Thoughts from Google's AI search announcement & potential impact
Aleyda Solís
International SEO Consultant & Founder at Orainti. Maker of the SEOFOMO + MarketingFOMO Newsletters and the Learningseo.io Roadmap. Sharing insights and resources about SEO & Growth Marketing.
1. Losers
Publications/sites focusing not only on facts & basic comparisons, but also reviews/guides to do X. We have a new Position Zero/Featured Snippets "on steroids" now for broader informational queries.
Eg. you'll get a list of best bikes for "5 mile commutes with hills" right there without needing to go to a review (affiliate) site; or "the best plan to run a 10K at the end of the summer for beginners" without having to go to the running/fitness site guide. Ouch.
The same with localized services searches: You won't need to go to "third party" aggregators/comparison sites if you have them compared right there.
More convenient for users, not so much on publications reliant on these for traffic and ads/affiliate revenue.
2. Winners
The actual business / commerce sites, whether product or service - from the way G is showing they will highlight them in the AI answer, they can become even more visible through the "messy journey" (via panels) vs the traditional blue links or map packs.
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The Strategic Move: Creators
But, How G will keep creators/publications incentivized to keep publishing information if there's less traffic referred to them via the traditional blue links?
The new "Perspectives" feature will likely play a strategic role here, to keep referring+benefiting *REAL* authors rather than 3rd party aggregators (G has become the meta-aggregator now anyway):
1) AI needs to keep learning from new original content
2) In an era of commoditized automated content: Incentivize "human" creators to keep going AND give "social" proof/connection to users fulfilling the type of need that had made users move to Instagram/TikToks to look for information too.
For Google this is a VERY smart strategic move. They achieve so much with this, and can ultimately regain the share they had lost vs social apps with younger generations.
Let's see how it finally plays out, looking forward to seeing what's coming! As SEOs we're ultimately "findability" specialists that should seek to provide visibility/traffic/conversions organically to businesses, independently of how they're displayed.
SEO Manager Vail Resorts
1yHow can we get analytics from AI search? Is this reported anywhere - notably these long tail queries. How about traffic journey, is there a way to understand brand presence in AI search results when users don't have to visit sites? Interesting the brand can show, but then they show linked articles on the side. I wonder how much impact that will have on the related articles they are showing with the result.
Digital marketing strategist, user experience focussed organic and paid search optimiser. Matching customer needs to multi-channel marketing and technology decisions.
1yGoogle says jump and instead of protecting client interests, we ask how high.
Awesome insight on creators! Though Spotify isn't without it's issues regarding artist compensation, it does a great job of introducing artists to me. I can't count the number of artists I've discovered because of them! I hope Google does the same.
SEO Consultant at Mozalami Montreal
1yNadir Marcos Mechaiekh Simon
I believe that the model presented by Google will still undergo significant changes from how it was initially presented. It will be very interesting to track website metrics in Google Analytics and understand how we should adapt to these new updates to find opportunities for on-page SEO optimization. Nevertheless, I believe that many users who have a greater appetite for consuming more in-depth content will continue to access third-party sites, and the traffic from these users will hold greater value. It may even increase the revenue for sites that deliver value to these information-hungry users. I don't share the belief that these massive update imply the death of SEO. On the contrary.