The Impact of Generative AI on SEO and How to Adapt

By now, you’ve been bombarded by hundreds of articles, Twitter threads, YouTube videos, and TikTok shorts about generative AI because of the meteoric rise of ChatGPT over the past six months. Even South Park has an episode about ChatGPT. Many people on social media have positioned themselves as experts on the topic, despite not ever creating content about it prior to last Fall. Are you detecting my sarcasm? Good, because I’m laying it on pretty thick (that's a Tommy Boy quote, I couldn’t help myself). Your social media and news feeds are littered with AI content because of how quickly ChatGPT was adopted despite its inaccuracies, weird biases, and the occasional creepy romantic response. To put it into perspective, let’s recap Generative AI's exponential rise in mainstream culture:?

• November 30, 2022 - ChatGPT Launched?
• December 4, 2022 - ChatGPT reaches 1M users?
• January, 2023 - ChatGPT reaches 100M users, Microsoft invests $10B in OpenAI
• February 2023 - Google announces launch of BARD / Baidu Announces launch of ERNIE
• March 2023 - Bing ChatGPT reaches 100M active users?
• May 2023 - Google announces Search Generative Experience (SGE) at its annual Google I/O event

Our culture went from thinking of artificial intelligence as Alexa and sci-fi fantasy robots that want to take over the world, to chatting back and forth with an AI robot daily in a matter of six months. But, the use of AI in our everyday lives is nothing new. Google, Bing, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and other big technology companies have been utilizing it to power their algorithms and products for years. We’re asking questions and shouting out commands to Alexa and other voice-assistants every day. But, the rise of generative AI apps brought AI to the mainstream. Generative AI is interactive and it creates useful content we can use at home, school, and work. It turned AI into something we can seamlessly integrate into our lives.?

In the Internet search industry, it’s transforming the way we search for information online, and its impact on SEO will be even more profound. As AI technology becomes increasingly sophisticated, search engines are becoming better at understanding user intent and delivering highly personalized results. This has been the trend over the past decade, and further advancements in AI will accelerate it even more.?

Let’s explore some of the ways that AI is changing search and SEO, and what it means for brands looking to improve their online visibility.

Natural language processing and voice search (the creepy part of AI)

One of the most significant developments in AI is natural language processing (NLP), which enables search engines to understand human language better. This means that search engines can now interpret user queries more accurately, even when they're phrased in a conversational tone or use slang or local dialects. NLP also helps search engines to identify the underlying intent behind a query, allowing them to deliver more relevant and useful results.?

For SEO, this means that businesses need to focus on creating content that is written in natural language and reflects the way that their target audience speaks. Branding, Legal and Compliance departments will need to adapt to the changing landscape of search and allow marketers and copywriters to produce content that fits a more natural language tone and style. This includes, but not limited:?

• Allowing short-form and abbreviated versions of your brand names to be used in page titles, descriptions, and web copy.?
• Utilizing more long-tail keywords to mimic what users are searching for using their voice and AI prompts.
• Answering common questions with more rich FAQ sections utilizing Schema Markup and other structured data tags.
• Providing detailed and informative content that covers a wide range of topics related to your industry. Educate, inspire, and make people laugh. This is the way.??

Personalization, everyone's favorite topic. You love it as a marketer, but find it too intrusive as a consumer.

AI is also changing the way that search engines personalize results based on user behavior and preferences. By analyzing user data, search engines can deliver more relevant and personalized results that reflect a user's search history, location, and other factors. This is no secret. Google, Microsoft and others have been personalizing results for many years, and they love it when you search while logged in to their ecosystems.?Entire governmental data privacy regulations were drafted in response to personalization such as the EU's General Data Protection regulation (GDPR) and California's Consumer Privacy Act.

Marketers often focus on personalizing their paid ad campaigns but not the content on their websites and apps. Personalizing content based on the audience's location, language, preferences, search history, and other factors is a great way to improve user engagement metrics such as bounce rate, average time spent on page, pages viewed per visit, and conversion rate. Search engines monitor click-through-rates and bounce rate to determine content relevancy and usefulness. The more you deliver relevant and useful content to your web visitors, the more likely your search rankings will improve. AI makes personalization even more important because it helps decipher the ambiguity of user search intent, and in the near future, it won’t just help search engines serve the most relevant content, it will predict and suggest the type of content we want without typing search queries.?

Over the past few years, Google has promoted the E-E-A-T method to approaching web content for search optimization. It provides guidance on how Google scores or rates the quality of your web content. What’s it stand for??

Experience (added in December 2022)

Expertise

Authoritativeness

Trustworthiness

In November 2022 at SMX Next, HJ Kim declared that E-A-T is a factor in every single search query. Then in December 2022, Google made an update to E-A-T by adding the first E for Experience. I believe this was a direct result of the rise in generative AI. AI may be able to simulate expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, but it will have a harder time faking experience. This is why using AI as a tool for your web content and not the source or creator of your content is so important. Search engines will eventually figure out that your content isn’t following one of these criteria. Generative AI is great for creating ideas, conducting research, and combating writer’s block. But, if you rely on it to generate your content, the robots that Google and Bing are using will eventually be able to see themselves in the mirror and push you down in search results.?

Image and video search, because who actually reads anymore?

Finally, AI has changed the way that search engines index and interpret visual content like images and videos. With advances in computer vision and image recognition technology, search engines can now understand the content and context of images and videos more accurately.?

Generative AI can create images, videos and other media based on a few command prompts, which means the amount of fake and simulated multimedia content will increase exponentially over the next few years. The age of misinformation will be propagated at a whole new level with thousands of AI-generated articles, images, and videos created each day.?

SEO specialists can help with this troublesome trend by continuing to focus on optimizing visual content for search engines by ensuring creators use descriptive file names, ALT text attributes, captions, and transcripts. They can also assist with recommending ways to authenticate visual content such as watermarks, copyright and trademark information, and other authenticating data that AI-generated content won’t be able to replicate.

Over the past 12 years of working in the SEO industry, I’ve heard that SEO is dead after every new technology advancement, and now the same is being said about Generative AI. But, every time it’s become even more important and relevant, and this time it’s no different. SEO is always evolving just like every other discipline in the technology and science industries, and the use of AI becoming more mainstream will make SEO even more important going forward. We can work side by side to complement the robots. AI technology can be used as a tool, not as a replacement. The robots need a prompter, and they need someone with experience to create content for them to consume, because search engines will refine their own AI-powered algorithms to detect other AI-generated content that isn’t useful or relevant based on the E-E-A-T criteria.

Search users need specialists behind the scenes to ensure the information they’re searching for is accurate and trustworthy as the Internet continues to be flooded with fake news and content. AI is here to stay but instead of rejecting and resisting it, we need to embrace its strengths and band together to minimize its threats and weaknesses.