“It is a big change, these are disruptive moments,” says Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google in a recent podcast. It talks about the arrival of artificial intelligence to the search engine. For a few weeks now, Google has been testing the AI Overviews (AI summaries) for some searches: these are paragraphs generated by AI that try to answer the user’s search. “Let Google search for you,” the company says.
The change has not reached Spain or Europe. There is also no arrival date. But there is a group of Spaniards very aware of how the responses with AI will work: they are the so-called SEO (acronym in English for “search engine optimization”) and whose job is to try to place their clients’ pages at the top. How will they do their job if Google no longer offers links and directly gives answers? Will your job disappear?
EL PAÍS has asked a handful of digital consultants specialized in SEO. Their collective response: relax, it’s no big deal. “SEO has died so many times,” says David Carrasco, SEO consultant. The arrival of AI in search does not completely eliminate links. Google gives below its summary the links from which it has taken the information, adds others later and also creates a new tab called Web where users will be able to see only links, without any type of AI.
“This has happened before,” says Betlem Cardona, SEO director at an agency. “Everyone believes that we are going to experience a revolution, we put our hands on our heads and in the end it is not like that.” Since the appearance of ChatGPT, in November 2022, the murmur about the end of the traditional search engine is constant. OpenAI, creators of ChatGPT, teamed up with Microsoft to, among other things, improve its search engine, Bing. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella then said of Google: “I want people to know that we will make them dance.” In February there were rumors about the development of a specific search tool in ChatGPT, which was supposed to appear in May and has not yet arrived. There are already AI-powered search engines on the market, such as Perplexity, but their market share is small.
None of this has come to fruition so far. Pichai even gently responded to Nadella in May: “One of the ways we can go wrong is to listen to the noise out there and play someone else’s music,” he said. The Google search engine is the gateway to the Internet for millions of people. The changes there are not fast, although in February the consulting firm Gartner predicted that search engines would lose 25% share in 2026 in favor of chatbots and other AI agents.
Google vs. Microsoft | The Circuit with Emily Chang
“We have a clear sense of what we need to do.” Google CEO Sundar Pichai tells Emily Chang he’s listening to his own “dance music” (not Microsoft’s). More on The Circuit: http://trib.al/yF5dutk
Posted by Bloomberg on Wednesday, May 8, 2024
“They are scared of what others can do, but it has been more than a year and a half since ChatGPT, a year and two months since Bing Copilot, a year and three months since Perplexity and none of them have gained a significant share of Google,” says Juan González Villa, consultant. SEO. “Bing has made an investment and so far it has barely achieved anything, although 1% of a very large market is a lot. But that doesn’t scare Google that much,” he adds.
Changes of this magnitude take longer. “On a day-to-day basis this will go more slowly,” continues González Villa. “Google will do it carefully not to cannibalize itself. It lives primarily on advertising revenue when people click on links,” he adds. Google has already announced that it would add advertising to its summaries with AI as well. Google does not give summaries for all searches. In the tests carried out by EL PAÍS and this SEO group, it is more likely that AI will appear with strange searches or questions where links previously did not give results (what is the relationship between chimpanzees and astronauts?) and less likely in lucrative searches for Google, like “best coffee maker”.
Searches linked to news or breaking news are also more difficult to automate. The AI needs time to compile these summaries and will have a hard time summarizing a match or a blitz while it is happening or just over. The media is, however, one of the groups most concerned with these changes. Networks send less traffic to media. Google is your last hope and if you eliminate a percentage of easy clicks with AI summaries (for example the typical “who is that person”) your impact will be noticeable. On June 7, the executive president of Business Insider He sent a message to the entire newsroom: “Google traffic has been especially volatile in the media landscape over the last month,” he wrote. “The way people find and access information changes rapidly (…). When our content is summarized and served, we gain nothing to support our journalism,” she says.
These changes have already begun to generate controversy among the media and search engines. In the first days of AI Overviews, Users found a few questions that Google gave wrong or ridiculous results. In a more serious case due to its connotations, Perplexity openly told exclusive news that Forbes had posted behind their paywall. Perplexity has tried to give several answers, but it is a new case of how these AI companies suck content in one way or another to continue growing.
Perplexity’s knock off of our reporting feels like a crystallization of the “Can journalism survive AI?” convo. The company took our paywalled work, without our permission, and competitively broadcast it across web, video, mobile — as though it were itself a media outlet. https://t.co/kEi15MYOQI
— John Paczkowski (@JohnPaczkowski) June 11, 2024
Carefully
Google, due to its position in the internet fabric, has to be careful: “We cannot assume that in a year there will be no SEO. Google will be careful because 70% of the website’s referral traffic comes from Google. Imagine if you stopped referring it, such a radical change from Google would not be sustained,” says González Valle.
Despite this supposed calm, Google assumes that these are imminent and important changes. “I was in Google training,” explains Beatriz Tejada, a digital marketing consultant who attended a course at a Google headquarters in Madrid in May. “In class they suddenly told us [que el método tradicional] ‘it’s dead, it doesn’t work anymore’. But I think we are in that transition right now,” she says.
Some searches are based on keywords. Now those words will be converted into a series of values that allow the algorithm to calculate how to best answer a question: “Before it was searching for a keyword, you did a keyword study based on the client’s niche. Now it is more about searching for a series of words semantically that are related to the keyword,” says Tejada. It is a way to facilitate consultations by AI questions.
“We are checking what are the results of the questions asked by our users, the target audience of your clients, and what type of results are activated by artificial intelligence and you analyze the sources,” says Cardona. “This way you have a strategic line to work on to know what content you have to develop to answer because we are discovering many questions that we did not know about.”
Another alleged novelty shared by Pichai is that the user’s behavior towards summaries is not apathetic: they look for more information in the links. Cardona has a similar experience: “User behavior as Google search results are built has a very machine-like behavior.” pinball. You don’t click on the first three results, you go down, go through all the pages, click here, go back up, do scroll. It has a very different behavior because there are results that are more attractive,” she says.
All these details mean that the real changes depend on how users accept the news from Google, which is the only one that has all the metrics. “With each update we have known how to be a little more cautious, more skeptical,” says David Carrasco. “It is true that there is concern, but as can happen with translators or editors. Things are changing, but it is true, and especially since we are SEOs, where the majority of my generation has transformed, we have made a living, so we will always have the same objective: send qualified traffic to our clients. If the search engine no longer works as it does now, perhaps five years from now Google will no longer be the main engine, then we will invent something else, we will have to evolve,” says Carrasco.
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