What is Generative AI Search, and How is it Going to Affect Your SEO?

The Rise of Generative AI

Generative AI has transformed the lives of millions of people in less than a year. Launched in November 2022, ChatGPT reached 100M users in January 2023. Its meteoric rise suggests that humans are ready to let AI perform some of the mundane and repetitive tasks that we've been doing for years. 

Of course, there are concerns about the rise of AI and the singularity, with AI not only taking jobs away from millions of people, but also growing more powerful than humans can handle. But the latter is a topic for another day. In this article, we want to discuss the role of generative AI search on your SEO, and whether it's going to help or hinder humans in doing their SEO jobs. Let's get into it.

In order to understand how generative AI search is going to affect SEO, we first need to know what it is.

What is generative AI search?

Generative AI is a form of artificial intelligence that can create content like text, images, and even music. In AI-based search, Google uses this technology in its latest search systems to identify and generate the most relevant, accurate, and comprehensive results for its users. Imagine it like a large language model (LLM), like ChatGPT, but informing your search engine.

Here's an example similar to the one Google's AI uses. Imagine you want to find something interesting to do with the kids on the weekend. You can ask in Search Labs, "What's better for kids under 12, the Honeydew Mazes or the Botanical Gardens?"

In times past, you'd probably have to split this question up into parts, and then read reams of information in order to find the answer you're looking for. Now, with Google's AI, you can ask this exact question and get the answer laid out for you directly. And if you want to ask a follow up question, say, "What about the arcade?" you can do that without having to start your search query from the beginning. Google's AI is going to change the way we think about the results we get.

How does it work?

It uses machine learning models, such as Google's Bert, to understand the nuances of human language. It's trained on a large database of content on the internet, which it uses to provide relevant results to search queries. This generative experience is evolutionary in the results offered up by this search giant, which has grabbed the attention of many SEO experts.

How does generative AI in search affect SEO?

People are concerned that the search generative model could make SEO a pointless exercise, since the AI would identify information and offer it up to users without the need for users to visit our websites. An ai-powered snapshot would be the new top-of-the-feed result users see first, so that even top-ranking websites are not, technically, number one anymore on SERPs. This search experience could be seen as more convenient for internet users but could also be a major concern for those looking for more site traffic. 

Should we be worried about AI's effect on our SEO?

For now, there are some positives. Firstly, the ai-powered snapshot is a largely experimental feature in Google Labs. Google acknowledges the intrinsic value of authoritative content from reliable sources, which means even in its ai-powered overview, Google will not want to cut your website off from the benefits of ranking well. In other words, even when Google Search AI has taken over SERPs, there are going to be clear benefits to ranking well. What may change is just how we get to the ranking well part.

As before, Google still aims to match results to the user intent. Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) are still vital elements in the content you create, perhaps more than ever. It affords you the opportunity to become part of the above-the-fold snapshot in Google Search in the future by firmly establishing your EEAT. 

Plus, having only users who actually need your product, service, or information visiting your website, through Google's more accurate ai-empowered search functions, should mean a larger conversion percentage. This means that if you're creating basic content on a topic that's unoriginal, you'll probably get even worse search results than before, because AI will be able to produce this content on its own. But if you stick to original and expert content, there's even more value in it than before.

What steps can I take to improve my SEO in light of new AI functions in search?

1. Write for EEAT.

Firstly, it is important to keep focusing on experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness in your website's content. This means writing from experience and your expertise instead of trying to reproduce existing content.

2. Write for value, not keywords.

Secondly, we should produce content with the aim of giving value to visitors of the relevant websites, instead of writing for keyword ranking and ranking factors. Google generative AI search is smarter than ever, but it is not infallible. Yet it can work to our advantage, if our website truly offers value to internet users. 

3. Run it through AI content detection tools.

Finally, it is a good idea to check any content you produce carefully to ensure that Google doesn't flag it as ai-produced. Content flagged as fake or ai-generated would, of course, not rank as well, since it is coming from a machine and not an expert. It could also be viewed as less trustworthy, potentially. What's more, in our experience, it isn't only content actually generated by AI that gets flagged as AI-produced.

That means your entirely human content could incorrectly be marked as AI generated! Surprisingly, neither Google nor many humans can 100% accurately ascertain what is and isn't AI-written anymore. Even so, we are certain that AI informs the Google algorithms now. That's why we highly recommend running any content you produce through AI content detection tools.

What about fake news?

With the rise of generative AI creating images, video, and other media, we're going to start seeing a lot more fake news. It's going to be up to SEO specialists to ensure that content has descriptive file names, captions, transcripts, appropriate alt-text, and maybe even watermarks to distinguish it from fake content.