How Google will change with the advent of AI, according to SEOs working to improve results | Technologies

“These are big changes, these are disruptive moments,” says Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, in a recent podcast. We are talking about the arrival of artificial intelligence in the search engine. Google has been testing for several weeks now. AI Reviews (AI Summaries) for some searches: These are AI-generated paragraphs that try to answer the user’s search. “Let Google find you,” the company says.

The change did not reach Spain or Europe. There is also no arrival date. But there is a group of Spaniards who are keenly aware of how AI responses will work: the so-called SEOs (an acronym in English for “search engine optimization”), whose job is to try to place their clients’ pages at the top. How will they do their job if Google no longer provides links or direct answers? Will your job disappear?

EL PAÍS turned to several digital consultants specialized in SEO. Their collective response: relax, it’s no big deal. “SEO has died many times,” says David Carrasco, SEO consultant. The advent of AI in search does not eliminate links entirely. Google lists below its summary the links it took the information from, adds others later, and also creates a new tab called Internet where users will only be able to see links, without any artificial intelligence.

“This has happened before,” says Bethlem Cardona, the agency’s director of search engine optimization. “Everyone believes that we are going to have a revolution, we put our hands on our heads, but in the end it’s not true.” Since the introduction of ChatGPT in November 2022, there have been constant rumors about the end of the traditional search engine. OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, has teamed up with Microsoft to, among other things, improve its Bing search engine. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said of Google at the time: “I want people to know that we will make them dance.” In February, there were rumors about the development of a special search tool in ChatGPT, which was supposed to appear in May and has not yet appeared. There are already AI-powered search engines on the market, such as Perplexity, but their market share is small.

None of this has come to fruition yet. Pichai even responded gently to Nadella in May: “One of the ways we can go wrong is by listening to the noise outside and playing other people’s music,” he said. The Google search engine is the gateway to the Internet for millions of people. Change there is not rapid, although in February consulting firm Gartner predicted that search engines would lose 25% share in 2026 to search engines. chatbots and other AI agents.

“They’re afraid of what others might do, but it’s been over a year and a half with ChatGPT, a year and two months with Bing Copilot, a year and three months with Perplexity, and none of them have gotten a significant share of Google,” says Juan Gonzalez Villa , SEO consultant. “Bing has invested and so far achieved almost nothing, although 1% of a very large market is a lot. But that doesn’t scare Google that much,” he adds.

Changes of this magnitude take longer. “In everyday life it will happen more slowly,” Gonzalez Villa continues. “Google will do this carefully so as not to cannibalize itself. It lives primarily on advertising revenue when people click on links,” he adds. Google has already announced that it will add AI-powered advertising to its bulletins. Google does not provide a summary of all queries. In tests conducted by EL PAÍS and this SEO group, AI appears more often in strange searches or questions that have previously failed to link (what’s the connection between chimpanzees and astronauts?), and less often in profitable searches. for Google, for example, “best coffee maker.”

Searches related to news or breaking news are also more difficult to automate. The AI ​​takes time to compile these summaries and will have difficulty summarizing a match or blitz while it is happening or has just ended. However, the media is one of the groups most concerned about these changes. Networks send less traffic to media outlets. Google is your last hope, and if you eliminate the simple click rate with AI summaries (like the typical “who is this person” question), your impact will be noticeable. 7 June Executive President Business Insider He sent a message to the entire newsroom: “Google traffic has been particularly volatile in the media environment over the past month,” he wrote. “The way people find and access information is changing rapidly (…). When our content is aggregated and fed, we get nothing to support our journalism,” he says.

These changes have already begun to cause controversy among the media and search engines. In the first days AI Reviews, Users have found several questions for which Google returned incorrect or ridiculous results. In a more serious case due to its connotation, Perplexity openly told exclusive news that Forbes posted behind his paywall. Perplexity has tried to provide some answers, but this is a new case of AI companies sucking up content in one way or another to keep growing.

Carefully

Google, because of its position on the Internet, must be careful: “We can’t assume that in a year there won’t be SEO. Google will be careful since 70% of a site’s referral traffic comes from Google. Imagine if you stopped linking to it, such a radical change from Google would not be sustainable,” says Gonzalez Valle.

Despite this supposed calm, Google believes these changes are inevitable and important. “I was trained on Google,” explains Beatriz Tejada, a digital marketing consultant who attended the course at Google headquarters in Madrid in May. “In class we were suddenly told (that the traditional method) was ‘dead, it doesn’t work anymore.’ But I think we are now in a transition phase,” he says.

Some search queries are based on keywords. These words will now be converted into a series of values ​​that will allow the algorithm to calculate how best to answer the question: “Before searching for the keyword, you did keyword research based on the client’s niche. Now it’s more about finding a range of words that are semantically related to the keyword,” Tejada says. This is a way to facilitate consultation on AI issues.

“We look at what the results are from the questions asked by our users, your customer’s target audience, and what types of results the AI ​​is driving, and you analyze the sources,” Cardona says. “So you have a strategy line to work on to know what content you need to develop to answer, because we’re discovering a lot of questions that we didn’t know about.”

Another supposed innovation that Pichai shared is that user behavior towards resumes is not apathetic: they look for more information in the links. Cardona has a similar experience: “User behavior when constructing Google search results is very similar to that of a machine.” pinball. You don’t click on the first three results, you go down, go through all the pages, click here, go back up, do scrolling. It has a very different behavior because there are outcomes that are more attractive,” he says.

All these details mean that the real changes depend on how users accept the news from Google, the only one with all the metrics. “With each update, we have learned to be a little more cautious and more skeptical,” says David Carrasco. “It is true that there are concerns, but the same can happen with translators or editors. The situation is changing, but it is true, and especially because we are SEOs, which is what most of my generation has become, we made a living, so we will always have the same goal: to send quality traffic to our clients. If the search engine no longer works as it does now, maybe in five years Google will no longer be the main engine, then we will come up with something else, we will have to evolve,” says Carrasco.

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