AI and the Future of Search

AI can be expected to fundamentally change how users search, moving towards a more conversational style. Businesses will need to adapt their content to multiple formats like text, images, and videos to win in the conversational search landscape. While search features like ‘Knowledge Panels’ and ‘People Also Ask’ have already increased so-called ‘zero-click searchs’ for top-of-funnel information searches, generative AI can be expected to increase this trend. This may or may not lead to a decrease in traffic numbers for informational searches – on the other hand, this can be expected to further increase the quality of website traffic from search, leading to higher conversion rates, with users self-pre-filtering with more specific searches on generative AI search.

User expectations can be expected to heighten, with users receiving more tailored search results and expecting a similar experience on the click-through to websites. This emphasizes the importance of landing page relevance. Metrics like click rates and dwell time in comparison to competitors in the same industry and for the same search query might become even more critical for ranking. On the other hand, AI provides opportunities to bring better personalization and content freshness, requiring businesses to have up-to-date inventory and audience data.

Google’s webmaster guidelines with regard to AI-generated content have been updated this year, mentioning AI-generated content as accepted. We can expect Google to evaluate AI-generated content with the same criteria as it has been evaluating human-generated content: on the basis of its relevance and usefulness. To ensure high-quality content, human touch and expertise will continue to be crucial for higher rankings, whether AI plays a role in the actual creation of content or not. Generative AI can be particularly useful for e-commerce, helping to write product descriptions and offering personalization; meanwhile, a well-optimized merchant centre feed will become even more important for paid and organic product listings.

Chatbots are unlikely to replace traditional SERPs but will add another layer to enrich the user experience, enhancing engagement. This augmentation also extends to organic search results, which could transition into reference links, potentially leading to slightly lower click-through rates. However, the upside lies in the cultivation of more qualified and high-value traffic, indicating the dual benefits of chatbots and SERPs.

Companies must ensure their AI models are free of third-party IP violations and provide indemnities in their terms of service. In regards to any 3rd party IP used in training our AI, Google takes best effort to keep training data free and clear of IP, with tools like citation checkers to block known sources of IP. Google Cloud provides indemnity in terms of service for customers on any third-party claims arising from its training data.

There are also a lot of ethical issues with AI in search, and because Google has worked on this for so long, they have given a lot of thought about the responsible way to do this. They look at toxicity in content and content bias, both from the training data set and output and ensure this is reviewed regularly and best efforts are continuously applied.