Google Unveils New Search Generative Experience. Is SEO Dead?

[MTF]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVsiusLQy5Q


Once this is live globally, SEO will be effectively dead for most publishers.

Look how much space this new tab takes. The entire above the fold will be gone. Who's going to scroll down to manually check search results? 95% of people will quickly switch to this more efficient, interactive, and most importantly, lazier way to get information.

Barring some exceptions, Internet publishers are F*cked. Google will scrape all the content for its AI and get all the money and traffic. Even if they show some sources, who's going to care enough to click if they got their answer?

I'm curious how it's going to affect the quality of information online. As a web publisher, why would I keep writing new content only for it to be stolen by Google without giving me anything in return?

 

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[Supa]

Without giving people reasons to add content for them to scrape they are basically reducing the amount of good content to scrape from in the future…

But it‘s a Google, so I‘m pretty sure they are aware of this and may come up with other ways for people to want to create content.

 

[heavy_industry]

This moment has been anticipated since the inception of the web. A higher order search engine that uses the traditional search engine to aggregate results.

It took 30 years, but it is finally here. This was unavoidable.

Barring some exceptions, Internet publishers are F*cked.

I do not share the same opinion. Here are a few reasons for it:

1. People seeking quick answers would have bounced off your website as soon as they've got what they wanted. Those people would have not become paying customers or return-visitors anyways.

2. People that are interested in a topic and want to study it in depth, will end up searching for and spending a lot of time on authority websites. It's much more convenient to browse a website and bookmark pages, rather than doing quick search after search after search.

3. Google is not stupid.
They are fully aware of the fact that cannibalizing the content available on the web without giving any credit to the authors will remove the incentive to produce, which will gradually cause the degradation of the information freely available on the web.

---

Things will change, and the market will shift.
The strategy used by publishers that has worked fine for the last 10-20 years will need to be updated.

"With every door that closes a new one opens" - Alexander Graham Bell

Every technological shift over the past 5000 years has eventually resulted in more wealth for everybody. There is nothing to worry about.

Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.

 

[Supa]

This moment has been anticipated since the inception of the web. A higher order search engine that uses the traditional search engine to aggregate results.

It took 30 years, but it is finally here. This was unavoidable.


I do not share the same opinion. Here are a few reasons for it:

1. People seeking quick answers would have bounced off your website as soon as they've got what they wanted. Those people would have not become paying customers or return-visitors anyways.

2. People that are interested in a topic and want to study it in depth, will end up searching for and spending a lot of time on authority websites. It's much more convenient to browse a website and bookmark pages, rather than doing quick search after search after search.

3. Google is not stupid.
They are fully aware of the fact that cannibalizing the content available on the web without giving any credit to the authors will remove the incentive to produce, which will gradually cause the degradation of the information freely available on the web.

---

Things will change, and the market will shift.
The strategy used by publishers that has worked fine for the last 10-20 years will need to be updated.

"With every door that closes a new one opens" - Alexander Graham Bell

Every technological shift over the past 5000 years has eventually resulted in more wealth for everybody. There is nothing to worry about.

Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.

Absolutely agree. As an user of Google this will be a great addition and improvement. As producers that want to be found through Google, this will be a change but probably a good and promising one that brings with it new possbilities.

 

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[heavy_industry]

As producers that want to be found through Google, this will be a change but probably a good and promising one that brings with it new possbilities.

Exactly.

Google understands that content producers are the lifeblood of their business. Their search engine is the middleman between consumers and producers.

That's why they have invested a significant amount of money and resources for the creation of tools for web masters: color pickers, fonts, traffic analysis etc.

And that's also why they've released the generative AI search feature at the very last moment.

I am 100% sure that this technology is not something new. And in fact has been fully developed for a number of years, but kept a secret.

The only reason they've decided to release the kraken now, is because they don't want OpenAI to steal any market share from them.

And this was a very smart move.

 

[BizyDad]

I hear echos...



SEO is dead. Long live SEO.

Once this is live globally, SEO will be effectively dead for most publishers.

10 years ago Google announced voice search. People said the same thing then...

Barring some exceptions, Internet publishers are F*cked. ... Even if they show some sources, who's going to care enough to click if they got their answer?

Because of voice search, Google developed a rich snippets and the zero position in search results.

Today, the zero position in search results is highly valued by any SEO. And people are producing more content than ever.

But Google still hasn't figured out how to actually show the right snippet in all cases. If anything, voice search has gotten worse in the last 3 years, and it was never all that great to begin with.

Pivot to AI search, the latest thing to kill SEO...

I'm curious how it's going to affect the quality of information online. As a web publisher, why would I keep writing new content only for it to be stolen by Google without giving me anything in return?

This is one of the driving forces behind regulation on Google. I have been hearing people sing this song for literally 10 years.

But we keep getting more new content, not less. In this brave new world Ecommerce stores will still enter their feeds into the merchant center. Local businesses will still update their Google profile and get reviews.

Or to be more specific, they will hire an SEO company to do stuff like this for them.

Putting that aside, to answer your question, because you're building a brand and a connection between your customers or readers. And in doing so, you're certainly not only relying on only Google for traffic.

Creating value is still the fundamental essence of what we do as entrepreneurs. Just because one of the tools that we use to send messages to customers is continuing its process of evolving, doesn't mean you can't build a value creation machine anymore...

Google is not stupid.
They are fully aware of the fact that cannibalizing the content available on the web without giving any credit to the authors will remove the incentive to produce, which will gradually cause the degradation of the information freely available on the web.

Google understands that content producers are the lifeblood of their business. Their search engine is the middleman between consumers and producers.

Sorry bud, but you can stop this nonsense. I'm not sure where you got this Kool-Aid from, but you're drinking the good stuff.

Google has a literal track record of stealing content and flaunting existing laws. Two examples...

They scanned library books and put them on the web for free, in violation of copyright laws. It took many years for the publishing industry win victories against the company.

They created Google amp, highly incentivized publishers to use it. This led to things like people using Google news and getting all their news directly from google, no traffic or ad revenue going to the news media companies.

In both cases, the only thing that adjusted their behavior was not Google "smartness", it was legislation or the threat of legislation.

shhhhh, nobody tell Kak that government has a role to play in the "free" market.

 

[srodrigo]

Is this the new Bard thingy, or a different tech?

I haven't been following lately as I don't want to get even more distracted. But I remember reading that Bard sucked because it was based on GPT. Maybe that was misinformation, or they just released a subpar version to weaken their enemies before releasing the good one (someone's been reading The Art of War).

The stuff on the video definitely seems to have potential to leave ChatGPT in the dust. I agree this was coming though, it's the natural step in search engines, and Google has the resources to make it happen.

Anyway, I don't see this killing content websites:

• The video shows links to other pages. It just presents the information in a much more useful format, so you might not even click on that page (or yes? we'll see how an actual human behaves).
• They need the information from some source. No new websites means no new information means ship sinks. I'm sure they'll do it in a way that doesn't put people off too much.
• Google already shows "answers to questions". Not in such a useful format, but I've been skipping clicking on links more than before because Google search already showed me a snippet of what I needed to know. Sometimes this works as a nice preview to sell me on actually going to the website and finding out more (which is why I don't think it's necessarily going to kill content websites).

Interesting times anyway. We'll see what happens. I think we are at, or about to get into, the next tech revolution that will change everything, for good or bad. Whoever thinks this is hype because it's come out of nowhere and all the sudden all big tech are releasing their AI big guns at once, is like an ostrich burring her head into the ground. AI has been in the making for decades. We just needed the computer power, which is now pretty much infinite, and the interest of companies with $$$$$$$$, to make it happen. That, and someone lighting the first fireworks for the rest to join the party.

 

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[Andy Black]

My reply when you brought this up in your INSIDERS thread:

What are the opportunities?
Big changes bring big opportunities.

I saw they're serving up videos in the search results. Where is it getting those videos from? Are they ones on YouTube? How does it decide which to serve?

As for the other formats of content, the video moved too fast and I couldn't quite figure it out. Is it going to create a response ChatGPT style? Are you saying no-one will want to read articles anymore? That everyone will just take that AI generated response without a grain of salt?

What are the opportunities @MTF? What are all the businesses spending thousands and hundreds of thousands a month on article creation and SEO going to do now? Can you go where the puck is heading?

How well will this be implemented by Google? Will folks use it or will they still look at the articles listed below? How do you know 95% of people won't scroll down?

Also... what's your end goal creating content? To generate leads, and signups I presume? And to then sell something or charge businesses to sell something to your audience/list? I presume your end goals haven't changed and it's more a case of adapting or changing your "how"?

It feels you've thrown the towel in a bit fast, and after watching some trendy promotional video about some future feature that may or may not be poorly implemented and may or may not be adopted by searchers.

Regardless, what are the opportunities?

 

[MTF]

Without giving people reasons to add content for them to scrape they are basically reducing the amount of good content to scrape from in the future…

But it‘s a Google, so I‘m pretty sure they are aware of this and may come up with other ways for people to want to create content.

Perhaps they only need to keep big publishers happy. Already most of SERPs are dominated by a few major sites like Forbes and Business INSIDERS no matter what you're searching for.

1. People seeking quick answers would have bounced off your website as soon as they've got what they wanted. Those people would have not become paying customers or return-visitors anyways.

On a website monetized by advertising (which is a LOT of niche sites), they could have clicked an ad.

2. People that are interested in a topic and want to study it in depth, will end up searching for and spending a lot of time on authority websites. It's much more convenient to browse a website and bookmark pages, rather than doing quick search after search after search.

How many people these days are so interested in a topic enough to study it in depth? I feel like it's maybe a few percent of the population. The rest is happy with 15-second shorts.

3. Google is not stupid.
They are fully aware of the fact that cannibalizing the content available on the web without giving any credit to the authors will remove the incentive to produce, which will gradually cause the degradation of the information freely available on the web.

They're not stupid but they don't care about publishers. Their only concern is their own bottom line.

10 years ago Google announced voice search. People said the same thing then...

At least a 5-10% percentage of my searches have gone to ChatGPT. But I like researching various websites so I'm still oldschool about search. For an average person who doesn't want to spend too much time looking for information implementing a Chat-GPT-esque solution means a LOT less traffic to the websites. Perhaps 30%, perhaps 50%, and perhaps 80% or more.

As a searcher, I don't really care much about the publisher but about answering my question. If I can get the answer without visiting the websites, that's even better (and way better for people from developing countries with slow data and data caps).

Will SEO survive? Probably so. But so has radio. Doesn't change the fact that radio today is not even a fraction of a marketing powerhouse it was a few decades ago.

The video shows links to other pages. It just presents the information in a much more useful format, so you might not even click on that page (or yes? we'll see how an actual human behaves).

I'm not sure how many people will check these links. Why would you? If you rarely visit the websites when you see snippets (I rarely do), why would you check the websites if you have a comprehensive answer right in Google?

 

[RicardoGrande]

The day ChatGPT released into open access and I saw twitter threads of guys firing their SEO writing teams- followed by google's announcements with bard and Microsoft pushing their GPT into bing I sort of felt like this is where it's heading.
Unsure of how google will tweak the algo in total and what will happen in the coming months/year, and it sure is unfortunate for people that work in SEO, but this is a good thing for consumers in the end.

 

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[heavy_industry]

I'm not sure where you got this Kool-Aid from, but you're drinking the good stuff.

I know brother, it's simply amazing.

We can both have it as a pre-workout if you want.

 

[SEBASTlAN]

 

[capitao]

As we can see in this video, content is still necessary and a few blogposts still show up right next to the generated content.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XbweREYQMo


But yeah, content creation will dim.

 

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[heavy_industry]

View attachment 48750

If there is one thing I've learned about technology, is that it's predictably unpredictable.

The one thing that we know for sure is that things will change.

When, how, why, and what will the downstream consequences be is something nearly impossible to predict.

Providing value will always be the winning strategy, regardless of the underlying technology being used. So perhaps that should be our main focus, rather than speculating on what might happen in the future.

 

[Supa]

Maybe this new way of searching will help us get rid of these f*cking annoying SEO filler articles that spend 80% of their words more on putting as many keywords in there to get a click, than to actually give the reader something of value when they click.

Maybe this helps to have writers actually focus on the essence of what they are writing about. Maybe in the near future it will be about whose writings gets picked the most by Google's AI.

Not everything can be put into one or two paragraphs of text, but a lot can. If I want to read something by Mark Manson for example (who writes really wrong articles) there won't be any essence of that article for AI to pick and thereby replace reading the whole article. I could get a summary once I already read it or something like this, but nothing can replace reading the whole thing.

For a lot of other types of writing though, the essence of what an article is about (i.e. what the title promised 8 subheadings ago), actually could be summarized by AI. All it has to do for that is to search for the essence in those long articles and write a few intro and outro words around it. And if someone actually wants the content below all those subheadings, they can still go on that site and read it.

Maybe this will bring back a focus on content instead of being found on search engines.

Just some thoughts I had while making coffee...

 

[srodrigo]

I'm not sure how many people will check these links. Why would you? If you rarely visit the websites when you see snippets (I rarely do), why would you check the websites if you have a comprehensive answer right in Google?

Then no one will dare writing anything and Google won't have much to show.
I'm sure there'll be a sweet spot somehow.

I still click on the snippets for more context, usually. Everyone browses differently. I don't know about actual statistics, to be honest. So I don't know what's more common.

 

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[maker]

SEO is alive and well

If you look at the longer presentation you'll see it's mostly the same product in a different wrapper with a touch of AI. They want to play it safe and at the same time look like they're revolutionizing the world by AI-ing themselves.

 

[samsig03]

If SEO/Paid traffic are going to decrease dramatically in the next 5 years, what type of advertising will become more valuable? Influencers, newsletters, podcasts, youtube ads, forums with a current set of eyeballs an organic way to grow.....