Author of Product-Led SEO | Strategic SEO Consultant & Growth advisor helping companies unlocks $billions in revenue | Angel Investor | Podcaster | Bestselling author | Please add a note to connection requests
The world is underestimating how much of an apocalypse Google's new experience will be. Here are my predictions for what will happen once this becomes the default experience: 1/ For most websites search traffic will decline by 30-50%. A former first position ranking on a query will now be the equivalent of a 10th position given that the generative response will take up the whole fold. 2/ Google ad campaigns will also see a massive decrease in clicks/spend as Google gives up short-term revenue to buy adoption of their new experience. The effectiveness of advertising will be immediately cut unless Google somehow secretly figured out to use its existing auction model to monetize generative responses. 3/ Query reporting in Google Seach Console will become mostly useless as more queries will become brand new and individual which will mean Google will have to hide them for privacy purposes. 4/ In q1 of 2023 Google's ad revenue was $59B. It won't be that in the current quarter given my prior production, this will have an impact on the overall stock price. 5/ Until Google figures out how to do query reporting, traffic that is sourced in an AI result will show up in analytical tools as referral traffic from Google. com rather than organic search. This channel swap will be very annoying for many marketers and data teams. 6/ Best practices around SEO will change and become a moving target until Google figures out how existing content is pulled into and then sourced in generative results. This will make it hard to build roadmaps based on chasing best practices. For example, do images become more important than title tags? Do header tags now become the new titles? What do links do for ranking in a generative result? 7/ OpenAI had the first mover advantage that Google is now being forced to chase. Expect Google to pull out a lot of stops including suggesting queries to type in Chrome as soon as you open the browser. Everything about Google search will change. If my predictions are even partially accurate the time to act is now. These are things you must do immediately: 1/ COMMUNICATE: Whether you are an in-house marketer, agency, or executive you need to communicate to stakeholders that there is a potential nuclear blast on the horizon that will impact revenue 2/PLAN: If traffic does get obliterated, develop a backup plan on where to acquire new traffic whether from advertising, partners, or different platforms. 3/ STRATEGIZE: Don't wait for the apocalypse to happen, wargame the different scenarios of what the new search experience could do to your business and come up with strategies to deal with it. 4/ LEARN: Right now, its anyone's guess when and how the new experience will land, don't be surprised when it happens. Read and learn as much as possible from publicly available information. #seo #google #ai
The biggest traffic causality to this generative AI experience will be informative/content driven searches. They will maintain ad-driven commercial intent search (showed as much during their demo with shopping). PPC will be fine. It will be rough for publishers and those who do SEO-articles to rank. As a google search user, I must admit this is much better aligned with my experience. I’ve used ChatGPT for straight answers, but google for comparison shopping. We’ll have to adjust strategies around awareness and discovery accordingly.
Seems that there are multiple ways Google can shoot themselves in the (or both) feet, if they aren't delicate. . 1. They cannibalize clicks from Google Ads in favor of ramming home this new generative AI experience. 2. They lose on-page ad revenue from content they used to send traffic to. 3. They lose the content that fuels their AI because producers refuse to give it away without proper citation. It's just an experiment at this point, and we know very little. It's coming, for sure...but may look very different in the future. Money talks.
Echoing the other comments, I don't think ad revenue will be impacted that much.
It will again create a gap between small and large brands. Only a few can afford high CPCs due to the high competition for first-page positions. Ultimately, brands need to rethink their marketing strategy and the efforts they put into SEO and paid advertising.
Highly unlikely Google will take any hit on ad revenue even short term
I think your same thoughts on voice search apply here. i think the query is going to be a huge factor in how this impacts SEO.
Sounds like companies investing in brand will be positioned well to weather changes in search traffic patterns.
I’ve been thinking along these lines too, great breakdown. I wonder about the revenue lost from those who have positions 1-5 that will be cannibalised by the AI result (which doesn’t credit its source/s) and if that is leaving Google open to litigation.
Eli Schwartz this is an interesting take. Lot to think about. Do you think this will affect other revenue streams for Alphabet, like YouTube ads, Google shopping etc, or only SERPs with information heavy search queries?
Founder of iPullRank | USA Today Top 10 SEO of 2022 | 2020 Search Marketer of the Year | Author of "The Science of SEO” Book Coming Soon | Toured 4 Continents as a Speaker and Rapper
12moI'm going point by point. 1. The generative stuff is slow. People will likely scroll and click a result while they wait. 2. We haven't seen what they are doing with text ads yet. 3. I agree we will see a much longer tail than before. Head terms will shrink dramatically 4. They aren't going to willingly kill their main source of revenue. 5.you may be right. They def don't make decisions based on this. 6. Will they? The inputs to the system don't actually change. What they do with them change. Retrieval augmented generation is just taking what ranks and feeding it into a language models. I think it will be just like when featured snippets rolled out. A lot of trial error and studying it, but no 100% effective way to get in there. 7. I don't think this matters long term. Google still has the most used platforms for a lot of things. Users are lazy and want new features in what they already use. A native bard integration in Google docs is much likely to eat into ChatGPT's user base than Bing adding ChatGPT did to Google's user base. Google also did a smart move by getting Jasper to dump OpenAI's tech. jasper being the single biggest consumer prior to Microsoft.