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The rise of AI. How advances announced at Google I/O 2024 are trying to redefine search. Blue links… and now AI? Adaptation to AI-powered search engines. Traditional SEO tactics are becoming less and less effective, shifting the focus to brand-centric content. AI and content strategy. Marketer Insights: Original, value-driven content is crucial to AI recognition and successful marketing.
Google’s announcement of new AI features for search last week a Google I/O 2024 serves as a wake-up call for SEO and marketing professionals. They highlight the shift from traditional keyword-focused strategies to focus on brand storytelling and AI adaptation. Additionally, as Google continues to innovate with its Gemini AI models, marketers are being asked to rethink their approaches in the evolving search landscape.
“This is a rude awakening for all SEOs,” said Mary Owusu, CEO of OwnMyNiche.com i CONDUCTIVE. “SEO as we know it has been too easy to manipulate. The idea of ranking keyword-rich content is gone. SEOs need to become brand storytellers. In the past, ‘doing SEO’ meant creating keyword-rich content in a format primarily written to rank in Google In the world of AI, “doing SEO” will create brand-focused content in various formats across the platforms the customer is on The mark”.
At Google I/O, Google announced a number of AI features with significant implications for search. Marketers weighed in with CMSWire on search strategies the industry should pay attention to as consumer adoption of AI expands.
Google’s announcements at Google I/O have always generated buzz from developers, but this year’s I/O introduced a variety of Gemini AI models to address different AI modeling needs. Developers using Google Cloud services have more features to explore, with several key features affecting Google Search. Marketers should pay particular attention to how these features highlight the AI trends that are taking shape now.
What search tactics are emerging with the advent of AI?
Much of Google I/O 2024 focused on upcoming features slated for release between now and summer, including Gemma 2, the next generation of their little Gemma language model. These features extend tokenization and parameterization.
Many features are promising for Gemini. People are already using Gemini and its competitors, such as Claude and OpenAI, for information seeking. Due to the bump and growing usage among consumers and professionals, AI is increasingly treated like a search engine, enhancing its status as a “recommendation engine”. People use quick queries to solve personal workflows and find information, just as traditional search engines help find information online.
However, queries must incorporate the latest rapid engineering techniques to make the right recommendations from the AI model. Search engines typically rely on links to rank results in the SERPs, a well-known concept among business owners, marketers, and developers. AI models make associations from their tokenized prompts based on trained data, so users must craft their queries precisely to suit the underlying AI engine.
New features like reasoning in several steps i AI overview give users more control over their queries. Marketers must consider how these features will be adopted in users’ information-seeking behavior, as they summarize the models involved, reducing the need for extensive iteration to explain what users are looking for.
(Editor’s note: We’re not entirely impressed with the arrival of AI in Google Search; at least not yet):
What is the big gain @GoogleAI generative search results? It looks like a glorified fragment. You don’t see the big differentiator in basic search results. pic.twitter.com/ByaVghomGW
— Dom Nicastro (@DomNicastro) May 20, 2024
Related article: Google I/O 2024: AI to redefine the future of search
Attribution challenges and a new world for search
Marketers shared their thoughts with us via LinkedIn after hearing Google’s announcements, along with other news like the arrival of ChatGPT4o.
Rand Fishkin, co-founder of SparkToropoints out how AI complicates the growing reality in research: the complication of attribution.
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“The rise of generative AI responses, the bias towards native content in social sources and the shift from a world where users are willing to click and visit websites to one where they are not connected.” Fishkin claims that the solution to this. is what you call your company”Zero click marketing.”
Creators, entrepreneurs, marketers, and influencers need to move away from posting direct-to-action links or over-investing in SEO-oriented content to gain traffic to non-attributable, hard-to-measure marketing investments branding and message dissemination. the web, he added.
If Google isn’t sending traffic to sites, don’t try to rank, advises Fishkin. Instead, work to influence generative AI response, snippets that show up, Reddit posts that people still click on, brand mentions, and lexical associations between search terms and names of your products.
“Interestingly, digital marketing in the 2020s looks more like traditional marketing in the 20th century,” said Fishkin. “No marketer in 1965 expected drivers to see a freeway billboard for vacuum cleaners and immediately change their route to stop by the store and buy one. Instead, they relied on the impact of ad to influence future demand and brand preference Similarly, by 2024, Google results are moving from an opportunity to change the driver’s route to an opportunity to influence future demand and preference for The mark”.
Related article: Will search be generative AI or blue links? They are actually both
Embrace AI search and original content
Marketing specialist Jeff “Mr. Marketing” Beale believes marketers need to embrace AI-powered search and adapt their strategies to take advantage of new AI capabilities. “That means understanding how users search with AI tools and creating content that aligns with those search patterns,” he said. “Search engines have already incorporated artificial intelligence into their algorithms, so it’s important to stay ahead of the changing market.”
Alison Ver Halen, Content Marketing and SEO Strategist and President of AV writing servicesstated that content must explain its purpose so that AI incorporating intent content is likely to refer to it.
“One of the most important (but also most overlooked) aspects of SEO is that Google prioritizes original content,” he explains. “One of my big issues with ‘generative’ AI is that it doesn’t ‘generate’ anything. It scrapes existing web content and reuses it. If you’re just putting a message into ChatGPT and then copy and pasting what it gives you on your site web, you won’t win any points with Google, or with people who see you saying the same thing to everyone else.”
To deliver value, Ver Halen added, your content must answer the all-important question: “So what?” That means, he said, in addition to providing information and updates, your content should provide your unique perspective on each topic you cover. What does this mean for your audience? How can they apply it to the real world?
“The answer is what will add value, get Google’s attention, and convince the real people who read your content that you’re the real deal,” said Ver Halen.
Ryan Levander, founder of the analytics firm Rednavel Consultancy, is also concerned about attribution, and suggests researching current customer touchpoints. He notes that one of the earliest evolutions of search, including the first incarnation of Google’s AI, Search Generative Experience (SGE)has a significant impact on search and content strategy.
“I would say that accuracy in marketing analytics is getting worse every year,” explains Levander, “especially with fewer users needing to click with SGE on the rise… You need to have a content strategy that matches the user journey . If you only create top-of-the-funnel content (go after high-volume keywords), then SGE will hit you harder with clicks. The same happened with featured snippets and rich results.”
Marketers need to make their content as valuable as possible so that the user has a reason to click through to read your article, he said, adding: “Make sure your analytics are set up properly so that you can see blogs that generate income.”
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