Rampant speculation among marketers has fueled fears that AI-powered search engines will produce more answers than links, delivering less traffic to millions of websites. The concern, though probably exaggerated, is worth acknowledging.
For one thing, companies shouldn’t panic. Artificial intelligence will not destroy organic search traffic this year, this decade, or ever. But it’s hard to ignore ChatGPT’s dramatic popularity and the AI-driven arms race of the major search engines: Google, Bing and Baidu.
Therefore, business leaders should plan for possible outcomes.
In this post I will address four of these possibilities:
AI-powered search reduces links, A tactical change in search engine optimization, Search results are better, The rise of new specialized search engines.
AI search narrows down links
Bing’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, Baidu’s Wenxin Yiyan and similar AI tools focus on natural language responses. A human asks a question and the AI tries to answer with a paragraph, not a link.
This is certainly a logical and desirable path for search engines. Google already responds to many queries using featured snippets at the top of search results.
For example, ask Google to “define artificial intelligence” and the main result is verbiage from a dictionary. Google answers the query directly instead of sending the search engine to the dictionary website.
Google now answers queries: “define artificial intelligence” in search results, even before adding chat AI tools.
On his Bard Chat AI Announcement, Google included an example gif that was essentially the same as the dictionary definition. The image was someone writing: “What are the best constellations to look for when stargazing?” Bard’s response was a short paragraph and four bullet points, followed by links to external sites.
The response is analogous to voice search. AI chat search will rely on websites for answers, just like voice search. So it’s not about ending organic search traffic, it’s about a change in optimizing a site for it.
The example gif from Google’s ad shows how Bard AI might work. Click on the image to activate the gif.
AEO
This change could be “optimization of the response engine”: AEO.
AEO aims to improve a website’s ranking on response-centric search platforms such as voice, virtual assistants, and now AI chat.
This form of SEO has been around for years. It’s similar to what many companies already do: identify potential customers’ questions and answer them in a way that AI-powered national language processors can understand.
For example, ChatGPT interacts with users conversationally. It’s popular and exciting because it understands human queries, which (often) lead to better results. Thus, websites that optimize for ChatGPT focus on natural language questions rather than keywords or even entities.
So AEO is not new, but a change in emphasis and competition: search results could contain limited links to external sites, and an answer could come from a single source.
Results improve
Despite marketers’ concerns, AI-enabled search could dramatically increase traffic to many sites.
Search engines with artificial intelligence will try to provide more accurate and relevant results than previous versions. This focus on accuracy and relevance can increase organic traffic for sites with the most relevant or best AEO content.
In this sense, AI search is not a problem but an opportunity.
New search engines
Expect more AI-powered search engines.
ChatGPT has captured the attention of the market. Users love the tool. And entrepreneurs see the promise of niche search engines.
Before the explosion of AI growth, an e-commerce site could optimize for Google and be successful. But multi-channel AEO could become the norm if search engines proliferate.
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