How AI is Changing the Search Landscape

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly expanding and influencing technology across the digital landscape, including search engines. As AI is changing the way potential customers interact with your brand via search, here is what you need to know to broaden your business’s reach with search engine optimization (SEO).

AI Integration in Search Engines

It has taken years to make AI sophisticated enough to understand and respond to human search queries, and the technology continues to evolve. Bing Chat power by GPT-4 launched a few months ago and Google Bard is still in the beta phase. Expect to see significant evolutions in how search engines integrate AI. 

Bing Chat currently lives on a secondary tab on the Bing search engine results page (SERP). The platform integrates the AI chatbot exclusively in the search engine within the Edge browser, Edge app, or Bing app. Bing Chat responses generate organic results and paid placements. 

Meanwhile, Google Bard is integrated into the main SERP, with traditional organic listings available below the chat box. Given its beta status, the advertising options are in flux, but Google Ads is Google’s largest revenue source so we expect ads to have a prominent position in the AI.

High-quality Content is More Important Than Ever

Search engine AI is still pulling information from the web to populate responses. Now that multiple organic listings can be referenced in a single chat response, the need to create effective, quality content has only increased.

Search engine algorithms are also evolving to account for AI. Expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EAT) have long been central to Google’s algorithm and Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. In anticipation of AI integration, Google modified the phrase to experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EEAT) to highlight the importance of the human perspective. 

Human writers can connect to readers with emotion and logic, motivating them to execute the desired call to action. AI-generated writing can only recycle existing content. The tools also lack the ability to interview a subject matter expert, become a subject matter expert themselves, collect first-party data, and verify the credibility of the sources they cite.

AI tech can be a useful tool for developing content ideas for your target keywords, outlining your writing, and doing some initial research, but it’s not where it needs to be to replace skilled SEO writers. AI writing tools create copy that fulfills the request of the user’s prompt, drawing its response from content that has already been published, but it can get stuck in an infinite loop of pulling the same exact information over and over again. As a result, AI-generated content can be very similar to the sources it was derived from, which won’t help you rank. AI tech is a good way to gather information and outline the content, but then you need to layer in the expertise of human writers.

Interested in Learning More About AI Integration in Search Engines?

If you are curious about how AI will affect your SEO strategy, get in touch. We’re happy to review your marketing mix and produce a free digital analysis with recommendations and competitive insights specific to your market.