July 2023 – Generative AI in Search Results
Google’s search results pages (SERPs) are the lifeblood of site traffic for most companies. Organic plus paid search provides 68% of site traffic on average (with organic being the large majority of that), but Google (and Bing’s) experiments with included generative AI-powered search results may change things up!
Lincoln Rinehart, Sr. Director of SEO at Adept Marketing, helped provide some reassurance to those of us worried about how Google’s inclusion of AI into these SERPs might affect our traffic.
Even though Bing beat Google to the punch on this, and Google seriously flubbed their initial response, Google still dominates search engine market share. Any changes Google makes to their search experience can change the kind of traffic your site receives in a big way.
This kind of change seems pretty concerning, but Lincoln pointed out a number of ways in which it could be good for SEO and good for your site (even if you get less traffic).
- Changes the focus of SEO away from trying to “game the system” and towards how to benefit the users that do come to your site.
- SEO changes from a giant checklist approach to a holistic cross-disciplinary practice.
- Could decrease the amount of junky content created solely for SEO.
- Traffic that does come will be much more qualified.
Additionally, Google says AI-generated content is ok, as long as it’s not made explicitly for the purpose of manipulating rankings.
Lincoln also was careful to point out that this change may not even happen! This is still very much an experiment on Google’s side and they have some significant issues to work out before they decide if (and how) they might release this more widely.
Lincoln has also provided his slides! We promised not to dump all of the text out of the slides as white-on-white text at the bottom of the page.
And, just in case Google decides the presence of images makes a site more authoritative, we’ve got pics, too: