AI-powered Search Engines are Changing the way to Think about SEO Strategies and user Engagement
AI is changing so many mechanisms on the Internet but will AI significantly change or even kill traditional search as we know it?
Google's search algorithm handles nearly 9 billion searches each day and has been in use since the launch of Google's search engine in 1998.
Over all of these years the underlying assumption was that more important websites were likely to receive more links from other websites.
As generative AI platforms begin to launch their own AI powered search engine, every major search engine is quickly moving to add their own generative AI capabilities to their search platform to avoid disruption.
Will these tools remain separate or converge over time? And what does this mean for marketers?
Why Google?
Over the years, as search algorithms evolved, new disciplines like SEO, SEM and advertising emerged. This ultimately led to the creation of a global nearly $1 Trillion advertising market dominated today by Google.
There is not just one capability that brought Google to the top but rather a series of deliberate moves and choices, most important being relevance and speed. Google had high performance and produced relevant search results very quickly. Google also indexed more web pages, and therefore it had more search results than any other search platform.
Google also focused on simplicity. Its interface was minimalistic and clean with a simple search box on a web page. Competing search engines had very cluttered interfaces with banner ads and other distractions.
Google also benefits from a data advantage. All things being equal, bigger and better data wins over better algorithms. This means even if a search platform uses the exact same algorithms as Google, they will still not perform as well because of less data.
Google has continued to evolve and innovate the search engine experience by introducing new features like RankBrain to improve relevance, Mobilegeddon to encourage mobile-friendly websites, Possum to attack local spam sites, Hummingbird to understand human intent, and BERT and the Multitask Unified Model (MUM) to understand complex search queries.
These innovations have made it difficult for other search competitors to scale and compete.
So many companies have tried to compete in search before and certainly after the founding of Google but none has mounted a significant challenge. So what is changing now? Will AI make it easier for the search playing field to be level?
AI-Powered Search Engines Are Transforming the Search Landscape
AI is now changing the search game, most likely forever.
It’s not surprising that OpenAI entered the search engine game. They already had a partnership with Bing, and it was only a matter of time before they went after Google.
SearchGPT is OpenAI’s prototype search engine launched in July 2024. And OpenAI officially rolled out ChatGPT Search in October 2024. This? feature provides more organized and meaningful search results by summarizing and contextualizing information rather than returning lists of links. SearchGPT is trying to improve user experience, introducing new paradigms like the sidebar which provides more links relevant to the search query. OpenAI unified the SearchGPT to the ChatGPT interface.
Maybe the future of web searching lies in a hybrid between traditional search and AI search. For example, using AI-powered research coupled with a custom search engine to generate more precise answers to queries and blending foundational LLMs with proprietary ones. New services can act as a search engine and a content generator.
Such new services will scour the web for you and use AI to write a summary of what it finds. These answers are annotated with links to the sources the AI used.
Search Is About More Than Just Getting Answers
While AI-powered search engines may certainly be better at summarizing information related to specific research queries, it’s not necessarily able to perform all the functions of today’s search engines.
Google is often used as the portal to the internet. When customers want to go to a businesses website, they’ll frequently bring up Google and type the business name rather than entering the business’s URL into the browser.
AI-powered search engines are not very good at navigational queries. They like to think for a few seconds and then provide a stream of information about the company when all you want is a link.
Traditional search also excels at real-time information like “today’s weather,” “sports team scores” and “flight information.” Google presents accurate information quickly, but AI search takes a few seconds and can sometimes give outdated information like last night’s scores or yesterday’s weather.
Over the past several years, Google Search has been experimenting with ways to give users more instant answers by providing companion results to the traditional search engine results page (SERP). An example is the “Google Answer Box,” a snippet that sits above all organic search results and provides quick and easy answers to queries by providing a snippet of content from one of the result pages. The Answer Box has become the big deal for SEO platforms to target as the propensity to click on answers in the box is much higher.
Another key feature is “People Also Ask” (PAA), which is a snippet offering users additional information related to their initial query. Google pulls the answers from relevant websites and presents them as snippets, along with a link to the original website. The answers are presented in various formats such as paragraphs, lists, images, tables or even videos.
These are typically presented as other questions for users to ask to explore their search topic further. When you click on a question, the answer appears below it. It also triggers more questions to appear, which you can expand by clicking on the down arrow icon. This process can frequently get you to your desired answer faster.
Through these search capabilities, traditional search engines are now trying to deliver quicker, more direct answers, similar to how AI-powered search engines work.
Third-Party Cookies
As the digital landscape evolves, there’s a growing emphasis on privacy, leading to changes in how third-party cookies are used and regulated. Privacy advocates are not happy and are likely to continue to put pressure on regulation that forces an end to third-party cookies.?
Other browser makers have been able to cut off support for third-party cookies without issue. Apple’s Safari began blocking third-party cookies by default in March 2020, with the major update to its Safari Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP). They introduced a privacy feature that allows the company’s web browser to block cookies and prevent advertisers from tracking your web habits.
Why have others removed third-party cookies but Google has not? One may assume that Google is worried about ad revenue cannibalization. Other browser companies are not as concentrated in ad revenues.
The elimination of third-party cookies creates challenges for both traditional search tools and new AI-powered search engines. Without access to extensive browsing data, AI algorithms will need to rely more on first party data collected directly by websites.
How AI-Powered Search Engines Are Shaping the Future of Search
While AI may not immediately kill traditional search, it will undoubtedly force traditional search engines to rethink their approach to the search experience. Ironically, AI is likely to be a catalyst for enhancing the capabilities of traditional search engines.
AI will help search engines develop more sophistication as they leverage core AI platforms to better understand user intent, personalize results and summarize information. They will be context-aware and will leverage that context for better search results. AI will deeply integrate multi-modal search with images, voice, video and text to create seamless search experiences.
Traditional marketing models will get disrupted by AI search. The era of keyword stuffing is likely coming to an end, replaced by a focus on user intent. As AI-powered search engines evolve to better understand user intent, SEO strategy will shift from focusing on keyword counts to leveraging location-based services.
AI and search engines are likely to remain companions and not direct competitors. Users want the best of both worlds wanting the ability to use generative AI to begin a search and then use search results to dive deeper into a topic.
Some users will use generative AI often, some will use it intermittently, and others won’t use it at all. But everyone will continue to use search.