How does Generative AI impact the 68-billion-dollar SEO industry? Google, Microsoft, and others claim that generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT will make online searches easier than ever. Instead of wading through a sea of URLs, consumers would be able to simply get an answer combed from the entire internet.
How does Generative AI impact the 68-billion-dollar SEO industry?
Concerns about the advent of AI-powered search engines include the lack of transparency about where information originates from, the possibility of “hallucinated” replies, and copyright difficulties.
However, I believe it has the potential to undermine the $68 billion search engine optimisation industry that corporations like Google have helped to develop.
For the past 25 years or so, websites, news outlets, blogs, and many others with a URL that sought to garner attention have utilised search engine optimisation, or SEO, to “convince” search engines to publish their information as high up in the results they deliver to users as possible. This has aided in driving traffic to their websites while also spawning an industry of consultants and marketers who advise on how to do so.
How does an online search work?
Someone looking for information on the internet starts her browser, navigates to a search engine, and enters relevant terms. The results are displayed by the search engine, and the user navigates through the links in the result listings until she discovers the appropriate information.
Online content producers utilise numerous search engine marketing tactics to grab users’ attention, such as search engine optimisation, paid placements, and banner displays. For example, a news website may hire a consultant to assist it in emphasising key phrases in headlines and metadata so that Google and Bing rank its material higher when a user searches for the most recent information on a flood or political issue.
How does generative AI affect the search process?
However, all of this is contingent on search engines attracting tens of millions of users to their websites. As a result, search engines must constantly work on their algorithms to improve the quality of their search results in order to earn user loyalty and online traffic.
That’s why, despite the risk of jeopardising a portion of their revenue, search engines have been keen to experiment with generative AI to improve search results. And this has the potential to dramatically alter the online search ecology.
This strategy has already been adopted or is being tested by all of the major search engines. Google’s Bard, Microsoft’s Bing AI, Baidu’s ERNIE, and DuckDuckGo’s DuckAssist are a few examples.
Rather than returning a list of organic and paid links based on the keywords or questions entered, generative AI will simply return a text result in the form of an answer. Assume you’re planning a trip to Destin, Florida, and you write “Create a three-day itinerary for a visitor” into the prompt. Instead of a slew of Yelp and blog posting links that necessitate a lot of browsing and reading, typing that into Bing AI will yield a full three-day schedule.
Users will have less incentive to browse through search result listings as the quality of AI-generated replies improves over time. By reading the AI-generated response to their query, they can save time and effort. In other words, it would allow you to avoid all of the sponsored links and costly attempts made by websites to increase their SEO scores, therefore rendering them ineffective.
When users begin to disregard sponsored and editorial result listings, the incomes of SEO consultants, search engine marketing consultants, and, ultimately, the bottom line of search engines themselves will suffer.
