Will Google’s AI Search KILL SEO?

Key Takeaways

so Google just announced the biggest update to its search engine in forever it puts generative AI front and center in its search results so in this video we're going to look at what this new search engine is how it works and most importantly how your marketing both organic search and paid search needs to adapt to this new technology there's also a bonus second announcement which really has flown under the radar for a lot of people because the generative AI stuff took so much attention but how Google announced this separately it would have been quite significant so we're going to look at that as well let's do this all right so since November when chat gbt launched Google has been kind of playing catch up in the world of AI against predictions of people moving their searches over to chat GPT and then Bing chat when it integrated with chat GPT as well so in Google's developer conference this week all eyes were on what they were going to do with this new search engine to take that market share back and to maintain Google's crushing dominance in the world of cert they did not disappoint so Google is going to be using his latest pan to large language model to build generative AI answers right into the search results and it demoed it for a wide range of different types of searches including informational commercial questions about fitness and health comparison searches it looks super exciting so let's break this thing down and take a look at a typical search results page so the question here is what's better for a family with kids under three and a dog Bryce Canyon or archers now this is a pretty complex query there's a whole bunch of sub questions that you would have to ask if you were trying to answer this question on Google today for example you might say search for something like Bryce Canyon kids under three Bryce Canyon dog friendly archers kids under three archers dog friendly what Google is trying to demonstrate is that their generative AI answers can answer really complex questions like this with all sorts of comparisons and sub questions all built into one answer so right up at the top here we have this generative AI is experimental section it doesn't actually have a label other than telling you that the genitive AI is experimental this has a green background it seemed like shopping questions had a blue background and then there was some restaurant ones that had a yellow background so not entirely sure on the coloring here but Google did say that this will change over time this text up at the top here isn't reference from any one of these particular websites this is generated by Google's large language model and this leads us to our first piece of confusion because understandably people have been assuming that the websites that are linked here are the ones that are being referenced in this answer actually that is not the case Google said repeatedly that these websites are ones that corroborate the answer you can also click to expand this generative AI View and that will give you more websites that corroborate the statements made by the generative Ai and Google is very careful to say that by clicking on these websites it allows you to dig deeper what they are not saying is that the text in the generative AI answer is taken from any of those websites now you can also see underneath the generative AI answer you have a bunch of buttons and the option to ask follow-up questions so this works kind of like Bing chat where you can either click one of the pre-selected follow-up options or you can write your own follow-up question and it continues in a conversational style so you don't have to reiterate your previous search Google knows that if you said for example which one would be better in November that you are referring to your past search and it will continue that conversation in a natural way alright let's address the elephant in the room so one of the criticisms about generative Ai and Google in particular over the years has been that it has tried to keep Searchers on the Google page rather than allowing them to go through to websites Publishers in particular have been very really happy Progressive Google changes which have meant that more of their content is displayed directly in the search results and I have got to say this criticism is reaching a crescendo right now you can totally see that in a search like this which may have yielded five or six different website visits previously potentially a Searcher is going to get all of their answer in one go and there might be no website business at all so I think we should expect that for some informational searches traffic to websites will definitely drop now Google was Keen to try and emphasize throughout the demo that people would still be clicking on websites but I think it remains to be seen how much traffic websites will be getting from this new generative AI component and whether that will replace the drop that is going to be being caused by loss of traffic to websites I think we've got to be completely honest here the whole point of Google unveiling this is so that people don't have to visit websites so to expect website traffic to stay the same is ludicrous one massive question of course is what types of searches will bring about these generative AI responses whilst Google hasn't provided a definitive answer on this and we suspect the answer might change over time based on user feedback there have been some specific comments from Google about your money or your live searches Liz read VP of search at Google was talking to search engine land and said that Google is trying to be careful with this new version of Google Search which will show answers for safer queries they gave the example of showing an answer to a question about giving a child Tylenol because it's in the medical space and Google has been careful about your money or your live topics for a long time now recognizing that the danger of giving an incorrect answer to a question like this could be catastrophic Google is also trying not to provide generative AI answers to questions where there isn't a huge amount of information about the topic so it would have a low confidence in those answers I think one of the most intriguing types of search that Google demoed were product focused commercial searches for example this one here this search for good bike for Five Mile commute with hills bought up Google shopping listings these are being pulled from the Google shopping graph if you don't know about Google shopping graph this basically takes shopping feeds that are fed into Google's merchant center and combines this with AI powered Insight that Google gets from scanning the web looking at which retailers particular products are stocked and then of course taking the stock availability and up-to-date pricing from that Merchant feed this looks like a really important potential marketing channel for e-commerce businesses to have the AI actually recommend your products for sale based on the user's specific criteria like this will be incredibly powerful of course it remains to be seen exactly what the ranking factors are to have your products recommended in the shopping feed like this but if it's anything like regular organic shopping listings then it's going to be making sure your feed quality is good making sure that your products are attractively titled include their target keywords and titles and descriptions have a good number of reviews and positive reviews preferably as well and that those reviews contain your target keyword and of course building links to your product pages through things like digital PR okay so that's commercial search and that's also product search what about ads ad revenue is about 80 of Google's total revenue and search revenue is about 60 of Google's total ad Revenue so obviously it's not going to be leaving ads behind anytime soon well fear not people there will still be Google ads and Google will be building ads into this sge or search generative experience that they're calling it from the accompanying PDF from this release Google says search ads will continue to play a critical role they serve as additional source of information and revenue for us while helping people discover millions of businesses online with sge which is search generative experience what terrible name search ads will continue to appear in dedicated ad slots throughout the page in this new experience advertisers will continue to have the opportunity to reach potential customers along their search Journeys will test and evolve the ads experience as we learn more of course when this search was made you saw the sponsored listings were right at the top of the page and I think it'll be very straightforward to get regular Google shopping ads listed in this section here it really wouldn't be too much trouble it feels like a very natural fit for this product okay before we move into the second announcement then what does all of this mean for businesses and how should marketers respond to this new technology to make sure that we're continuing to be recommended and found by Searchers online what do we do well I think the first thing is not to get too emotional about the fact that Google is going to be keeping more searches in the search results page this has been their trend for a long time featured Snippets knowledge panel all of this is designed to keep you on Google Google doesn't want to send people through to your website if it can possibly help it this Tech is clearly no exception and we should expect to see organic traffic drop particularly for very informational searches but don't panic there are two possible ways to counter this firstly by making sure that your website is one of the ones referenced up at the top here if this generative AI sec action becomes really popular and people tend to use it a lot then it's not unreasonable to expect that these websites are going to see some fairly significant traffic volumes because there are only three they're not competing against all of the Blue Links in the regular search page they're really prominently displayed at the top against only two competitors of course we don't yet know for sure what the ranking factors will be to get a site listed here but Google has said throughout the promotion of this new search engine that they are building on the ranking and security factors that they've been working on since the start of Google search so it sounds like they're using very similar or the same criteria as they always have done in particular they mentioned wanting to recommend high quality and trustworthy sources so we can assume that having good quality links from high Authority reputable websites is going to be a big factor for getting your website featured here digital PR is going to continue to be incredibly important we also know that it's going to be really important to continue publishing very very high quality content and in particular content that demonstrates your experience in the topic that you're writing about this has been a consistent thread through a lot of Google's updates recently where they want to prioritize content that shows direct experience of what they're talking about whether this is through the helpful content update or the product reviews updates or even the update I'll tell you about in a minute of course these things are just good SEO practice this has been modern SEO for quite a while get high Authority links and build amazing content that demonstrates your expertise so in that sense the rules haven't changed the other way to counteract any drop in traffic is if you are product focused business like an e-commerce or getting your products featured in these organic shopping listings could be very powerful if the AI is helping your customers make their product choices you want to make sure that your products are standing the best chance of being recommended but again the rules here aren't any different from doing good product focused SEO over the last few years if you want help with this by the way the team here at exposure ninja have a free website and marketing review that we do to help your business get discovered by people who are looking for you on tools like Google's new search engine all you need to do is go to exposureninja.com forward slash review to request your free review if you're eligible you'll receive it usually within two to three working days as a video is killer so go do it now with all the understandable hype about Google's generative AI in search engines it was all too easy to miss another announcement that Google made this week and this is called perspectives they even gave us a little demo so in this search somebody has typed how to make friends in a new city they've seen a perspectives filter and clicked it and this has given them not the regular website Blue Links that you might be used to but instead a tiled page of long and short form videos and user generated content from discussion sites forums and social media sites this seems very much focused on creators and user generated content which is kind of of interesting because it's like the opposite of the generative AI stuff we'll come back to that in a second as well as showing this under the perspectives filter Google is also going to be building a perspective section into its main search results which will show you some more of this content why why is Google doing this they say helpful information can often live in unexpected or hard to find places a comment in a forum thread a post on a little-known blog or an article with unique expertise on a topic our helpful content ranking system will soon show more of these hidden gems in search particularly when we think they'll improve the results okay so how does your business use this well if this is relevant to the sort of products or services that you sell making sure that you have users on tick tock on YouTube shorts posting video reviews of your products sharing their direct experience could be a great way to get your business recommended here whilst it's unlikely that you're going to be getting your own content ranked in this section actually having some of your users or customers contact getting ragged here could have even more credibility you can imagine can't you going back to the best commuter bikes search from earlier how compelling would it be to click on this perspectives Tab and see a few people recommending the same bike over and over again giving really great reasons for it and sharing their direct experience of this product love it of course it remains to be seen how often Google will use this feature how prominently it will position the perspective section in its regular search results and how well it will promote this little perspectives filter but I actually think this could be really important here's why as more and more of our searches are answered by somewhat vanilla sounding generative AI there will be searches for sure where people want a more human experience this to me looks like Google's response to the trend with young people to search on Tick Tock where they just want to get someone's perspective they want to get a personal opinion on something so in some ways this is like the antidote to the generative AI feature that they roll out and it'll be really interesting to see how the comparative popularity of each of these features changes over time as people get used to them I think this could be a key Battleground for the future so if this type of thing is relevant for your business the key Focus areas are making sure that your customers are posting user generated experiences and reviews on particularly short form video sites like YouTube shorts and Tick Tock also posting about you on Reddit quora those types of discussion boards q a sites and posting first-hand reviews on social media these are the sites that Google wants to push in this perspective section so you need to make sure you're ready and have some visibility there so what do we think about Google's new search engine features is Google back in the game well investors certainly think so look at the share price it took a big beating when chat gbt was announced they took another beating when Bing chat was announced on the same day that Google's Bard gave an error in its results although it saw a big jump around the time of gpt4 the jump that it saw after these features were unveiled demonstrates that investors think that this is Google reasserting itself reasserting its domination in Search and continuing his Monopoly as much marketer I've got to say I'm inclined to agree I think the features that Google are rolling out of course as long as the answers are good quality do enough to reassert itself as the main place that people go when they want to get answers to their questions there were other announcements in the developer conference which show that they are really pushing forward with their AI functionality and I think this is the play that Google needed to make to assert its dominance now what does this mean for businesses well all of these updates point to SEO being more important than ever with Google re-establishing itself as the place to start your question or your query or your product search getting found in those organic results whether in the generative AI section whether in the product features or even in the regular listings is more important than ever because we're going to be seeing more people pouring into Google as these features are rolled out let me know what you think of Google's new AI features in the comments and if you want to know how to fight back against a chatbot stealing your traffic check out this video thanks for subscribing and I'll see you next