Google's generative experience: an update
Google's generative experience: an update
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Digital PR agency Search Intelligence. See their case study at the end of the newsletter.
It has been just over two months since Google launched its generative experience, and while I feared the worst for SEO, the worst may not come to pass, yet.
Initially, Google placed generative responses on just about every query. Within a week or so, many branded and specific informational queries no longer had generative responses.
Queries in the financial space that generated lucrative clicks from banks stopped showing AI responses, but those now have generative responses because Google began to monetize.
On the monetization side, there were no search ads at the launch, but again within a couple of weeks, ads began showing up on top of generative responses. I am now seeing multiple ads show up on top of generative responses, which must mean that Google feels more confident that users will not run to ChatGPT as fast as they feared or that someone saw a drop in revenue they wanted to arrest.
From an informational quality standpoint, I have seen generative responses get worse and better simultaneously. I have seen many responses that seemed completely irrelevant to the query I initially put into Google, but to be fair given the novelty and challenges of an LLM this should be the norm rather than the exception.
(Note the response above. It seems pretty useless to see a range of pricing for tickets that large.)
On the improvement side of the equation, the generative responses do a great job of summarizing the results beneath it, but that has come along with what at times could appear like plagiarism of the featured snippet.
(There have been a lot of allegations of plagiarizing by AI in general, so for now I am going to assume that any responses that appear to be too similar to a featured snippet are more random than an intentional rewrite. At the same time, when LLM’s are accused of plagiarizing they are also accused of making things up as they did in this case in court, so it can’t really be both. )
Where is SGE today?
This week Google made a big visible change to SGE.
Source Links
They added very specific links to the responses, so the results are almost like a second search results page. This will address the concerns about where Google is taking the information from and it will also allay concerns about Google taking information from websites without giving an opportunity for the websites to earn that traffic from Google.
Without these direct source links, there were some SGE responses that were quite laughable. When asked a question that results in multiple opinions, the response would quote the opinions by beginning a sentence with “some say…”. Sourcing the knowledge will make SGE significantly more credible.
Trojan horse for change
While there will be those in the SEO community who will see this change as an improvement, I am not convinced that it is. I see a few potential challenges with this that conflict with the goals of anyone who is tasked with driving traffic from a search engine.
Optimizing a website to appear in these result boxes will be nearly impossible as the potential queries on Google will increase exponentially with SGE. A marketer could only optimize for a small handful of these queries, and that is assuming there is a way to optimize at all.
If the SGE response gives the correct answer, source link or not there is no reason to click the links. This will be especially troubling for informational-only sites that monetize with advertising. E-commerce sites that have a lot of specifications and review information on a product listing page might find this to be an improvement as now their content could be used to drive more clicks.
My greatest concern is that this “improvement” in SGE could usher in the greatest change to search ever. Making generative responses more like a search result with multiple links makes generative responses the default result. Unlike the previous paradigm where generative responses are loaded on top of search results and a user could either choose to accept the generative response or ignore it to scroll lower to click, this default result could significantly lower the incentive to even scroll for the standard search results.
Combined with my two prior points about an inability to optimize as well as a decreased need to click, this new generative experience will be highly detrimental to SEO efforts once it is rolled out more broadly.
Ultimately, I still believe search has changed forever because it is quite clear that Google will not be rolling back SGE anytime soon as some had hoped. I also think that Google is getting closer to a stable state for SGE where it can be rolled out to the entire global user base.
While ChatGPT might not be as popular today as it was earlier in the year, it still presents a huge threat to Google and Google needs to get ahead of it.
No one can predict what the future may hold, and if you are a marketer trying to read the tea leaves for how top-of-funnel acquisition might change in the coming months, buckle up.
[Sponsored]
This campaign landed massive links in CNBC and dozens of online publications for our real estate client.
This is how we’ve done it:
▪ We noticed that the Barbie hype is happening in the world
▪ We put forward our real estate client with a simple comment about how much they estimate a Malibu Barbie-style home would cost
▪ We shared it with journalists who write about real estate and entertainment from around the world
▪ As everyone and their dog was … Read more
