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At the annual IO event, Google revealed they would introduce generative responses into search results. The beta version of this product was opened to opted-in users on Memorial Day weekend. I immediately saw how impactful this would be on search traffic for sites across all verticals.
Google doesn't typically wait this long from announcing anything before launching it to the world, but I assume that Google has legal issues they want to resolve before launching it more broadly.
It’s easy for Google to disavow responsibility for anything that appears in search results by claiming that they have no oversight over what gets ranked. Still, that argument is harder when Google itself answers.
There have been well-documented issues with Google’s AI hallucinating, giving wrong advice, and plagiarizing, so I think that Google wants to ensure that they have derisked themselves as much as possible before launching this product to those who have not opted into this “experiment.”
They are in the travel vertical, and by every measure, they’re doing all they can according to best practices.
They have specialized travel writers that they send out to locations so content can be written from first-hand experience.
They strive to provide unique content that solves problems for travelers considering where to go, stay, and what to do.
For years, they were handsomely rewarded for their integrity and high editorial standards.
And then, they were hit. Click here to find out how we recover sites and get graphs like these.
Links as insurance
In this vein, links, and images in the SGE box are liability protection features for Google, not a new way to send traffic to sites. If the answers satisfy the user, there's no reason to click those source links.
From a timing perspective, it also helps that ChatGPT’s growth seems to have plateaued. While I don’t think this genie goes back into the bottle, the slower growth for generative AI search potentially takes some pressure off Google to launch immediately or lose market share.
There's very unlikely to be a big announcement before Google lets in their first few logged-out test cohorts, so if you are waiting for a warning before starting to plan, consider the May announcement the warning. An apocalypse could happen at any time.
Impact
Initially, I saw SGE results on 80-90% of all the queries I conducted on Google, but this seems to have been reduced now to 60-70% of my queries. This product seems to change daily or even hourly, as there are times when I see different responses or no SGE response when I do the same query later in the day.
Even when Google launches this product to the whole world, they will still continuously test it, but I also think its basic foundation won’t change much. SGE will hugely impact most sites that depend on Google for traffic.
Apocalypse for thin sites
In Google’s fight to maintain market dominance, the organic results will be collateral damage.
The genre of sites that I think will be most impacted are affiliate sites that rely ONLY on keyword-rich content to drive visitors from search engines to their affiliate offers.
Any website that doesn’t provide value far beyond the ability to be visible on high-volume search queries will find its traffic displaced.
Examples of these kinds of sites are abundant. Do any query for top VPN providers, cell phone plans, best online games, or online schools; the results will be rife with affiliate aggregators.
SGE can easily replace these results.
On the flip side, there are great examples of affiliate sites that provide significantly more value than the websites that pay them for their traffic.
Some of the Red Venture properties are great at this.
ThePointsGuy earns revenue from sending traffic to merchants who pay them per action, but no one can argue that the site doesn’t add value beyond just being visible in search results. CNET does original reporting in its verticals and is a respected brand.
As a side-by-side example, look at how much value a site like TripAdvisor provides over Kayak. They both provide hotel names, prices, and features, but TripAdvisor provides the personal experiences in each hotel that Kayak doesn’t offer.
Here’s Google attempting an SGE response, but it will likely never have what users seek unless Google plagiarizes a review site.
What should sites do?
The best way to inoculate against this apocalypse is to be like the affiliate sites providing much more than an affiliate link.
If I were advising sites in the VPN vertical, I would urge them not to focus just on the keywords most similar to top VPN providers but instead to go deeper into specific experiences and feedback. A blog post about which VPNs to use while traveling in China that details more than the price and options will inevitably have some keywords that SGE cannot cannibalize and will help convert users lower in the funnel.
Even sites that monetize with online games affiliate traffic can go deeper into the top games for specific users to play, and why, and again, these will have some search terms that will be out of bounds for SGE.
In a previous newsletter, I suggested that all sites focus on the mid-funnel, but this advice is even more critical for affiliate sites whose only product is content. If they lose the traffic for the content, this could be fatal for them.
The time is now
There are still many voices who are convinced that Google will fail at this experiment, but in Google’s entire existence, it only fails slowly. By the time Google gives up (if they ever do) on this experiment, the damage will already be done.
Even if you are convinced that nothing will change, it doesn’t hurt to have a plan just in case it does. If your content could be summarized into a quick answer by Google, now is the time to think about how you safeguard your traffic.
I greatly appreciate every single one of you that subscribes to my newsletter, and just hit reply if you have any feedback on this newsletter or topic.
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