Traditional search engines are going to be dead within a few years. I wanna talk about how we know this and then who the winners and losers are gonna be in this shift. And then finally, I'll talk about how you can make sure you're one of the winners.
Kevin Indig recently reported that Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, says that he sees Google's AI mode replacing traditional search within two to three years. So that means what we now think of as Google Search would just be a separate tab that people can go to, but the default experience would be AI mode, which is a lot like ChatGPT. However, the shift from traditional search to AI mode has already begun.
Google is already experimenting with bringing more and more AI features into the traditional search results page. So it seems like it could happen much faster. So what is this going to mean for websites and small businesses when suddenly people are going to AI to get their answers instead of traditional search engines?
If you're someone that depends on web traffic like a publisher, then this is just bad news. But if you're a business that sells an actual product or service, there's gonna be a new set of winners and losers. I think this shift is gonna be a lot like the shift we saw when traditional search engines first came out, except a lot faster.
I'm old enough to remember when regular internet use was still very new. I remember circa 2000, I was in eighth grade, and we would be assigned to research papers and our teachers would have to tell us you can't use the internet to the research. Of course, you can't trust what's on the internet.
You need to go to the library. Everyone kind of accepted that as common wisdom back then. You couldn't trust anything on the internet.
You had to drive to the library, find a book, bri
ryone kind of accepted that as common wisdom back then. You couldn't trust anything on the internet. You had to drive to the library, find a book, bring it home, and read through it to find information.
Nowadays, if someone says they research something, it's a pretty safe bet that they went to Google, they did a handful of searches, they clicked on some of the links, and they read information from the websites. For about 10 or 20 years, this has been standard practice before making a big decision. That's all about to change.
5% of searches in Google's AI mode result in a single click. I think within a few years when we hear someone say I researched something, we'll be able to safely assume that they went to ChatGPT or Google AI mode and typed in one or two prompts. And I'm not passing judgment.
I think as these large language models get better, that will be the best way to do research. But what that means is we're effectively outsourcing our decision making to the large language models. After providing ChatGPT or AI mode all the relevant context, we'll just trust that do the necessary research to come back with the best recommendation for us.
So the winners in this shift are whoever the large language models recommend, and the losers are everyone else. So how do you make sure you're one of those winners? We don't know how these AI will work in a few years, but I can tell you what's working right now.
These large language models still use a search engine under the hood. And so you need to rank in traditional search engines. However, it's not the same as it is today.
Instead of doing a single broad search like dentist near me the way a human might, it'll do up to a dozen very specific searches. And then instead of just looking
oing a single broad search like dentist near me the way a human might, it'll do up to a dozen very specific searches. And then instead of just looking through the top few results like a human might, it'll look through multiple pages of search results. What this means is that the large language models are considering hundreds of pages before returning a recommendation.
And so it's no longer about ranking in position 1 for the most competitive search term. It's about showing up in as many places as possible. So the brands that are gonna win from all this are the noisy ones, the ones that are putting out content everywhere they can, that are joining the discussions wherever they're happening.
So that's exactly what we're doing for our clients. We're tracking where all these large language models are looking, and we're making sure our clients are represented on as many of the web pages as possible. By the way, if you're interested in keeping up with this stuff, Kevin Indig's newsletter, Growth Memo, is one of the best out there.
