In the past couple of years, the world seems to have been changing more than it did in the last year (or two) when we look at it from a technological perspective. Back in October 2021, Meta embarked on a journey to create the Metaverse, something that Mark Zuckerberg himself labelled as “the successor to the mobile internet”.
Fast forward a couple of years, and AI has made its way into the hands (and minds) of many, ahead of the metaverse. It has also reached a lot more ‘common places’ and feels like a much more democratized solution to many everyday actions, such as online searching, which seems to be one of the cornerstones of the AI revolution the world is starting to experience.
Introducing the AI Revolution
One could compare this AI revolution to how the digital calculator came to be part of the everyday toolset for many human beings despite their profession. It was always important to learn the basics, get educated on the foundations and how it worked, and then start using the tool to solve more complex or repetitive problems.
The exponential rate at which AI has been growing and changing over the past months shows just how much change we can expect to see in the future and its impacts on the world.
In this article, we will explore the impact of this AI revolution on the organic search space and on SEO; an estimated average of 3.5 daily billion searches (only in Google) may make it one of the most common actions in today’s world. We will also discuss what brands should be doing to adapt to these changes, what are some of the challenges and opportunities for SEO professionals, and key considerations in its usage.
A Brief History of (“The Latest”) Chatbots
In November 2022, Open AI released ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot built on top of Open AI’s families of large language models (LLMs), trained from millions of different sources of information up to 2021 which allowed the user to communicate and ask questions in a conversational mode and getting a written output based on the user’s input.
The friendly user interface that resembles a typical chat window from your favourite platform along with the capacity to offer answers to specific questions, help create written content, edit, translate to multiple languages, and more, allowed ChatGPT to reach an estimated 100 million monthly active users by January 2023, just two months after its launch.
Following the disruptive (and exciting) new possibilities that ChatGPT opened up for search-users, Microsoft (who has been an early investor in OpenAI) released the New Bing, a reinvented search experience for their Search Engine, and expand their AI capabilities to all of their products. On the other hand, Google, off the back of its multiple LLMs (Such as LaMDA and so many others) announced its own AI product, Bard, which aims not to only be implemented in their Search Engine, but all their suite of products.
Five months from the disruptive launch of ChatGPT, on the 14th of March of 2023, Open AI’s ‘multimodal’ GPT-4 was released. This latest iteration can generate content from both image and text inputs and give text outputs and has been described by Open AI as “while less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks”.
Given the nature of the changes from these new AI solutions and proposals for different companies, the implications for SEO and the way that we search online are far-reaching.
Impact of AI on SEO: What should brands be doing?
Consider the technical implications for their websites
Technical SEO will not only need to be focused on building a healthy and fast websites or helping define the site’s foundations to be properly crawled and indexed but will need to focus on working as a bridge and translator for AI and robots to understand content correctly and more efficiently.
This means that Schema, tagging, and markups will be especially important to help AI understand the contents of your page (regardless of the format) and move through the website seamlessly (an area where the site architecture will also have a key role).
Winning brands will need to ensure their technical foundations (including the elements mentioned above) are covered, before prioritising the optimisation of content in a way that is tailored to AI. As a minimum, both tasks need to be done in parallel to cover both bases, although, it is important to notice that there will be little point in creating content geared towards AI if the site’s groundwork has not been laid.
Build their content library (at scale) tailored to sophisticated crawling and indexing
In order to adapt to the AI revolution, Brands need to keep building their own “library” of content that is relevant to them, at scale.
Marketers and SEO experts need to make sure that the brands are covering content and topics in-depth and in multiple different formats. This way, if users reach the “straightforward” answers on the AI’s chats, they will still have the motivation to dig deeper into a website to build up their knowledge.
It will also be important to cover as many long tail keywords, and topics in their industry, as possible, to try and make sure that the brands’ owned pages are featured as the sources for the AI responses on search results. Good quality and thorough keyword research will have an even more important role to play.
Thou shall not forget thy brand
Brands must also make sure that they are covering all their ‘weak spots’. If AI is to be presenting information about a specific brand or company, Brands need to make sure that the information comes from their own website or content library, as much as possible. This, at the same time, will put brands in a position where they can be part drivers of the stories told about them in the AI chats.
Brand building may not happen in the organic search space directly, but SEO must definitely be there to support it. This refers to a holistic search experience across platforms that are relevant to your audience, such as Tik Tok or Instagram.
Authority is also built from within
Aligning internal content with Google’s EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) will be more important than ever. With AI having the ability to access content and pages at a rapid rate, brands need to ensure they are displaying their authority from within their websites.
Backlinks will remain a key factor, but the authority and expertise shown from owned content should be on equal grounds.
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How would brands measure success? Attribution and Analytics
Measurement of attribution, forecasting and budgeting for different marketing channels, and SEO specifically have always been a challenge for many brands.
With AI chatbots becoming more prominent in search engines, traditional multi-touch attribution models (MTA) may not be the best solution as touch points increase, but instead, may need to be replaced by newer models such as mix modelling marketing (MMM) that rely on broader statistical frameworks. Therefore, the SEO industry could start seeing new metrics from the AI chat interactions that may be important to track (i.e. Number of prompts where the brand was mentioned, quality of engagement during chats, depth of prompts, etc).
A challenge that will certainly be present, is the possibility of users not landing on the website after a chat interaction. This can be a similar scenario to the zero-click searches in Google due to the search engine’s feature snippets. For these types of situations, SEO experts will need to educate the brands on other not-so-quantifiable benefits of SEO, such as increasing brand visibility and remembrance.
In reality, it is still too early to say how the interactions on the chats will be measured, however, Microsoft has already announced that there will be an integration between the Bing Chat and Webmaster tools. This will certainly shed light on how search engines may interpret chat data.
Education must be a key priority for brands, internal teams, and experts
There is definitely a correct way to use AI when it comes to SEO, not expecting it to replace humans, but working for them as a tool.
The quality of the output of the AI tools will only be as good as the quality of the input. This refers firstly to the quality of the prompt and what the AI is being asked for, and secondly, but equally important, the quality of the training materials for the Machine Learning algorithms (ML).
Final Thoughts
The rise of AI chatbots and the AI revolution is changing the way brands need to engage with their audiences. However, the success of these tools is dependent on the quality of input and the training materials used in their development. Proper education on how to use these technologies, prompt engineering, and other SEO tactics are also crucial for successful implementations.
As the use of AI chatbots becomes more widespread, it is clear that they are here to stay, and businesses need to adapt to this new technology to remain competitive. By investing in high-quality inputs, training, and proper education for their teams, businesses can successfully integrate AI chatbots into their customer engagement and SEO strategies.
Remember that while the rise of AI chatbots may seem daunting, it also presents exciting new opportunities for businesses to connect with their customers in more meaningful ways. As long as businesses remain agile and willing to adapt, the future looks bright for those willing to embrace this exciting innovative technology.
As with any revolution, some jobs and opportunities from the past may become obsolete, but humanity has always adapted and developed new opportunities from these challenges. The future of AI tools is no different, it is important to embrace them, and learn how to use them to our advantage.
To me, AI and chatbots are becoming more like the library clerk in the Ready Player One Movie
In the movie Ready Player One, there is a scene when the main character (Wade Watts) goes to the Halliday Journals, a massive library containing all the memories and interests from James Halliday (the creator of the OASIS, the virtual world around which the story is mostly developed). In the library, Wade is attended by a library clerk, who seems to be omnisapient and omnipresent, and can help him find specific information (memories) across and through the archive.
Screenshot of the Ready Player One scene where Wade and Artemis look at one of the memories in the Halliday Journal Archives. This image is used as a representation of how AI Chatbots may behave across the internet as library clerks.
Throughout the movie, Wade asks multiple questions to the clerk, but it is only one that actually takes him to the memory he wants to see. Although the right memory had always been there in the library, it wasn’t until Wade made the right questions that he was taken to the right answer.
FAQs
Will websites become irrelevant?
On the contrary, AI bots need the internet to keep growing, as it makes up part of their fuel and is a vital source of their extensive knowledge and information base. However, the way that websites are sued and promoted may change. For example, they may need to become centralised sources of information, with in-depth content that is high-quality ‘fuel’ for the data layer structure of the ML.
Will Bing overtake Google?
From our perspective, there is no danger of this happening any time soon. While it is true that Bing has been gaining some ground on Google in recent months, one of the caveats is that the Bing chatbot is currently only available when used in Microsoft Edge. Up until December 2022, Chrome owned around 50% of the market share in web browsers used in the U.S. (one of the markets with the biggest impacts in the Search Engine landscape), and the change of behaviour required is a large bridge to the gap.
Should the change happen, we foresee this taking a significant amount of time to take place given the hold that Google and Chrome have over the online space. However, it’s important for brands to keep an eye on Bing and other search engines to ensure that their content is optimized for all search platforms.
This article was first created as a POV for Kinesso Australia during my role as SEO Manager in November 2023.
