on the site, built an index of them and now runs the same step daily so new stories are added, Schwartz writes. The index is what makes a match quick and keeps the running cost down. Several models were tested during a few weeks of trials, and the backend lets Schwartz switch between them while watching which one gives the better match on real queries.

Why it costs seven cents a run

The paywall is unusual: enter an email, get a code, land on the newsletter list, and unsubscribe when you like. Schwartz says that each run costs about seven cents, which is enough to make an open form worth protecting from bots. Daily per-user and site-wide caps also apply, and a visitor who hits either sees a notice in place of a result.

RustyBrick, the development firm Schwartz runs, built the tool. He credits two of its developers who took the idea on when he was joking about it, and he points to a RustyBrick post for the backend write-up.

What it will not do, as published

The tool matches against one site, Search Engine Roundtable's own archive. It does not scan Google's documentation, patents, Search Central posts or the wider SEO press, so a feature Google has described but Schwartz has not yet written about will not be found. Schwartz is explicit that the tool is a first version he wanted to release so readers can tell him what to tune, and that it is capped by day.

For an SEO or GEO team, the practical use is turning an open question into a one-upload lookup. "Have we seen this before, and when" has been Schwartz's email for two decades. The site has moved that single workflow into a form, which is the kind of job AI is well suited to: matching a new image against a long private archive without a human having to remember every past story.

Source

Is It New? AI Scan Tool by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable.