Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently spoke about the future of search, asserting the importance of websites (good news for SEO). But how can this be if AI is supposed to make search engines obsolete (along with SEO)?
Search vs Chatbots vs Generative Search
There is a lot of discussion about AI search, but what is always missing is a delineation of what is meant by this phrase.
There are three ways to think about what is being said:
Search engines Chatbots like Gemini or ChatGPT Generative Search (which are chatbots stacked on top of a traditional search engine like Perplexity.ai and Bing)
Traditional search is a misnomer
The word inappropriate means an inaccurate name, description, or label given to something. We still talk about traditional search, perhaps out of habit. The reality that needs to be recognized is that traditional research no longer exists. It’s a misnomer to refer to Google as traditional search.
Sundar Pichai pointed out that Google has been using AI for years, and we know this to be true because of systems like RankBrain, SpamBrain, the Helpful Content System (aka HCU), and the review system. AI is involved in virtually every step of Google search, from the backend to the frontend of search results.
from Google Documentation 2021 on SpamBrain noted how AI is used at the crawling and indexing level:
“First, we have systems that can detect spam when we crawl pages or other content. …Some content detected as spam is not added to the index.
These systems also work for content we discover through sitemaps and Search Console. …We observed spammers hacking into vulnerable sites, pretending to own those sites, verifying themselves in Search Console, and using the tool to ask Google to crawl and index the many spam pages they created . Using AI, we were able to identify suspicious verifications and prevent spam URLs from entering our index that way.”
AI is involved in the indexing process and all the way to the ranking process and finally in the search results themselves.
The most recent update from March 2024 is described by Google as complex and not yet finished as of April 2024. I suspect that Google has transitioned to a more AI-friendly infrastructure in order to of adapting to do things like integrating the AI signals previously associated with the HCU. and revisions system directly into the core algorithm.
People are freaking out because AI research of the future will summarize the answers. Well, Google already does this in featured snippets and knowledge graph search results.
Let’s face it: traditional search doesn’t exist anymore, it’s a misnomer. Google is more accurately described as an AI search engine and that’s important to recognize because, as you’ll soon see, it relates directly to Sundar Pichai’s media when he talks about what search will look like ten years from now.
Combined hybrid search, also known as generative search
What people currently call search AI is also a misnomer. The most accurate label is generative search. Bing and Perplexity.ai are generative AI chatbots stacked on top of a search index with something in the middle that coordinates between the two, usually called Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), a technology that was created in 2020 by Facebook AI researchers. .
See also: Google’s CEO on what search will look like in 10 years
Chatbots
Chatbots are many things, including ChatGPT and Gemini. No need to elaborate on this point, right?
Search vs Generative Search vs Chatbots: Who Wins?
Generative search is an awkward mix of a chatbot and a search engine with a somewhat busy interface. It’s awkward because he wants to do his homework and tell you the phone number of the local restaurant but is mediocre at both. But even if generative search improves, does anyone really want a search engine that can also write an essay? It’s almost a foregone conclusion that these awkwardly joined capabilities will shrink and eventually resemble what Google already is.
Chatbots and search engines
This leaves us with a near future of chatbots and search engines. Sam Altman said that an AI chatbot search that shows advertising is dystopian.
Google is pursuing both strategies by bringing the Gemini AI chatbot to Android as an AI assistant that can make your phone calls, call your local restaurant, and give you suggestions for the best pizza in town. CEO Sundar Pichai notes that the web is an important resource that they would like to continue to use.
But if the chatbot doesn’t show ads, that will significantly reduce Google’s ad revenue. However, the SEO industry is convinced that SEO is over because search engines will be replaced by AI.
Google may at some point make a lot of money from cloud services and SaaS products and may move away from search-based ad revenue if everyone migrates to AI chatbots.
The inquiry deserves publicity
But if there’s money in search advertising, why go through all the trouble to crawl the web, develop the technology, and not monetize it? Who leaves money on the table? No Google.
There is a search engine algorithm called Query Deserves Freshness. The algorithm determines if a search query is trending or newsworthy and will choose a web page on the topic that has been published recently, new.
Similarly, I think at some point chatbots will differentiate when a search query deserves ads and move to a search result.
Google CEO Pichai contradicts the SEO narrative of the decline and demise of search engines. Pichai says the future of search includes websites because search needs the diversity of opinion inherent on the web. So where does all this lead?
Google Search already shows answers for non-monetary queries that are informative, such as the weather and currency conversions. There are no ads for these queries, so Google doesn’t lose anything by showing informative queries in a chatbot.
But for shopping and other transactional types of search queries, the best solution is Query Deserves Advertising.
If a user makes a shopping-related search query, there will come a time when the chatbot will “helpfully” decide that the query deserves advertising and will move it to the search engine’s inventory that also includes advertising.
This may explain why Google’s CEO sees a future where the web is not replaced by AI but rather coexists. So, if you think about it, Query Deserves Advertising may be how search engines retain their lucrative advertising business in the age of AI.
Reads: Why Google SGE is stuck in Google Labs and what’s next
The query deserves a search
An extension of this concept is to think about search queries where comparisons, user reviews, human expert reviews, news, medical, financial and other queries that require human input will need to appear. These types of queries can also change to a search result. The results may not look like today’s search results, but they will still be search results.
People love to read reviews, read news, read gossip and other human generated topics and this is not going away. Ideas matter. Personality matters.
The query deserves SEO
So maybe the SEO knee-jerk reaction that SEO is dead is premature. We are still at the beginning of this and as long as there is money to be made from search, there will still be a need for websites, search engines and SEO.
Featured image by Shutterstock/Shchus
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