The Gist
AI Disruption. Generative AI is set to significantly disrupt SEO.Shielding of contents. Brands need strategies to protect their content from AI.Direct relationships Building strong direct relationships is key.
Do your customers trust your brand more than ChatGPT?
The answer to this question will determine which brands really have credibility and authority in the coming years and which don’t.
The ones that are more reliable than generative AI engines will:
Be destinations for those looking for answers, driving strong direct traffic to their websites and robust app usage. Be able to build large audiences of your own through email, SMS, push and other channels.
Both will be critical for any brand that wants to insulate itself from the loss of search engine optimization (SEO) traffic that will be caused by generative AI.
The threat to SEO
Despite amassing 100 million users just two months after launch, an all time record — ChatGPT doesn’t seem to have a noticeable impact on it many billions of searches that are made every day yet. However, it’s not hard to imagine it and other large language models (LLMs) taking a sizeable bite out of search market share as they improve and become more reliable.
And they will improve. After all, Microsoft, Google and others are investing tens of billions of dollars in generative AI engines. Having dominated the search engine market for a long time, Google in particular is well aware of the huge risk to their business, which is why declared a Code Red and pooled all available resources in AI development.
If you accept that generative AI will improve significantly over the next few years, and probably dramatically by the end of the decade, and thus consumers will get more answers to their questions through click-free engagements, which are already importantthen raises the question:
What should brands do to maintain visibility and brand authority, as well as avoid losing value in their content investments?
Protection measures against the negative generative effects of AI
Brands have two main levers they can pull to protect themselves from the negative effects of the growing use of generative AI.
1. Protection of the content of the generative AI training
Major legal battles will be fought over the next few years to clarify what rights copyright holders have in this new era and what still constitutes fair use. Content and social media platforms are likely to try to redefine the copyright landscape in their favor by amending their user agreements to give themselves more rights over the content shared on their platforms.
Andrey Popov on Adobe Stock Photo
You can already see the divide in how companies decide to proceed. For example, while Getty Images sues Stable Diffusion for copyright violations when training your AI, Instead, Shutterstock partners with OpenAI, having decided that it has the right to sell its contributors’ content as training material to AI engines. While Shutterstock says it doesn’t have to compensate its contributors, it has created a contributor fund to pay those whose work is most used by AI engines. It also gives contributors the option not to use their content as AI training material.
From Google was allowed to scan and share copyrighted books without compensating the authors, it is entirely reasonable to assume that generative AI will also be able to use copyrighted works without agreements or compensation from copyright holders. Therefore, content providers should not expect the law to protect them.
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With all this in mind, brands can be protected by:
Getting more web content, whether behind paywalls, account logins or lead generation forms. While there are disputes, both search and AI engines should not crawl behind paywalls.Release of some password-protected PDF content. While web-hosted PDFs can be tracked, password-protected ones cannot. Since consumers aren’t used to encountering password-protected PDFs frequently, some education would be required. Also, this approach would be best suited for your most valuable content.Distribute more content through subscriber-only channels, including email, push and print. Inboxes are considered privacy spaces, so tracking that content is already a no-no. While Google and others have scanned printed publications such as books in the past, smaller publications would likely be safe from scanning efforts.
In addition to these, we expect brands to win one not index it’s the equivalent of telling companies not to train their large language models (LLMs) and other AI tools on the content of their web pages.
Of course, while protecting their content from external generative AI engines, brands could also deploy generative AI on their own sites as a way to help visitors and customers find the information they’re looking for. For most brands, this would be a welcome addition to their site search functionality.
2. Build stronger direct relationships
While protecting your content is the defensive game, building your own audience is the offensive game. In other words, now that you’ve kept your valuable content out of the hands of generative AI engines, you need to get it into the hands of your target audience.
You do this by creating your subscription-based channels, such as email and push. In your email registration forms, emphasize the exclusive nature of the content you will be sharing. If you want to personalize the content you send, highlight that as well.
Brands have the opportunity to turn their emails into personalized landing pages for their subscribers, as well as turning their subscribers’ inboxes into personalized search engines.
Email marketing is being reinvented again
Brands already have compelling reasons to build their own audiences. One is the demise of third-party cookies and the need for more customer data. Email marketing and loyalty programs, in particular, along with SMS, are great for collecting zero-part data through preference centers i progressive profileas well as own data through interaction data with the channel.
Another is the increasingly obvious dangers of building on the “rented land” of social networks. For example, Facebook is slowly declining, Twitter has cut 80% of its workforce to avoid bankruptcy how its value fallsi TikTok is facing increasing bans around the world. Some even claim that we are witnessing the beginning the end of the social media era. I wouldn’t go that far, but there are certainly many reasons for brands to focus more on those channels over which they have much more control, such as web, loyalty, SMS and of course email.
So the disruption of search engine optimization by generative AI just provides another compelling reason to invest more in email programs or acquire them. It’s hard not to see this as yet another case of email marketing reinventing itself and becoming more relevant to brands again.
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