Google recently unveiled an Artificial Intelligence-centric facelift for its Search function, the likes of which will change the way users interact with results and even go about finding them. Publishers and advertisers everywhere are concerned.
The trepidation is understandable. Google Search has already moved away from becoming a vehicle through which it delivers referrals. AI summaries of individual webpages have become increasingly popular, significantly driving down pageviews.
Companies have needed to adapt accordingly. Catering to the almighty algorithm in hopes of ranking among the 10 blue organic links populated on the page has become primary goals for entire business models.
Yet, even that narrow tunnel of traffic-driving will be impacted by Google’s latest update. The fallout from it contains multitudes, and nearly every publisher and advertiser will be impacted.
Indeed, recognizable brands with plenty of organic traffic will be fine. As vegasbetting.com explains in their review of the Bovada sports betting app, even the gambling industry, which has so long been motivated by corralling new users, is focusing more on user interfaces and experiences that emphasize repeat customers, who do not stumble upon them using the search function.
Not every brand has that kind of staying power, though. Even if they do, Search is still supposed to be a piece of the click-traffic pie. If that’s going away, how are publishers and advertisers supposed to adapt, or in some cases, survive? There is no universal panacea. Google’s new AI-powered search is still too new. However, a couple of key points stand out.
What is the Nature Google’s Search Overhaul?
First and foremost, we need to understand how Google is changing the Search experience. Here is Sarah Perez of TechCrunch with the lowdown:
“Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times. Google is also introducing tools that can dispatch “information agents” to gather information on a user’s behalf, along with tools that let users build personalized mini apps tailored to their needs. With the revamped Search experience, the new search box simply expands to accommodate longer, more conversational queries, rather than making you decide what type of search experience or mode you want to choose at the start of your query. It will also have a new AI-powered query suggestion system that goes beyond autocomplete to help people craft more complex and nuanced queries, Google says.”
Perez goes on to explain other changes to the search experience. Most of them are built around the deployment of AI agents. These tools will, in essence, make it even less likely that users click on links and visit websites off Google.
This comes at a time when such referral traffic is at its nadir. A study from Chartbeat, released by Axios, found that traffic from Search last year plummeted by over 60 percent for small publishers and by more than 45 percent for mid-sized ones.
Here’s How Publishers will Need to Adjust
“Google Doodles” Licensed Under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Anticipating the uproar, Google has released its first batch of guidelines for how websites can optimize themselves for the new near-exclusive AI Search edition. Believe it or not, not much changes—functionally speaking anyway.
Google says that all of the SEO focuses should remain the same. Those best practices will heavily inform what gets selected for AI overviews. There will, however, be a larger push to weed out and ignore “content ‘chunking,’ AI-specific rewriting, pursuing inauthentic brand mentions, and over-indexing on structured data for AI purposes,” according to TheKeyword.
When it comes to generating engagement, the biggest shift comes in measurement. Brands will now must get used to using “AI visibility” metrics. This is an evaluation of how much they appear in Google Search’s overviews and likely how much time people spend hovering over that information. These numbers can then be provided to advertisers, and ad revenue will be determined through this lens.
Of course, it isn’t clear how long it will take publishers to adopt these metrics, or more importantly, how long it will take advertisers to adjust their pay-per models.
In the meantime, paid search options are expected to be at a premium. They already received priority listing in the previous iteration of Google Search. It’s expected that they could populate the meat and potatoes of the AI overviews in the new era.
Optimists continue to hope that Google’s transition to a more interactive webpage-like Search might increase bottom-to-top engagement of users. This is to say, getting used to more calls to action might actually increase the likelihood they take the extra step of navigating to external webpages.
Still, this feels like wishful thinking, in large part because Google Search interactions will be built around interaction with AI agents, whose primary goals will presumably be providing enough of a thorough overview to prevent users from leaving that specific page.
Publishers and advertisers can speculate themselves about what this all means. But make no mistake, Search is about to change forever. Though companies may not have to overhaul their behaviors, they will need to reimagine how they measure the success of their sites, and what constitutes engagement worth paying for.
