Google's Conversational AI Chatbot in Search and Implications for SEO
Big news - Google is releasing their own conversational AI search product chatGPT-like integration w/ Google search.
Personalization through AI chatbots in search makes the most natural next step for Google. People already ask follow-up questions after their initial search, and leveraging personalization allows for a deeper, more customized experience based on the context from your earlier question. It also makes sense for them to not only defend themselves as the search market leader after Bing sees boosts in the search market after Bing GPT integration, if only to sustain their ad revenue. This is a natural progression for them since they’ve been leveraging AI with NLP and ML in searches for years, with a focus on conversational search. They were sort of the OG in this realm, even if their answers and search results were super clunky. I also have no doubt that once Google Magi is accessible to everyone, it will be the leader in search AI industry.
Magi won’t be released across all search categories, and Google hasn’t yet released what categories would be, beyond eluding to products and shopping. I don’t see it completely replacing the search results with informational intent, especially in issue advocacy or political campaigns (at least I hope) due to the need for guard rails with disinformation, and as user behavior shifts away from the first result as users discern which result best fits their need.
Does this mean the end of SEO? No. SEO isn’t dead - it’s evolving. With or without the 10 blue links, the point and practice of SEO is just to write useful content that gets noticed and served by engines. If anything, it will be more important than ever to be competitive in search and content. However, it could have implications on publishers and small businesses by not delivering traffic to sites from AI answers. In my opinion, in order to compete effectively, smaller organizations and businesses will require greater effort on content and ad spend in order to compete effectively.
Totally speculating here, but the rollout of Google Magi could bring with it greater availability to more nuanced contextual data for ad placements. With more hyper relevant and contextual answers, this could mean that advertisers receive data to categorize and quantify the contextual variances of searches to improve ad experiences and hyper-relevancy. Within reasonable expectations, of course, given Google’s tendencies to hide some data due to privacy.
Approach with caution…
This could have negative implications on publishers and small businesses that rely on Google to deliver traffic to their websites to pay their bills. We’ve seen this before with Google updates and SERP rollouts, so apologies if I’m a little skittish about it. Google did at least acknowledge the need to be thoughtful about how this affects publishers. And if there’s any consolation, early results from Bing have actually shown to have sizeable boosts to publisher sites that were referenced in highlighted results.
Two things can be true. I’m still very excited about AI and it’s potential to augment human capacity and enhance our lives, and I recognize this revolutionary moment and absolutely see the opportunity for all of us to evolve, AND this is one area where I’m cautious.