A new report shows that 84% of Google search queries will show a result powered by Search Generative Experience, the tech giant’s artificial intelligence-powered search engine, which will disrupt huge amounts of search traffic from brands and publishers.
Search engine optimization marketing firm BrightEdge, which sells SEO expertise, has been tracking patterns with SGE results since last fall (when Google introduced SGE), measuring more than 1,000 keywords across nine industries including healthcare, e-commerce, and business-to-business. technology, among others.
“The brands that are performing well, most of their traffic comes from organic search,” said Travis Tallent, VP of SEO at Brainlabs. “This is because [SGE] it’s a big thing If you implement a new way that affects the traffic coming to the site, it has dire consequences for the performance of an entire business.”
SGE is available to people from the USA, India and Japan to participate, but Google hasn’t fully implemented the new search experience. Analyzes search context, sentiment, intent and nuance to provide fact-based opinion. In response, companies are preparing for this shift, reworking their SEO game beyond keywords to ownership of valuable information and integrating siled teams to streamline business operations.
SGE, which was previously scheduled to go live in December 2023, uses two formats for queries within the AI experience: the collapse format and the activation format.
The collapse format (which appears 16% of the time, according to BrightEdge analysis) gives people a snapshot of the AI-generated result, where people can click a button to expand and occupy the most of the screen. While the opt-in format (which appears 68% of the time) is presented via a banner and asks people to decide if they’d like to explore AI results for their queries, initiating a more conversation
Michael Robbins, senior director of paid search at Exverus Media, doubts Google will roll out SGE widely without making inventory available to advertisers or a method to optimize paid ads for those generative experiences.
“Search ads make up 80% of Google’s revenue,” Tallent said. “Google hasn’t figured out how it plans to monetize it effectively without affecting brands.”
Beyond the search for organic brands
BrightEdge’s testing revealed that in some cases, such as when “Nike” was searched, SGE prominently displayed results related to the demand between Nike and StockX. (Nike filed a lawsuit against the reseller platform, accusing it of selling counterfeit shoes and maintaining an unreliable authentication process.)
“Having this show up when you search for Nike is a big change,” said Jim Yu, CEO and co-founder of BrightEdge. “It attracts a lot more [brands’] dealers on top of the AI experience.”
Managing brand searches from an organic perspective, which used to be simple, now requires brands to carefully consider their appearance in both branded and unbranded searches.
“Most marketers have taken this for granted for a long time,” Yu added.
Impact on site traffic
As brands look forward to widespread adoption, about 75% of Brainlabs customers have asked about SGE in the past six months. The agency conducted tests on SGE in different verticals, including B2B customers and e-commerce, last December.
In one case, for a B2B SaaS (software as a service) brand with a market cap of over $10 billion, Brainlabs exposed 70% of the brand’s keywords with “informational” user intent to SGE.
“We expect the site to lose 20% to 36% of its traffic with the SGE deployment,” Tallent said.
Tallent noted that in most cases, websites that are not in the top 10 search results are incorporated into SGE.
“SGE doesn’t seem to be sticking with all of their SEO algorithms that they’ve been using for years,” he said.
Impactful content and diversified search spend
At Brainlabs, brands are building subject matter expertise on websites while augmenting their multimedia content with premium video and images.
“SGE pulls the most impactful content from the site and combines it with other sources it believes will have the most impact,” Tallent said.
At the same time, brands are diversifying their media spend beyond Google Search to TikTok, YouTube and Reddit.
“Google’s paid search spend has grown every year at Brainlabs, including over the last year, while other media channels are growing faster with double-digit growth,” he said. “This aligns with general trends in the sector—Google’s advertising revenue is increasing, while its overall share of advertising revenue compared to other platforms is declining.” Tallent would not share specifics about Brainlabs.
The agency’s SEO team now works more closely with the agency’s influencer team to understand TikTok search trends and ultimately reach a wider audience.
“The channels used to be separate and the teams didn’t even communicate,” Tallent said. “Now we’re all being called upon to make broader marketing business decisions to reach audiences, no matter what platform they’re on.”
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