100DOSEO #9

What will AI search look like?

Feb 15, 2023

I’m sorry that these newsletters are slightly distracted by what’s going on with AI.

It’s a huge part of what everyone is talking about at the moment.

Everyone has a take on it and what it means for the future of SEO.

With Microsoft now including AI assistance in its search results, I want to take a look at what this looks like and what it could mean for us SEOs.

Is this the end of SEO traffic?

Let’s dig in.

The best real estate in the SERPs is still given to websites:

Would this mean that if Google adopted a similar layout, there might not be as much of a traffic decrease as we all imagined?

It’s also interesting to note that on the mobile view, the AI answer doesn’t take up more space than a featured snippet.

If we look closely at the AI results, what do we notice:

There are a lot of references in the AI results. More than I expected.

If you click these, it loads the page as an organic-looking result. This makes me think that a lot of people will naturally click this if they have searched for something that doesn’t have a simple answer.

Whilst it does do this, there’s a question about the relevance of the links. They don’t seem to match completely with the SERPs.

AI also (as Google learned the hard way) likes to make things up. I think after the initial shiny-ness, we will be less inclined to take the answer that AI delivers as completely true, especially as we notice more and more it is making small errors.

We will earn to optimize for both organic and AI answers. In the same way that we think about people also asking as a way of jumping to the top of the rankings, the same will happen for the AI answer.

This isn’t as doom and gloom for organic ranking sites as we first thought. It’s important to remember that this is still very early in the AI search journey, things that seem seismic right now might be laughable at some stage in the future.

It’s important to note that I’m not saying this is all a gimmick - it’s more likely that search is changing, just not as dramatically and with as large of a consequence as sensationalists like to have, you think.

I know that’s a little boring, but hey, all we can do is optimise for that.