There is lots of exciting chatter as Google announced its latest innovation: The integration of generative AI into Search!
David Lakins, Managing Director at Key Digital Agency based on Dorchester investigates.
“For over a decade, Google has been using AI to power its Search tools. But, this is a glimpse at how generative AI will further evolve Search in the coming months. This new Search Generative Experience, also known as SGE, will be rolling out via Google’s Search Labs program in the next few months.”
What does Generative AI Search do?
From what we have seen in the preview video, the new Google search experience can display an AI-generated answer above the search results listings, providing users with instant snapshots of key information and suggested next steps. This can make your search process faster, more insightful, and easier.
Context will be carried over from question to question, so you can expand a search with new questions and naturally continue your search exploration.
Here’s a screen shot of an AI-generated answer might look in Google’s search results…
There’s also great potential for e-commerce websites to improve chances of attracting potential buyers and driving conversions. Google shares a look at its first steps in this new era of Search.
With generative AI in Search, Google will help searchers see a much wider and rich set of results, making even the most considered and complex purchase decisions faster and much easier.
According to Google:-
“When searching for a product, you’ll get a snapshot of noteworthy factors to consider and products that fit the bill. You’ll also get product descriptions that include relevant, up-to-date reviews, ratings, prices and product images. That’s because this new generative AI shopping experience is built on Google’s Shopping Graph, which has more than 35 billion product listings — making it the world’s most comprehensive dataset”
What does this mean for website owners?
The first thing to say, is this doesn’t replace the Google search you know today. However, it could lead to opportunities for your website to be featured and gain visibility.
As the search landscape evolves, businesses will look to exploit the generative AI results section as well as the organic results – or maybe Google will move the goal posts further and meld the two sets of results together.
The fundamentals of content marketing and SEO however, are still sound:-
- creating great, unique content for your website should still be your main focus
- review your content regularly and keep it up to date
- keep your content natural – avoid excessive jargon or complex terminology
- write in a clear and concise manner – so you increase the chances of the AI model understanding and retrieving content from your website
- use clear headings, sub-headings and bullet points to structure your content in a logical manner
- provide comprehensive answers to questions about your products and services – don’t forget that AI models learn from the content they index and the searches people make – so relevant, detailed, accurate and authoritative content will continue to count
- incorporate structured data such as schema.org markup to provide additional context and metadata about your content. Keep an eye out for new rich snippet formats as the technology improves
- improve the accessibility of your website and make it more likely to be included in any AI-generated response
Using AI generated content on your website
By all means use Bard and ChatGPT to help with your content idea generation, but take care if you are simply cutting and pasting AI generated content to replace existing web content. Although an AI model is designed to generate responses based on patterns in the language and information it learns from it training data; they lack true creativity and original thought.
AI can generate content, but it still needs the creative input of a human. A copywriter or digital marketer will still play a crucial role in crafting high-quality, engaging, and tailored website copy that aligns with the your goals and resonates with the target audience.
Preview of Google’s AI generative Search
Watch the preview video from Google of “What’s next for AI and Google Search”.
Want to know more about AI search and how it impacts your business?
A: Talk to our Digital marketing team – we’re happy to help and share our knowledge.
Need help to grow your business using SEO and content marketing? Find out what we can do for you.
With over 100 members you can join Dorchester Chamber for business from £60p/a (no VAT).
