While platforms like Perplexity, Arc Browser, and Bing have advanced generated search results, Google’s announcement last week that it’s rolling out “AI Overviews” to searchers will likely make AI-written search results be the norm. But some vendors say the feature isn’t quite ready for widespread use.
“Even as OpenAI innovates and releases features, Google is the company that can deliver AI features to as many people as there are online,” said Darwin Santos, SEO Senior Technical Strategist and Innovation Manager for AI in Webserv.
But Google’s AI responses still have “flaws, redundancies, dangerous information, spam and other issues,” said Lily Ray, Amsive’s vice president of SEO strategy and research.
“Many of us in the SEO community felt that AI Overviews were not yet ready for prime time, and certainly not a huge improvement over the answers Google already provides in its organic results,” he said. .
For example, an AI overview for the search query “best SEO professionals” included people who are not SEO professionals and even a professional who is no longer living, noted Aleyda Solís, founder and international consultant of Orainti SEO.
The biggest issue for websites is the lack of clarity on how to optimize for AI overviews. Google hasn’t been doing a great job of communicating the impact and opportunities AI Overviews present to website owners, Solís said. And while websites can choose not to show up in Overviews, it’s unclear how that will affect their visibility in search results, he said.
“It will be difficult to measure how this change actually affects website traffic, and even more difficult to adjust our marketing strategies to find the best ways to appear in these AI overviews,” Ray said.
Gartner has already said it expects search volume to drop 25% by 2026 as a result of AI search changes.
Another concern is search engines’ lack of transparency about how a site’s data and content is used. “Whether it’s Google, Microsoft Copilot, OpenAI with ChatGPT or Anthropic with Claude, none of those places [is] sharing data [with] brands, making it very difficult for brands to know whether their customers are changing their behavior or not,” said Wil Reynolds, founder and CEO of Seer Interactive.
Unlike other search features, such as feature snippets, Google said it will not show any impression or click data from AI overviews in Google Search Console.
Will search engines like it? “In an AI search world, the fewer websites I have to visit, the happier I am,” said Reynolds. “The amount of friction today with pop-ups, cookie consent, weird navigation, intrusive ads , none of us enjoy this experience. So I applaud the moves that Google is making.”
Some users, however, are doing the opposite of applauding. The Google Search Community Forum is currently full of user posts asking how they can disable AI overviews.
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