SEO Implications of Search Engines Transforming into AI Chatbots

While big AI companies are digging in legal gray areas trying to find new data sources for their large language models, the situation for website operators and publishers is much more black and white. Website traffic is drying up, and a total drought could be on the way as search engines morph into generative AI chatbots.

To learn more about how search engines are changing in the age of AI and what website operators can do to adapt, I spoke with Jim Yufounder and executive chairman of BrightEdgea corporate SEO platform that has been operating for seventeen years.

Are Perplexity quotes driving traffic?

BrightEdge recently released an interesting perplexity studyan AI chat platform that’s trying to compete with Google in search (when I spoke with Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas in January, he admitted he was “a huge fan of Larry Page” and had modeled his search engine search in PageRank).

What immediately stood out to me in the study was the claim that people are increasingly clicking on Perplexity’s citation links. “BrightEdge analysis shows that Perplexity’s referrals to branded sites are growing nearly 40% month over month since January,” stated the media release. “This is the first evidence that Perplexity is not being used solely for generative content purposes, but also as a search engine that refers users to sites through citations.” (emphasis mine)

This struck me as a regular user of Perplexity (disclosure: Perplexity gave me a year of their Pro service while researching the January article). When I first started using Perplexity Pro, citation links were visible in the chatbot’s answers to questions I posed, but there were few suggestions to click on them. But recently, I started to notice that Perplexity is asking users more to click on these citation links. In many of my answers now, I get phrases like “according to the search results” and “the key evidence is,” which usually make me want to click more on the accompanying links.

I asked Yu if this could be why Perplexity’s referral traffic to websites is growing? While he wouldn’t be drawn on that particular question, he said Perplexity has taken a clear position in research that is the polar opposite of ChatGPT.

“I think the heart of the Perplexity AI experience is that it provides a well-formulated, well-researched answer to your question,” he said, noting that it’s much more transparent than ChatGPT in that regard. He added that Perplexity gives you the sources, but also provides “a nice AI summary.”

Clearly, the main value a user gets from Perplexity is the summary of the source material. But it might also be in the company’s interest to get people to click on the citation links, as a way to help the user build trust in Perplexity. In any case, BrightEdge’s results on referral traffic are encouraging from a publisher’s perspective.

The Giant Awakens: Generative Google Search Experiences

While Perplexity has captured the interest of many early adopters of the technology, the 800-pound search gorilla has been quietly preparing its own AI-powered search. Google’s “Search Generative Experiences” (SGE) has been an optional feature in Google Labs for almost a year now, though it’s been geo-restricted to US users for most of that time. Although it has recently expanded to other countries, the UK (where I live) has yet to see it. So I asked Yu for his impressions of Google’s SGE?

“Google is in between the two,” he said, referring to ChatGPT and Perplexity. He believes SGE is “much more transparent” than ChatGPT. He added that while “it’s closer to Perplexity than the GPT model,” it’s “less prominent” in how it includes citation links.

Yu has seen Google go through a series of iterations to perfect SGE over the past eleven months.

“In the early days, experience wasn’t cached,” he noted. “So it was pretty slow when it loaded. Now it’s cached, it’s pretty fast. We’re also seeing it being tweaked on an industry-by-industry basis.”

In particular, the industry adjustment includes the implementation of “guardrails” in industries such as healthcare and finance, as a form of risk management in how it implements AI search for these industries.

“The number one place they’re using AI is your health,” Yu said, regarding Google’s SGE testing. “The reason for this is that they are very careful with it. So if you look for a disease in the AI ​​version [of Google Search], put a disclaimer at the top: Hey, you should see a doctor. The second thing it does is it takes up a lot of the page and clearly weighs on certain places like the CDC (Center for Disease Control) and the NIH (National Institute of Health). They [also] weigh Mayo Clinic, the leading health institutions.”

While these same sources also rank better in current Google non-AI search, Yu’s point is that they are even more prominent in AI search results. He says this extra weighting, along with the disclaimers, is because “AI generates certain opinions” and so Google naturally wants to protect itself.

This seems to imply that Google SGE will place even more emphasis on authoritative websites than ever before. Which means it will be harder for new entrants (say, a new health information website) to rank well in Google’s AI search. So I asked Yu what web operators can do to optimize search with artificial intelligence, since it’s clearly going to be harder to get cited (especially in industries like healthcare).

“If you make good content and you’re a trusted brand, you have a good foundation to build on,” he said. “The future means that you have to understand much better in which conversations you have the right to win as a brand? Make sure you’re building unique perspectives on that—your brand heritage, where you have authority.”

Will publishers benefit from AI citations?

It’s all very well cited in search results, but of course websites want traffic coming back to them from those citations. While the BrightEdge study found an increase in referral traffic from Perplexity, that won’t necessarily happen with Google SGE, especially since Yu said SGE doesn’t display citations as prominently as Perplexity. So I asked him what website operators, and particularly media companies that depend on this traffic, can do to adapt to the age of AI search.

He replied that the media “need to report a lot about what is the subject area where you will be eligible to win, where you have the most experience”. Thus, brand authority will become even more important, because “AI engines must somehow attribute trust to different sources of information.”

He said that in order for AI engines to organize information sources, they will increasingly rely on “authority graphs” that create metadata about publishers. While this already happens with traditional search engines, it’s now being introduced to LLMs: “all the things you want to surround content with, so the AI ​​knows how to do attribution,” Yu said.

All of this means that being a citation in Google SGE or Perplexity (or Bing’s OpenAI-based solution) will increasingly drive your search optimization strategy. In fact, Perplexity’s Aravind Srinivas said something similar in our January interview. According to Srinivas, the more Perplexity’s product cites a particular web page, the more important it becomes.

“The next generation of rankings is going to be citation,” Yu said, “and you want to be, as a publisher, the original source of cited information, because everything going forward will be generated from AI around the source original. . And so the chart will try to be the original source of different topics. So I think that’s very important for the editors.”

Yu’s point is that being the original source, the “trusted source” – will be vital for publishers in the future. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that traffic will come back to them, even if they are the original source for certain topics. But there’s at least some hope that Perplexity will start driving traffic to publishers, and we can only hope (and pray) that Google follows suit.

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Richard MacManus is a senior editor at The New Stack and writes about web and application development trends. He previously founded ReadWriteWeb in 2003 and built it into one of the most influential technology news sites in the world. From the beginning…

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