In Search Podcast: Five Ways that Generative AI is Changing Search

We’ve all seen the AI headlines recently and on this episode, we’re aiming to separate the facts from the scare stories. How much is generative AI actually changing search right now?

We’re discussing that with a man who describes himself as a mix between a country house snooper and a triathlete in decline. He’s a published SEO author, a training producer, and a conference speaker. A warm welcome to the In Search SEO podcast, SEO Director at SEOMG!, Ben Howe.

In this episode, Ben Howe shares five ways that generative AI is changing search including:

1. Challenging the long-established status quo of Google’s dominance.
2. Measurement and reporting as we know it might become a near-impossible nightmare.
3. Sites will get less top-of-funnel traffic

FIVE WAYS THAT GENERATIVE AI IS CHANGING SEARCH WITH BEN HOWE

1. An outlet for curious search professionals to develop, innovate, or work more effectively without gatekeepers or barriers

David: You can find Ben over at seomg.co.uk. So today, you’re sharing five ways that generative AI is changing search. Starting off with number one, it’s an outlet for curious search professionals to develop, innovate, or work more effectively without gatekeepers or barriers.

Ben: I thought this was a good one to start with because it’s quite positive. In the search industry, a lot of the chat to date has been quite a doom and gloom which creates a bit of a state of anxiety about what the immediate future will hold, but there are definitely positives and it’s a nice place to start.

One of the main ways that generative AI is impacting SEO now is the way in which it helps people innovate on their own terms. Conceptually, I might know something is possible. I might lack the skill or I might lack the initial direction to do it. But with generative AI, only recently mainstream, I’m able to exploit it to do things that I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to do. For example, if I want to generate some logic for a particularly advanced code extraction, I know that it’s conceptually possible that I might be struggling just to finesse it. Using generative AI to help me can save hours just to get that punch in the right direction.

Similarly, we’ve seen common uses already, like getting structured data markup. Things just to get a nudge in the right direction, which otherwise will take you a long time. I think there are so many different ways that it has been used that focused on all sorts of finessing and we’re just at the start of the journey for how generative AI can help people in search.

D: Obviously, you don’t want to encourage your team to innovate too much on client websites. Do you have a set of sites that your agency can test on? Perhaps you own and operate. Or do you encourage your team members to have their own sites that they test on? Also, how often should they be innovating and testing newer ways to do things?

B: Yeah, some good questions. Several of us have our own websites, and to be a top-class organic search marketer you should have your own website or websites that you’re able to test things on. So my teammates are always welcome to try things out on my blog. My colleague has this affiliate site, which is astoundingly unsuccessful.

The way we’re set up as a business is that we have development time set aside on a monthly basis, a bit of contingency time to complete all their work on time. There’s a bit of contingency time there to experiment with things and drive innovation and teammates are measured against what extent they can bring their innovation into deliverables that the rest of us can use. So there’s a culture of innovation here, though we do have our own websites that we’re encouraged to try things on.

D: It’s funny. When I first got involved with having a proper full-time job, it was as a Digital Marketing Manager at the time that led me to SEO. It was almost frowned upon to have your own little entrepreneurial activities going, but it’s certainly not the case anymore.

B: I find it’s such an advantage. If I’m interviewing somebody, it really piques my interest if they’ve got something that they work on on the side as a bit of a hobby. It shows a genuine interest in the work that they do.

D: Absolutely. I’m thinking about back in 2006 and 2007 when it was a slightly different climate. You tended to have more of a predictable path that you looked at, but maybe people within agencies were always on the lookout for individuals who had that individual spark about them.

2. Generative AI is a challenge to the long-established status quo of Google’s dominance

That takes us up to number two. The second way that generative AI is changing search is it’s a challenge to the long-established status quo of Google’s dominance.

B: Yeah, when I first started considering this, I was a lot more certain about this point. I’d say even three or four weeks down the line, I’m actually less confident about it. But in principle, Google has been the dominant search engine for such a long time amongst the top search engines, and Bing’s generative AI was launched first and it’s still, as we see, it’s a better product than Google’s own search generative AI. I think most search marketers would come to that conclusion. Even as recently as a few weeks ago, there was a real opportunity there for Bing to steal a march and take a chunk of their market share. And while Google has since released Bard, they still haven’t rolled out a full search generative AI experience in the UK. Bing did not leverage that first-mover advantage at all. We’ve seen no discernible signs of loss of market share from Google towards Bing in the US where search generative AI experiences exist for Google in some form. And in the UK, we’ve seen no evidence from either Google or Bing. It’s really interesting that there was a chance for others to steal a march on Google when its product is still not up to scratch, but people don’t seem to be leaving the platform. Now, if there’s anyone that’s taking market share from Google at the moment, it’s the likes of TikTok and Instagram, rather than another traditional search engine with a better feature.

D: Is there any indication that the way that people use search is likely to be altered because of AI? For instance, in the past, when people were researching and deciding if they were going to buy a particular product, they would look at the various search results and compare and contrast the different options while AI potentially leads us toward finding a definitive answer as opposed to a set of potential recommendations.

B: It’s definitely possible. With any major industry disruption, user behavior lags quite some way behind that innovation. So even if Google launched tomorrow the full generative AI experience, I think it will be 12 months or more before we really start to see the full effect of that in people’s search behavior.

D: Yeah, I guess it’s because SEOs are slightly more likely to be on top of the technology trend than the average consumer.

B: Possibly. I don’t think as a search engine professional you can assume your own behavior is going to be the same as the average person. One thing that is true is that in recent years search behavior, while there’s not been a lot of innovation in search beyond looking through the search results, Google has continued to send more and more results to publishers, while at the same time a greater proportion of results have been kept on the SERP. That might seem like a contradiction but what it shows is people carrying out more searches as part of their day-to-day lives. The value of a single search now is lower than the value of a single search ten years ago. I’ve no doubt that search behaviors will continue to change but I’m not expecting anything sudden as a result of a new search experience.

3. Measurement and reporting as we know it might become a near-impossible nightmare

D: And your point number three is that measurement and reporting as we know it might become a near-impossible nightmare.

B: Yeah, one of the observations from the search generative experience from colleagues in the US where results are published in Google Search generative experience… sometimes related websites are nested in Sources or Read more. And those results appear to be classified in Google Analytics as direct traffic and not as organic search. So automatically, there’s a bit of a challenge there with organic reporting where the principles that cause website links to be lifted into that search generative experience sound very similar to the principles of E-A-T that we are used to in core search results.

At the moment, we’re encouraging sites to optimize new considerations, but the traffic is seemingly being tracked as direct traffic and not as organic. So that poses a bit of a challenge.

Likewise, for rank tracking, we are generally a bit more relaxed about tracking fluctuations in ranking where we work. But still, with the search generative experience in Google looking like it’s going to take up so much of the above-the-fold space, rank tracking is not going to be as valuable as a success metric as it was previously. So there’s definitely going to be a need to innovate the most common means of reporting for organic search. I haven’t seen any organization or any search influencer come up with a compelling coherent solution yet. I feel the industry is lagging a bit behind on that and that’s something that will probably come out in the wash in the next few loads.

D: Taking a massive sidetrack for a single question, in relation to measurement, has GA4 made that more challenging?

B: Actually, it’s quite convenient to be honest, because folk who are scrutinizing GA4 properties, that were set up a year ago, most of these search marketers who set them up a year ago haven’t really used them. We’re now in the last month and scrutinizing how things are configured and could be further optimized beyond just the basic setup. So when you’re working with clients, and you’re trying to sell a change to established metrics, sometimes it can be a bit challenging. And it’s quite a nice opportunity to look at these things together in a project rather than getting GA4 properties configured and in about three months’ time I’ll need to rip everything up again as we’ve got to consider a search generative experience.

Now if that Google Search generative experiences rolled out any week now in the UK, like we’re expecting, it’s a nice opportunity to bundle GA4 and search generative experience changes into reporting in one go.

4. Sites will get less top-of-funnel traffic

D: And your fourth way that generative AI is changing search is that sites will get less top-of-funnel traffic.

B: It’s just inevitable, where we’ve seen examples of the search generative experience in play in the US and they’re generally for very top-of-funnel queries and they’ve been taking such a dominant position in search results. It’s just inevitable that top-of-funnel traffic will be lost for websites. However, that’s not great news for sites that monetize through ads like publishers or maybe even affiliates. It’s going to hurt folks with vanity metrics for those top-of-funnel queries. I wouldn’t expect it to hurt conversions where last-touch attribution is concerned. Most of the clients we work with are used to using the last touch attribution and we haven’t really seen evidence that search generative experience is currently being surfaced for those “money” queries. But it’s just a fact that top-of-funnel traffic is going to be affected.

D: Yeah, I was going to have a follow-up question on that. I’m just wondering what that means for top-of-funnel strategies for content that you’re producing to attract those types of keywords. Are they not so important now?

B: Folks will have to be more disciplined focusing on the riches in the niches. Things that may have been appealing at the top of the funnel are not going to be so appealing now. Simply getting the raw numbers in that top-of-funnel for conversion is going to be more difficult. And it does lead on quite nicely to my final point if we can segue straight into that.

5. Search marketers will want to up their conversion game

My fifth point is that I think search marketers will find that they want to up their conversion game. This is a direct result of that previous point. Search marketers, I think in general, want to find easier, quicker, and more effective ways to get sheer numbers at the top of the funnel. It’s a numbers game. We don’t have to obsess over that conversion optimization. A/B testing can take months, and it can be inconclusive. And it’s easy to get bogged down in details for conversion, and oftentimes, it’s just easier to just get enough traffic at the top of the funnel where things will filter through.

And that mindset probably will have to change if top-of-funnel queries are harder to win. We’ll have to be more focused on those lower volume conversion-type queries, which would mean a bit more of a focus on getting conversions from that traffic, which is just a bit of a mentality shift for a lot of search marketers. A lot of organic search marketers have the skills but haven’t really been faced with having to confront the fairly mundane world of A/B testing for conversions.

D: I sense some potentially several follow-up episodes on things like ‘x’ ways that AI is changing top-of-funnel keyword strategy. So much more that can be discussed.

THE PARETO PICKLE – SCALE CONTENT FOR BOTTOM-OF-FUNNEL QUERIES

D: Pareto says that you can get 80% of your results from 20% of your efforts. What’s one SEO activity that you would recommend that provides incredible results for modest levels of effort?

B: We were just talking about the potential difficulty of top-of-funnel site entrances so I’d say my tip at the moment would be to scale content for these bottom-of-funnel type queries where the volumes are nowhere, the intent is higher, and you might have to achieve a slightly better ranking position for some of these bottom-of-the-funnel queries in order to get the click-through rate. So my advice would be to scale bottom-of-funnel content as much as possible to future-proof these efforts.

D: Superb. I’ve been your host, David Bain. You can find Ben Howe over at seomg.co.uk. Ben, thanks so much for being on the In Search SEO podcast.

B: Cheers.

by Darrell Mordecai

Darrell creates SEO content for Similarweb, drawing on his deep understanding of SEO and Google patents.