There’s a lot of discussion in SEO and digital marketing circles about how search is changing. In fact, when you look back at the history of search, you’ll notice that search is still changing – it always has.
However, the thing about the nature of how search is changing now is that it feels more seismic than previously and that’s because of generative AI.
I’ve mentioned previously how I thought that the dawn of ChatGPT 3.5 in November 2022 was the start of this current age. I’m not one for sensationalism but it really did feel like it erupted into the world, like Pandora’s box was opened, the genie was out of the bottle, or some other grand analogy. But when you look back, it felt like it at the time and, to me, it still feels like an incredible age is upon us.
Another important waymarker in the timeline of search was when Google were rumoured to have raised a “code red” not long after the public release of ChatGPT3.5. This was supposedly an internal memo where Google execs raced to find a counter to OpenAI’s release and launched Google Bard (Now renamed Google Gemini) and made a strategic point about being an AI-first business.
Of course, it’s well documented here that I felt a mix of fear and excitement. There was the immediate threat of inexperienced amateurs being able to match the work of those who had spent years honing their skills, which soon turned into the realisation that AI is still just a tool and in the hands of an expert, you can do greater things. And the fact that Google’s Webspam team eventually took action against scaled content abuse was both pleasing and validating.
And so search is still changing because we’ve gone heavily into the integration of AI. There are two paths in my opinion:
- The first is the use of generative AI itself as a search tool.
- The second is the use of generative AI in the search results.
But I’m going to talk about these in reverse order…
Generative AI in Search Results
If you’ve been searching on Google recently you can’t have helped but see the change in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
This is one of the areas of change where it’s been going on for years but it feels a lot more significant this time.
What I’m talking about is the fact that Google search results are no longer a list of ten blue links and they haven’t been for a long time. Of course, they added tabs for images, news, and blogs in the early years. But then the actual format of the results pages changed to match the type of search.
Now we have tabs for videos, short videos, shopping, jobs, forums, web, maps, flights, and books. I even found a knowledge panel for video games the other day that I’d not seen before.
But the big difference recently has been the AI Overviews in Google Search. Mainly for informational search intent, these results are, for want of a better word, content that Google has scraped and re-synthesised into its own snippets, much along the lines of featured snippets.
For example, if you ask “what’s a googlebomb?” you get this result…
This is a typical AI Overview result. You don’t need to go anywhere else, nor click a link to “read more” if this had only been a title and a description. The Google AI Overview should be everything you need. You can “read more” but it’s still within the snippet.
Links are included but purely as link icons. It’s a bit of a “magical mystery tour” because I have no idea where the destination pages are – Apart from the links in the sidebar, those in the snippet have zero indication of where they’ll send you. If click these links, we’re putting a lot of trust in Google, and I would rather see a tooltip with the URL of where I’m visiting just so that I don’t end up on a potentially unsafe website.
But this is one of the biggest changes to SERPs these days and it’s still “in beta”, so what’s in store next?
Gen AI as a Standalone Search Tool
Then there’s the fact that these AI tools are a search tool in themselves.
Because ChatGPT was seen as such a threat, that internal memo was raised at Google and soon after we saw their offering, Google Bard, as the supposed equivalent. It’s now been rebranded as Google Gemini. And it’s not just these two, we have Anthropic’s Claude, the mighty Perplexity, Mistral’s Le Chat, and the Chinese DeepSeek. There are probably plenty more, but these are my headliners.
Now search is still important but I myself have been substituting traditional search for pure AI tools recently. Only yesterday I was on the train to go see Aldershot Town FC in their FA Trophy match at Wembley. Not being a London native, and only usually going from Farnborough Main (FNB) to Waterloo (WAT), my journey followed one of my old routes of going to gigs after college from Richmond Station.
Purchasing return tickets from Richmond to Wembley Stadium on The Trainline app, I had to change at Waterloo then take the tube to Marylebone. But the app didn’t tell me specifically which underground line to take, so I downloaded the TFL app. It wasn’t very helpful. I then considered downloading an old tube map app I’d used previously when I realised I was running out of time and thought that maybe I should just ask AI.
So I opened Google Gemini, as I should have done from the start, and asked it which line from Waterloo would get me to Marylebone? The Bakerloo line, it told me. Job done.
And then we needed food and a beer – being regulars of The Queen Hotel in Aldershot, we asked AI for the nearest Wetherspoons to Wembley Stadium – We were quickly informed that it was JJ Moon’s, in Wembley High Road. Sorted. Again. When we jumped off the platform at Wembley Stadium we asked a friendly copper for directions and he pointed us in the right direction, to a pub full of Shots fans. Brilliant.
This is the perfect example of generative AI being better at answering my question than getting a link or using an app. Had I been more switched on I’d have been quicker at getting the answers too.
This is gen AI being the most useful search tool for this type of query.
Conclusion
Whilst I’m still an SEO consultant, doing the optimisations that matter for my clients, I have to continually bear in mind the ever changing nature of search. Whilst I can still get you in “the local pack”, the three-business Google Maps listing, in the organic, images, news, and shopping, I have to keep reminding myself that you, the user, may no longer be using search engines so much.
TikTok and Pinterest have been tagged as highly useful sources of information for some users, so we need to continually think about how getting into the AI results will help us and the users. I’ve landed websites and links in the AI Overviews, but these get more brand visibility than clicks. And generative AI is apparently “stealing” around 34% of Google’s informational intent search results, so we have to accept that search is still changing.
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