Embracing GenAI-Powered Search — Will Companies Have to Rethink Marketing Strategies?
The author's views are entirely their own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
The short answer is yes.
Businesses that rely on Google Search to bring traffic and revenue to their websites are always trying to keep up with how their results are shown or where they come up in the search results. Generative AI and AI chatbots are reshaping how people search and find information, challenging traditional SEO strategies.
It's been over a year since OpenAI's ChatGPT, backed by Microsoft, burst onto the scene. This created a frenzy of interest in generative AI (GenAI) capabilities from consumers, the media, and venture capital (VC) investors and put the largest search engine, Google, on red alert. This has led to Google and Microsoft going all in with generative AI as a core to their future of search.
The macroeconomic conditions for VC funding in 2023 had tightened for everything except AI-related startups, which received $68.7 billion in 2023, according to PitchBook data reported by Techcrunch. This forced Google to announce several new AI-powered products, including its chatbot named Bard, and launch its new AI answer-powered search engine called Search Generative Experience (SGE) in beta.
So, a question that has been on my mind for the last few months as I have been playing around with these AI tools: What is going to happen to startups, small businesses, and publishers who rely on search traffic from Google when they decide to roll this SGE out officially to users worldwide?
On December 12, Gartner put out several marketing predictions for 2024, one of which was about organic search traffic:
"By 2028, brands' organic search traffic will decrease by 50% or more as consumers embrace generative AI-powered search."
This rapid adoption of GenAI in search engines will significantly disrupt chief marketing officers (CMOs) ability to harness organic search to drive sales. They suggested that companies that rely on SEO should consider shifting resources to test other marketing channels to diversify.
Is this prediction accurate? According to Gartner, it came from a small survey of under 300 consumers. While the ultimate impact on organic traffic revenue remains uncertain as AI search evolves, it is on business owners' minds.
In a recent Business Insider article about the rise of AI-generated content and the problems it is creating, Gary Survis, an operating partner at a VC firm, Insights Partners, told BI,
"AI-powered search experiences such as this may lead to traffic declines of as much as 25% for many websites."
Will this mean that large brands will get all the search traffic, such as marketing consultant AJ Kohn has suggested is already happening? When you search for a topic in Google's new SGE, it will display an AI-generated answer summary and cite the top 3 websites it used to generate that answer above the traditional ten blue links search results. The SGE experience feels like it is ranking for a Featured Snippet, AKA position zero. Still, instead of one answer, the AI parses snippets of content from several sites to show a comprehensive answer to a search query.
According to Search Engine Land columnist Julia McCoy’s perspective,
“Contrary to popular belief, this means SGE won’t steal your traffic. If anything, it’s giving publishers more ranking opportunities.”
It is too soon to know since SGE is still an experimental technology.
So, as these technologies advance, people continue to use AI answer chatbots such as Perplexity, Anthropic's Claude, ChatGPT, and Bard to find answers. How should startups and companies prepare for this new landscape of how people search for information, blending personalized results and conversational interactions?
How should you rethink your marketing strategies?
Do GenAI-powered chatbots know your company?
Companies should start experimenting with these AI tools and ask questions such as:
How many of my brand's customers are moving to chatbot search?
And how visible is my brand in AI search?
I recently found an interesting post by Wil Reynolds of Seer Interactive, which posed the question to businesses:
"If chat search becomes the standard tomorrow – how would you determine how big the market is, my visibility in that market, and the impact of that visibility on leads and sales?"
Ann Smarty, co-founder of Smart Marketing, stated in her newsletter that when people search ChatGPT or alternatives, they should think about,
"How likely would your brand or product come up as a solution or answer to the question?"
I recommend submitting targeted test prompts to your chosen AI tool, such as:
What do you know about [My Company]
List the best [Your product or service]
What or who are my most successful competitors?
What do you know about [Competitor name]?
Which company is better: [CompetitorName] or [My Company]?
Take all of your top keyword phrases and reword them as questions in prompts
Playing around with these AI chatbots represents a crucial initial phase for gauging the tool's comprehension of your company and its positioning amongst rivals.
Perplexity, the AI search engine app, reportedly grew to 10 million monthly active users (MAU) in less than a year and resolved over half a billion queries in 2023. If I type in the search question "What is the best CRM software?", it lists five solutions as the answer. It does cite web link sources.
Will your brand be shown as the solution when someone types in questions or keywords related to your products or services? According to an FAQ article about how it ranks answers, it says "Perplexity AI uses AI technology to gather information from multiple sources on the web and provide responses to users' questions; it also uses a Bing-based retrieval system for verifying the answers." So, optimizing for Bing search seems to be relevant again.
If I conduct the same search question as prompted by Bard, "What is the best CRM software?" Google Bard comes back first, stating there's no single "best" CRM software that fits all businesses perfectly. The best option for you depends on several factors.
Conduct a SWOT analysis: What are the risks of SGE for my business?
It's more than just small businesses or startups nervous about how these new technologies will affect their businesses.
News publishers who rely heavily on Google for traffic are also sounding the alarm about the potential threats of Google's AI-powered search product being tested.
The Wall Street Journal reported that soon after ChatGPT debuted, The Atlantic compiled potential threats that generative AI posed to the 166-year-old publication. They ranked Google integrating this groundbreaking technology as the foremost risk. The Atlantic heavily relies on Google searches for website traffic. They estimated that Google's adoption of AI search could substantially reduce clicks to their site. Around 40% of The Atlantic's online visitors originate from Google queries that surface article links, which users then click on to read more. The internal task force estimates that AI-powered search would supply complete answers directly on Google without needing to visit The Atlantic over 75% of the time. That's just one example of how many other businesses could face similar outcomes.
Kevin Indig, a respected enterprise SEO marketer, suggests using a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), a risk management tool that could be used to determine the strategic impact of a public SGE launch. I suggest reading the article. It goes into detail, but a few examples he mentions are:
Engaged communities, proprietary data, and free tools can be strengths.
Slow execution, generic content, and low brand sentiments can be weaknesses.
E-commerce, local shopping, LLM apps, or videos can be opportunities.
Hallucinations, personalization, and missing tracking data can be threats.
Indig also points out that the risk factors will depend on many factors, including the type of business model: e-commerce, local business, SaaS, affiliate, publisher, consumer, etc.
Brands should involve subject matter experts to build topical authority
As AI chatbots grow conversationally fluent, your brand should focus on creating content that showcases authentic human perspectives rather than generic keyword-focused, tactically optimized pages.
Companies should engage subject matter experts (SMEs) alongside real users and influencers in their content creation so that Google views them as a trusted authority.
In this new AI answer search experience, Google may value E-E-A-T signals, which stands for “experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness,” more than ever. Julia McCoy stresses that first-person narratives are more important than ever and suggests “using conversational language and addressing follow-up questions naturally within the text.”
Become the go-to resource in your industry
More than simply targeting keywords is needed to thrive in Google's SGE. It would help if you become the ultimate authority in your niche, the go-to resource for all relevant things.
The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the world's largest HR professional membership organization, does an excellent job branding itself as a trusted source of everything related to HR and workplace topics.
Conclusion
Ultimately, every executive wonders whether SGE will launch officially and when. Organizations must adapt to AI or risk extinction as with previous technological revolutions. With Google's SGE still in its early stages, marketers and SEOs are in a phase of active exploration, trying to understand its full potential and impact.
Mr. Indig said in his SWOT analysis article that he thinks they will keep SGE in beta until OpenAI, Bing, or a new player puts something on the map that could endanger Google Search as it stands today and continue to develop and refine SGE behind the scenes to have it "ready."
Recently, Google announced that it is not ready to release SGE out of the lab, which Search Engine Journal reported, and gave a few theories about why.
So, as to the burning question, will companies have to rethink marketing strategies as consumers continue to embrace GenAI-powered search?; I think so, and marketers need to stay ahead of changes in technology and how consumers adopt them.
What could happen is that instead of rolling out the entire SGE experience we see in beta, Google could release it gradually by testing more minor features directly in the SERPs.
The bottom line is that if people continue to get used to chatting with AI search assistants such as Bard or ChatGPT, then it’s essential for marketers to track and keep up with the next frontier of search.
