I have been a serial entrepreneur for over 25 years now. Each of the businesses I built included a healthy dose of search engine marketing, anchored by Google, the “big dog on the block”. Google controls over 90% of all searches completed on the internet worldwide, a market share it has held for the last decade. It was never imaginable that anyone could ever take Google down off its perch. But with all the progress the artificial intelligence (AI) companies are making in the search world (e.g., ChatGPT recently launching SearchGPT), it may not be long before there is a “new sheriff in town”. And that could be really bad news for most of us digital marketers that have grown to be dependent on Google over the years. This post will help you get in-front of this pending avalanche on the cusp of happening.
How Search Engine Marketing Works Today
If you are new business trying to get off the ground, most do so on the backs of companies like Google where millions of people are searching for things each and every day. You simply needed to piggyback on their huge audience. And you either did that by trying to get free organic traffic as Google indexed pages on your website, which you would try to manipulate through search engine optimization efforts (e.g., content creations, sourcing backlinks, optimizing the page code). Or you would do it the quicker, easier and often more costly way of purchasing pay-per-click advertising through Google Ads. This latter effort meant you always had an immediate way to get your business exposure with 100% certainty. As long as you had advertising money to spend, Google would find you an audience.
How Artificial Intelligence Changes This
First of all, these AI companies are in their infancy and they are solely focused on winning the “technology war” up against their competitors to prove they have the best AI search product in the market. Which means they are not focused at all on how to monetize it yet. Secondly, there will be a handful of players that rise to the top of this race. Which means it is unclear who the winner will be that you need to focus your marketing efforts on, which will result in a much more splintered marketing efforts across multiple sites to manage (no single “big dog” yet). Thirdly, there is no “handbook” written on how you can “game” the AI companies to include free organic links to your company. It took decades to learn how to “manipulate” the Google algorithm, and it is unclear what needs to happen to manipulate more conversational AI robots.
This doesn’t even speak to the biggest point—AI can do things that were never even possible or imaginable with Google, making it a “better mousetrap” which will capture a lot of attention from users looking for solutions. For example, if you are looking for a vacation on Google, you better have your “keywords” ready (e.g., whitewater rafting trip, best things to see in Florida, best hotels in New York). With AI you can layer in a lot of different things into a single search. I was amazed when ChatGPT could quickly answer this question I posed: when you combine the cost of air, hotel and concert ticket costs, which of the 20 cities in Taylor Swift’s European Tour is the cheapest place to see the concert with me starting from Detroit. In less than a couple seconds it pulled all the airline cost options, hotel cost options, concert ticket options by city, and made a well-researched and detailed recommendation. WOW, was all I could say!! This is a game changer, and Google should be really worried. But more importantly, us digital marketers need to be shaking in our boots right now.
What This Means for Digital Marketing
First of all, it is going to be a “wild ride” for the next few years. Most likely two things will happen, in this order. First, people will experiment with all the new AI engines. And they will gravitate to the ones they like better than Google, and Google will start to lose its stranglehold grip and market share. This means you will see a lot less traffic coming from Google to your website, or the cost of that traffic will materially increase as you and your competitors will be fighting over less-and-less traffic over time.
The second thing will happen is the winning AI companies will finally turn their focus to revenues and monetization and launch advertising options on their websites. It is not exactly clear how they will do that (e.g., keyword based like Google or something completely different), so it will be a learning exercise for all involved. Which means there won’t be an immediate replacement for your lost Google traffic, and there will be this “middle period” of waiting to learn how to replace that lost traffic from the new AI engines. That will put a lot of strain on your financial results—losing traffic from Google, waiting for new solutions, learning new solutions from AI engines. It could result in a material “shake-out” for undercapitalized companies that don’t have a big pile of cash with which to “weather the storm”.
Closing Thoughts
Hopefully, all the search engine optimization companies shift their focus from Google to the new AI engines to help us more quickly navigate this new “Wild West”. Or better yet, Google protects its search turf with its own AI and acquires one of the big AI engines so it can quickly transition its advertisers from the legacy Google search engine to the new AI driven solution that users are migrating towards. Until then, protect your businesses in the coming years. It most likely won’t be all “wine and roses” for immediate marketing positions that you can easily control. Which will make it a really bumpy ride for your income statement, requiring you to have a healthy cash reserve on hand. I can’t wait to see where we end up in the next five years—as digital marketing will look a lot different to what it is today.
For future posts, please follow me on Twitter at: @georgedeeb.
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