The End of the Search Box

Marketers have spent decades getting their links to land higher on Google. But with the advent of AI chatbots, the days of search results with blue hyperlinks may be coming to a close.

Consumers won’t put up with scrolling through endless pages of search results when an easier AI-based option exists; marketers will have to develop new strategies to get their results in Gemini, ChatGPT, and other AI-generated answers.

Not since the rise of the Internet itself has the search engine optimization (SEO) industry been this transformed. AI-based search has completely changed SEO, and indeed even marketing itself: IDC reports that AI may disrupt $100B in cloud spend, $500B in digital ads, and $5.4T in online sales. Google is at greatest risk: AI could impact its $162B search advertising business, and–since chatbots use footnotes rather than links to answers–industry leaders forecast a reduction in Google traffic to virtually nothing.

Large language models like Perplexity and others provide tightly packaged results. There’s no scrolling through a results page, clicking on candidate links, reviewing the site’s info to find the answer, or hitting the back arrow if the information disappoints. Marketing teams need to find other ways to connect online audiences to their brands and content.

AI Is the New Google

AI is a serious threat to SEO. Google, the strategy’s greatest proponent, is deeply involved in the AI-answer business, which is a strong signal about the future of everyone’s favorite digital marketing strategy.

Google is committed to Gemini and the features created in Project Astra, a multimodal universal agent. This is a major change; will users shift from the familiar search box to AI tools? Recent statements and new product announcements suggest that Google is counting on it.

Microsoft is bringing disruption to the SEO industry, too, by integrating Bing with Copilot. ChatGPT, the progenitor of the category, released SearchGPT, which draws from Bing. With the increasing number of players in the generative AI market, more disruption is expected.

Don’t panic; learn the game

Revolution is nothing new in search; SEO professionals have seen it before. They remember that when Google became the search-engine-of-the-moment, there were alternatives: Alta Vista, Yahoo!, MSN Search, Ask Jeeves, and others. The same is true of AI search tools today.