By Emilia Martin
The short answer is yes.
Businesses that rely on Google Search to drive traffic and revenue to their websites are always trying to keep up with how their results are displayed or where they appear in the search results. Generative artificial intelligence and AI chatbots are reshaping the way people search and find information, challenging traditional SEO strategies.
It’s been more than a year since Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT hit the scene. This has created frenzied interest in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) capabilities from consumers, media and venture capital (VC) investors and put the largest search engine, Google, on red alert. This has led Google and Microsoft to focus on generative artificial intelligence as the centerpiece of their future of search.
Macroeconomic conditions for venture capital funding in 2023 tightened for everything except AI-related startups, which received $68.7 billion in 2023, according to PitchBook data reported by Techcrunch. This forced Google to announce several new AI-powered products, including its chatbot called Bard, and to launch its new AI-powered search engine called Search Generative Experience (SGE) in beta.
So, a question that’s been on my mind for the past few months as I’ve been playing with these AI tools: what will happen to startups, small businesses, and publishers that rely on Google search traffic when they decide to officially roll out this SGE to users? of all the world?
On December 12, Gartner released several marketing predictions for 2024, one of which was about organic search traffic:
“By 2028, brands’ organic search traffic will decline by 50% or more as consumers adopt AI-powered generative search.”
This rapid adoption of GenAI in search engines will significantly disrupt the ability of chief marketing officers (CMOs) to leverage organic search to drive sales. They suggested that businesses that rely on SEO should consider shifting resources to testing other marketing channels to diversify.
Is this prediction accurate? According to Gartner, the finding is the result of a small survey of fewer than 300 consumers. While the ultimate revenue impact of organic traffic remains uncertain as AI-driven search evolves, it is on the minds of entrepreneurs.
In a recent Business Insider article about the rise of AI-generated content and the problems it is creating, Gary Survis, an operating partner at VC firm Insights Partners, told BI:
“AI-powered search experiences like this can lead to a drop in traffic of up to 25% for many websites.”
Will this mean big brands will get all the search traffic, as marketing consultant AJ Kohn has suggested is already happening? When you search for a topic in Google’s new SGE, it will display an AI-generated response summary and cite the top 3 websites used to generate that response above the traditional ten blue link search results. The SGE experience appears to rank for a featured snippet, which is position zero. However, instead of an answer, the AI analyzes snippets of content from different sites to show a complete answer to a search query.
In the view of Search Engine Land columnist Julia McCoy,
“Contrary to popular belief, this means that SGE will not steal your traffic. If nothing else, it is giving publishers more placement opportunities.”
It’s too early to know as SGE technology is still experimental.