Market research firm Gartner recently released a statement saying that web searches will decline around 25% in 2026 due to the availability of AI chatbots and other virtual agents.
In fact, this is a predictable trend, as major browsers such as Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge are increasingly introducing their respective Gemini (formerly Bard) and ChatGPT capabilities to their search engines.
Historically speaking, when you type in a web search query, the results that come up are usually links to related sites. The web crawler software counts the interrelationships and the number of times each link has been viewed to rank those links.
The entire search engine optimization (SEO) industry takes advantage of this relationship. By optimizing websites for SEO, you can ensure that a website ranks higher than other sites. For example, using the right hashtags that most people will likely use will likely increase your rankings and visibility. The same happens if other sites refer to your site, which is then interpreted by the search engine as some kind of authority from your website to write about that topic.
Ranking high and on the first page of a query search, especially in Google search, offers many benefits. People are often pressed for time, and if the top search results are good enough, they won’t have the patience to check other results on lower ranking pages unless they need to be thorough in their search. For many people, however, if the first result is good enough, they don’t need to continue.
Of course, problems will arise for businesses that rely on their SEO rankings. The reason for this is that these new AI chatbots don’t really prioritize giving links. Instead, these AI chatbots and other AI tools try to interpret the query and provide an answer based on what they know from their training. The way these AI chatbots answer a question is through a process called inference.
Basically, they infer the answer based on all the training data they have learned in the past using their large language models (LLMs) like those used by ChatGPT or Gemini. These bots will not return the links (or your company’s website), but instead give the best inferred answer.
In other words, if web search has benefited your business because your business link might be the one that appears on the search page, now you will soon have to deal with the search engine only giving its own answer and no longer showing your link
Therefore, given this likely trend, companies and businesses that rely heavily on SEO should plan ahead. They should keep up with the latest web search trends, especially from giant tech companies like Alphabet (Google) and Microsoft, and try to study and prototype some of these tools. Maybe they can get some quick engineering tests and feedback on ChatGPT regarding a company’s products or services.
Aside from the fact that your online SEO visibility may be negatively affected, your own customers may want to deal with sleepy, natural-looking chatbots that are familiar with your company’s products and services. So now there are two reasons why your internal (or contractor) IT group or team might want to develop some custom chatbot prototypes to test.
Knowing that the death of SEO may be likely in the foreseeable future, you should plant the seeds to be ready for a time when people will simply talk or chat with their computers to find the answer they need and hope that your business is positioned well enough. to take advantage of it soon.
Uncommon knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in search of common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in search of common ground.
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