Although they offer a very different user experience, search engines like Google or Bing and generative AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT intersect in terms of functionality in one very important way: they help us find information
What does generative AI mean for websites and SEO?
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Since ChatGPT took the world by storm in late 2022, we’ve seen the technology built into Microsoft’s Bing search engine and similar products emerge from both Google and Facebook. It’s clear that big tech believes the impact of these tools will be truly transformative.
It is also true that all of these tech companies generate a important part of your revenue from ads that are shown to users when they search. Millions of small businesses also rely on technology to drive potential customers to their websites through the power of search engine optimization.
If generative artificial intelligence leads to a significant change in the way we use the Internet, these business models will change significantly. And everyone wants to make sure they have a stake in what comes next.
So what does this mean if you’re a small or medium-sized business that relies on search engine traffic to drive potential customers to your website? And how will the esoteric art of SEO be affected by a dramatic change in the way we find information online? Let’s take a look.
Search Chatbot
The main difference between the way a chatbot and a search engine provide answers is that the chatbot tells us directly what we need to know, while the search engine presents us with a page of results, known as a search engine results page ( SERP).
Many businesses of all sizes, from global media companies to your local handyman, rely on search engines to drive traffic to their sites. This could be because they have paid to have their ads displayed on search engines using certain terms, or because a search engine has determined that the business page has information relevant to their potential customers.
With the way generative AI chatbots work today, none of this happens because all the information is provided directly to the user without them having to visit another page to find their answers.
The first impact of this will be a huge increase in the number of “no-click” searches, where users get their answers without having to take any other action. On the face of it, this is great for users, but not so good for businesses.
The problem is that, annoying as it may be at times, advertising drives the Internet as we know it today. Companies create and make content available online, often at no cost to us, either because it allows them to build an audience that might eventually become customers, or because they get paid to show- no ads on their own sites. It also gives big tech companies the revenue they need to build services like search and give them to us to use for free.
At the moment, it is unclear how this will play out. If chatbot providers (Google, Microsoft, etc.) go the route of charging users to pay to use their service, all the revenue will go to them and there will be much less incentive for companies to create content online.
Alternatively, providers can adopt a model where businesses pay to have their information, or even links to their pages, included in the chatbot’s output. This would inevitably lead to biased results to give us information that companies want us to see.
How will this affect SEO?
SEO means optimizing the keywords used on a page to encourage search engines to include that page in their SERPs.
Generative AI has many implications for this. First, it’s great for creating SEO content. Anyone can use it to create content (or edit existing content) to make it more attractive to search engines.
This could have a democratizing effect on content creation, as businesses (and individuals) no longer need specialized SEO knowledge.
However, as anyone who has used generative AI will tell you, it’s great at creating formulaic content, but not necessarily so good at anything that involves original ideas or new ideas. In the short term, this could lead to an explosion in the amount of low-value content that simply refreshes old ideas.
Inevitably, the search engines themselves will respond to this. Google, Bing, Yahoo and others use their own sophisticated artificial intelligence whose main goal is to make them useful for their users and get really relevant and useful results.
As an example of this, it is speculated that Google will adjust its ranking algorithms to focus on information gain. This means that pages with new information could rank better, while those that simply regurgitate and regurgitate information from other sites could be penalized.
Another potential consequence is that as businesses may have to rely on fewer hits to search engine pages, they may have to work harder to ensure that visitors who do arrive spend more time on their sites. and are more likely to become customers. A strategy designed to address this could involve enhancing the richness of the company’s content ecosystem to encourage repeat visits and increase conversion rates.
Another important point to consider is that a widespread shift away from search engines and towards generative chatbots could also cause trust issues. With search engines, it’s usually very easy to see where the information you’re being directed to is coming from. Chatbots, on the other hand, most famously ChatGPT, are often very opaque about their sources, which means it’s harder to make a judgment about whether we can trust the information they give us.
The future of research
Putting all these considerations together, in the context of a predicted shift in consumer behavior that sees search engine use replaced by chatbot use, means we could be entering the biggest period of change in the way of finding information since the invention of Internet search.
The advent of mass-produced and AI-generated content could lead to the growing importance of off-page SEO factors. These are metrics like the number of backlinks a piece of content has, or social signal metrics like how often your content is shared on social networks.
In the meantime, search engine providers will likely continue to look for ways to monetize chatbot results the same way they monetized search engine results in the early days of the Internet.
To begin with, this will take the form of hybrid searches, as seen with Microsoft’s integration of ChatGPT into its Bing search engine. This allows you to provide us with regular search results (sponsored and organic) along with a chat interface for when we want answers to specific questions.
In the long term, I think a more consolidated user experience is likely to emerge. We could, for example, get used to generative chat results that provide us with a list of links to additional relevant information as part of natural language responses.
After all, it was the monetization of Internet search, often credited to Google with the development of its PageRank algorithms, that really drove the mass commercialization of the Internet.
As with anything to do with AI, there are obviously ethical issues to consider. The extent to which we tolerate biased chatbot output, based on our understanding that there is a need to generate revenue for both service providers and content creators, is a problem that society will have to solve in the near future.
The only certainty is that if your business relies on your ability to drive visitors to your site, you cannot afford to ignore the changes that generative AI brings to the table. The ability to understand how the search and SEO landscape is changing has long been an essential business skill, and right now, it’s more important than ever.
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