There’s a ton of AI hype at the moment and Google’s recent I/O conference saw the company demonstrating many new upcoming features within search.

These are still experimental features for now but are likely to be rolled out soon as Google and other search engines fight for AI dominance. What's the big deal?

ChatGPT

ChatGPT is trained on an already existing data set, rather than searching the web live, so Google is attempting to get one up on ChatGPT here. Yes, we have web search extensions for ChatGPT, but Google is doing that work for the users as a core part of their experience, and let’s face it most businesses will be more concerned with Google search for the near future, as it's such a huge part of customer's lives already.

Google’s Answer

You may have heard of Bard, essentially Google’s version of ChatGPT. The new announcements from I/O is basically to combine Bard with the search engine, known as Search Generative Experience.

It provides a new way of displaying information to searchers, providing more context and related information in a conversational style. You’ll also be able to follow up with more questions or prompts, much like a conversation.

The most clear benefit to the searcher, and clear concern to website owners; is that a lot of useful information is presented without the need to visit a site. Google has also said they are connecting their "shopping graph" to the system, meaning a huge amount of product data will be surfaced in the results too.

My thoughts and opinions:

Google has been using AI for a very long time, so a lot of the use of the phrase is hyped up quite a bit. Keep calm (for now).
It’s helpful for now to see AI as a new way of interacting with computers, rather than a monstrous machine that is going to end the world by building too many paperclip factories. That’s not to say ethics aren’t a concern, but most news sources focus on the Terminator angles rather than the good stuff, because that sort of thing gets more clicks. I could do a whole separate article on the subject but that’s for another time.
We already see a lot of information in search results that will discourage clicks. This has been around for 5+ years at least, and SEOs have dealt with it. We will continue to deal with it.
Where this may get interesting is in trying to measure these results. This is already messy; how do we know if our information is being read? Will we see SGE impressions in Google Analytics 4? Unclear currently.
On the last three points, the main difference with Generative AI is that it often doesn't give a source for the information. This is the biggest worry for content creation right now - how do we control how our content is cited? Possibly more lost clicks here.
The regular non-AI results aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, and businesses need to think about several factors that might give an indication of how they will be impacted, including:
- B2B vs B2C - B2C probably more likely to be impacted first
- Keyword intent and the length of the buying/purchase consideration cycle - longer buying journey impacted more
- Long tail vs short tail keywords - short tail & high intent transactional keywords are potentially likely to show more of the regular non-AI results because the journey is so much more simple
- How factual and impactful your information needs to be, particularly for your-money-your-life (YMYL) industries like health and finance
Similarly, most people will take quite some time to start searching in a way that will better utilise the AI features.
Google’s functionality is trained on results from the web. These will still need to come from some form of indexed content. Therefore content will still be very important, particularly unique, expert, authoritative and non-machine written content. Keep being better - provide realiable expertise in your industry.
Google is bringing what they call “perspectives” into search, including an algorithm update designed directly to better understand this. Basically this is surfacing opinions from real people from blogs, forums, social media and YouTube etc. It could become a lot more important for all types of businesses to use these channels as part of their digital strategies.

Ultimately it’s still early stages for these announcements, but I have a feeling Google are slightly rushing things following a dissapointing response to their initial Bard reveal. It could mean that SEO and Google Ads is impacted a lot sooner than we think, and in a potentially messy way. But rest assured, SEOs are responding quickly.