Are you prepared for the SEO apocalypse?

I am afraid that the world is underestimating how much of an apocalypse Google's new experience will have on existing search traffic, and as a result, they are failing to prepare for worst-case scenarios.

Many pundits (admittedly, I did too) have opined on how the search experience will look and downplayed the impact without failing to take into account that the dawn of generative AI is an existential threat this is for Google.

Google had many good reasons not to launch their own generative AI/LLM tools before ChatGPT, but once OpenAI launched, Google lost the narrative. ChatGPT is the fastest-growing tool in history, reaching 100 million users in just three months. I have even heard from many people who have shared that they or their family members do most of their searches on ChatGPT rather than Google. Google became the old tech while ChatGPT is the darling.

Google quickly launched its own tool, Bard, but that wasn’t enough to regain momentum. Now Google is integrating generative AI into search results, and if it is not successful at retaining users, it will have a material impact on search usage which is the largest driver of Google’s revenue. If Google loses market share, it will be very expensive to claw it back.

This is a big deal for Google

Google must and probably will do everything it takes to keep that from happening. Everything possible means showing generative AI responses on nearly all results which will inevitably cause a massive decrease in revenue because ads and generative AI will find it challenging to both be successful, but that is short-term pain for long-term value. If this happens, SEO will be impacted in the greatest way possible in the history of search.

Have a look at this screenshot from Google IO and imagine that for every query you now have the whole fold taken up by an AI response. Yes, many users will still click the results links and references in the AI response, but the decrease in traffic will be substantial.

If you work in marketing you need to be prepared for this possibility. There are glimmers of hope such as this only being in English for now, the possibility that it changes quickly to benefit SEO, or that it is not on all queries, however, I don’t think there will be any website that does not feel the impact. But are you willing to bet your traffic on the best-case scenarios?

My predictions

These are my worst-case predictions for what will happen once this becomes the default experience:

1. For most websites, search traffic will decline by 30-50%. A former first-position ranking on a query will now be the equivalent of a 10th position given that the generative response will take up the whole fold. Assume this happens with most queries, even shopping ones.

2. Google ad campaigns will also see a massive decrease in clicks/spend as Google gives up short-term revenue to buy adoption of their new experience. The effectiveness of advertising will be immediately cut unless Google somehow secretly figured out to use its existing auction model to monetize generative responses. Google has said there will be advertising but right now there is an emergency and they can’t go all in on generative AI without hurting ads. Google can afford to lose revenue, but it cannot risk loss of market share.

3. Query reporting in Google Seach Console will become mostly useless as more queries will become brand new and individual which will mean Google will have to hide them for privacy purposes.  

4. Until Google figures out how to do query reporting, traffic that is sourced in an AI result will show up in analytics tools as referral traffic from Google.com rather than organic search. This channel swap will be very annoying for many marketers and data teams. This annoyance will translate to internal budget shifts for Q4/holiday marketing spend.

5. Best practices around SEO will change and become a moving target until Google figures out how existing content is pulled into and then sourced in generative results. This will make it hard to build roadmaps based on chasing best practices. For example, do images become more important than title tags? Do header tags now become the new titles? What do links do for ranking in a generative result?

6. OpenAI had the first-mover advantage that Google is now being forced to chase. Expect Google to pull out a lot of stops including suggesting queries to type in Chrome as soon as you open the browser. This may mean Google steers even more users down specific buyer journeys. Everything about Google search will change. I don’t think I am wrong in referring to this as an apocalypse.

Act now

If my predictions are even partially accurate the time to act is now. There have been Google algorithm updates that shifted billions of dollars around the web and those only impacted 10-15% of all results. I think generative AI is going to impact 75%+ of all queries in some way or another.

These are things you must do immediately and if I am being overly dramatic, your only loss is the time you spent preparing.

1. COMMUNICATE: Whether you are an in-house marketer, agency, or executive you need to communicate to stakeholders that there is a potential nuclear blast on the horizon that will impact revenue

2. PLAN: If traffic does get obliterated, develop a backup plan on where to acquire new traffic whether from advertising, partners, or different platforms.

3. STRATEGIZE: Don't wait for the apocalypse to happen, wargame the different scenarios of what the new search experience could do to your business and come up with strategies to deal with it. As I shared in my newsletter earlier this week, now would be a great time for Product-Led SEO (check out my book here.)

4. LEARN: Right now, it’s anyone's guess when and how the new experience will land, don't be surprised when it happens. Read and learn as much as possible from publicly available information. 

You will not regret preparing for a disaster that fizzles out, but you will have deep regrets if you closed your eyes to a real search apocalypse.

To quote FEMA:

Prepared NOT scared.