I don’t know for sure that people are searching on Google less. I just know it’s true.
During Google I/O, Alphabet/Google CEO Sundar Pichai told us that AI overviews have led to an “increase in search usage.” Pichai said as much during Alphabet’s Q1 2024 earnings call.
But if that’s the case, doesn’t that mean AI Overviews, or the artist formerly known as Search Generative Experience (SGE), isn’t solving a problem it was supposedly invented to solve?
That is, give users the answer or information they want, faster?
Yes, the same week that OpenAI basically created Samantha, the AI virtual assistant from the movie “she,” Google’s tagline became “Let Google Google Google for you.”
Well, if Google is Googleing Google for you now, chances are your search volume will increase when Google can’t find what Google is looking for on Google on Google!
No blue links
The video of Google Search in the Gemini era was eye-opening.
Look at this:
What did you notice was missing?
The caption already gave it away, but there’s no blue link in sight.
The former CEO of Google said that Google is not about blue links. Clearly he wasn’t wrong.
In the Gemini era of Google, apparently links will now live in a web filter.
If you’re lucky, the web will be the fourth option you can choose from (after All, Images, Video, and News), or you might have to look for the web filter under More options.
We knew this was coming. For two decades, Google has talked about search being like the “Star Trek” computer:
“When search grows, it’s going to look like Star Trek: you talk into the air (“Computer! What’s the situation on the planet?”) and the computer processes your question, discovers its context, discovers what answer you’re looking for, it searches a giant database in who knows how many languages, translates/analyzes/summarizes all the results, and presents them to you in a nice voice. I think this technology is about 300 years old.”
This quote, from former Google CTO Craig Silverstein, is from 2003.
It didn’t take 300 years. It only took 20.
The future is here.
The search was already fragmenting
We don’t know exact data about global usage of Google Search in 2024 and how it compares to previous years. Google doesn’t disclose it.
But reporting an increase in search usage is like reporting domain authority. It’s a meaningless vanity metric.
Google claims that user satisfaction has also increased over the same period. But I don’t recall an extended period of sustained negativity about the quality of Google search results like I’ve seen over the past two years, both inside and outside the search marketing industry.
Google’s own data has shown that younger internet users go to TikTok and Instagram instead of Google. Although Google is a monopoly general search engine, people search on other platforms: Amazon, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and more.
Meanwhile, we’ve heard rumors about ChatGPT search, and I hope OpenAI will release a search product in the near future.
Dig deeper. The modern search landscape: how and where to reach your target audience
AI Overviews apocalypse
The inevitable day of final judgment of the SGE that we have been warning you about since last May has finally arrived.
Publishers who weren’t already freaking out about losing traffic from Google’s useful content or core updates (or Gartner’s prediction that search engine traffic will drop 25% by 2026) are definitely starting to freak out now as AI Overviews begin to unfold.
Here are just a few of the headlines we’ve seen since the release of the AI overviews:
This quote from Owen Meredith, CEO of the News Media Association, is a variation on one we’ve heard in recent months from content creators who have recently been frustrated by Google’s algorithm updates:
“Google’s stated mission is to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible’ by sending visitors to websites. Presentation [generative AI] in search and AI overviews that synthesize and present information directly to the user risks discouraging users from clicking on the original links, in turn threatening the business model of those who invest in journalism and quality information”.
Relying entirely or mostly on a platform like Google to send you traffic via link clicks is not a business model. It’s a game of chance. Because every time Google changes something, it risks losing everything.
Ten blue links were a transient way of giving answers. Now we have AI overviews.
Tying a bow on it
So we don’t know for sure that people are searching less on Google. We just know it’s true.
People are not satisfied with the search. Google is still a monopoly, but people are looking elsewhere.
AI overviews are designed to reduce the number of searches, but again, Google’s whole message is “Let Google do Google for you.” This indicates that users should do fewer searches.
Although Google has definitely seen an increase in the number of searches on how to disable AI results.
Wow!
It seems that Google is getting further and further away from reality.
In this brave new world of Google, advertisers should expect costs to rise (hello, tuning and crush), websites should expect less organic traffic, while Google sends searchers to the tracking query bin to boost search usage stats that nobody cares about, or use agents to complete tasks like purchases (where I’m sure Google will address some hidden Ticketmaster-type fees that turn what should be a $50 purchase into $120).
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