On Wednesday, May 10, Google unveiled one of the biggest changes to Search in years. At Google I/O 2023, the company announced that generative AI would be making its way into Google Search in an experiment dubbed Search Generative Experience, or SGE. The Search experience is currently in the experimental phase (and only certain people from the Google Labs waitlist will get access in the coming weeks), but it’s indicative of a larger trend and an industry-wide shift toward AI that can’t be ignored.
Google’s AI advancements have previously been behind-the-scenes when it comes to Search, but thanks to OpenAI’s ever-growing ChatGPT, AI-powered, interactive chatbots have become the internet’s latest infatuation. And big companies like Google and Microsoft are betting on the fact that this isn’t a fluke or a fad: By January, ChatGPT had already reached 100 million monthly active users, making it the fastest-growing consumer app of all time.
Naturally, the SEO community had mixed reactions to this news. On the one hand, SGE’s UI is a welcome upgrade from what many assumed would be a lack of citations and links altogether. But on the other hand, this new generative AI snapshot will be occupying the entire first page of Search, which means publishers (smaller ones especially) are now going to have to fight twice as hard for half as many spots.
Personally, I think it’s too soon to definitively determine what kind of an impact SGE will have on the organic landscape (and it is definitely too soon to start bemoaning the end of search as we know it). However, there are some things we do know for sure, based on what Google has said:
- Not every query will have the Generative AI text box.
- Users will have to opt into Search Labs to access Generative AI.
- Google’s AI results will link to publishers/sources.
- SGE is not replacing Google Search — at least not yet.
The biggest question mark around SGE is which queries will trigger a Generative AI text box. Google has said that it will exercise caution with YMYL queries, but it hasn’t offered much insight beyond that. And during Google I/O 2023, all of the example queries that were used to demonstrate SGE’s capabilities looked nothing like the ones we search today. (Nothing about the query “What’s better for a family with kids under 3 and a dog, Bryce Canyon or Arches National Parks” feels natural. Let’s just be honest here.)
In my opinion, it doesn’t make sense for Google to generate an AI response to a query as vague as “Taylor Swift” — this isn’t a specific question, and so there’s no specific answer. And where does the Top Stories carousel end up for a search term related to breaking news? I would much rather see publishers’ news stories about a breaking news event than a Generative AI response that is (potentially inaccurately) summarizing what’s going on in real time.
At this point, we have no choice but to accept that ChatGPT has brought on a wave of AI innovation in every facet of society. But that doesn’t mean that we have to love every new AI product that comes our way. SGE as it’s been presented is fine — I see some benefits to it for longer queries, but if Google plans on rolling this out for the vast majority of search terms, I think they are going to get a lot of pushback. Google is going to have to be honest with itself about the fact that in order for this product to work, people are going to have to change how they Google entirely, which they might not be willing to do.
The Verge’s Elizabeth Lopatto summarized many of my gripes well when she compared SGE to the now-defunct Ask Jeeves: “Most of us don’t want a questionably accurate summarized answer derived from unknown websites — we want to be able to judge the source of our answer by looking at the original copy.”
The SEOracle | SEO Optimization Tips + Expert Advice 