Google's AI Search Update: Threatening Website Traffic Survival

0:00Google has just made a very big update to their generative AI search experience feature that they will be rolling out soon and it has a lot of people up in arms. So today on the podcast, we're going to be talking about what the update is, what they're doing, why some people are upset with it, and why Google says it's important. So the first thing to say is that it is called Google Search Generative Experience. That's kind of their, or I guess people call it the SGE. This is their new feature, which essentially integrates AI straight into your search results. So instead of what they previously did, which was providing links to human created content, SGE uses AI to compile resources from a variety of sources and essentially just generates one response.

0:44similar to you know what you get out of chat gpt if you're not using the browse web feature where it goes and browses the web and then it has um you know citing sources google says that this is increasing the speed and so they have made it so that now um it's just going to give you a chat gpt like response a big block of text answering your question but it's not actually citing the sources um now as you can imagine a lot of people are upset about this people that are content creators are upset that Google is just stealing their copyrighted data, repackaging it and essentially selling it. Now the update here, they claim to cut the load time in half, which is a pretty big move if they really want to make sure that this is up to, you know, standards with what a current Google search is, right?

1:30I don't think a lot of people are going to appreciate it if they go to Google search and all of a sudden, instead of, you know, being able to get responses in one second, now they have to wait 10 seconds for it to generate. It's something people have complained about with GPT-4. And it's not something that necessarily has to be because there are a lot of different AI tools when they have less people using them, where they're able to even chat GPT and GPT-4, able to generate responses very quickly when they're on low bandwidth. But when a lot of people are using them, that's a bog it down and slow it down.

1:57And so Google is really trying to make a big effort to cut down the speed. So that's one of the big motivators they've said to doing this update. But as you can see, a lot of people are quite up in arms about it. And one of the big additions to not just sorting or citing the sources is that in addition to that, you're also going to need to scroll past an entire page worth of AI content after you search something. And like, let's be honest, whoever goes to the second, you know, page of Google results. So I do believe that this is going to essentially cut down web traffic for a lot of different sources that are not, you know, that are used to getting traffic from Google and making money off of ads or, you know, perhaps selling their product.

2:41So this is a really interesting, a really interesting new update. Essentially, when you ask it a question, like, for example, I asked it, you know, who is Albert Einstein? And it gave me a blurb about who Albert Einstein is. And then it gave, it does have like a couple different websites, including a biography, Wikipedia, and National Geographic article about him that you could click over to. And it kind of has a carousel of different websites that are authorities, I guess, on Albert Einstein. So that is a good way that they are pushing, you know, that they're pushing traffic to those websites.

3:15And I can only imagine one of the big motivators of just having that carousel of websites right next to the response is that eventually one of those could just be a sponsored post. So you could have your ad right next to that and bada bing, bada boom. Now Google is still making money off of this. In addition, at the very bottom of the response, it has a couple, it has a handful of bubbles. And I think this is pretty similar. It's honestly what they're already doing they're just kind of repackaged this in a way like when you do a search and a lot of times they'll have like a bunch of drop downs of similar questions and so they're doing that at the bottom of this where it has kind of like follow-up questions you can ask what are three interesting facts about albert einstein you know what made albert einstein a genius what are the most famous works of albert einstein and you can click on that it also has thumbs up thumbs down to tell it if you like its response or not and you can switch back to search if you just want this to be strictly on the Google search engine.

4:08However, this is going to be eventually integrated right in with the search engine. So this is going to be at the top of your search results. Now, at the moment, if you want to get these results, you have to get access to Google search labs, I'd get on a wait list before being approved to have access to Google search labs and it is not in every country. But one can inevitably assume that this will be rolled out eventually to everybody, which is going to majorly disrupt the traffic of virtually all websites, I would say, on Google. I believe this is going to cut down just, you know, it's hard to say how much, but like, can you imagine if all website traffic to websites got cut by 50 % over the next few months?

4:44I think there's going to be a lot of big impacts there. At the end of the day, honestly, just consolidates power to Google for their ads. And perhaps there's even, you know, less space for ads in these kinds of results. So perhaps Google takes a hit to their advertising revenue, which is what they've been worried about. And perhaps, you know, advertisers are making less money from being able to host ads on their website or content creators, I should say. So this is really hard to see exactly who the winner is, aside from the fact that as a user, you can get your responses quicker, which is definitely a plus.

5:16And it kind of leaves it up to be said right now, Google says this is like an experimental feature. If Google sees that something like this really does cut down their ad revenue by a significant amount, are they going to keep this feature here? That being said, this is Google's official statement about this new feature that they posted on Twitter. They said, two weeks ago, we started opening up access to SGE, that's search generative experience. Since then, we've made a number of quality updates, including a major improvement that reduced the time it takes to generate AI snapshots by half. We hope everyone testing it enjoys the speedier experience.

5:54If you haven't yet signed up, check it out at labs.google.com slash search. Okay. So in the comments on that, uh, on that Twitter tweet, it is kind of interesting. A lot of people are saying, um, first off, a lot of people are just saying, Hey, I can't get access to the, um, you know, the search labs wait list. So that's one complaint people have. Someone said rip organic e-commerce SEO. Um, someone said, please stop stealing content from sites without attribution. SG is literally quoting sites word for word without any quotation marks or links. Why does Google find this to be acceptable behavior?

6:29It's not generative AI. It's just a featured snippet without a link. So this is another complaint, which I have not verified for myself. From what I've seen, right, it's putting together some, it's putting together stuff that it's pulling from other places. But some people are accusing them of straight up just copy and pasting, right, doing the featured snippet that they used to do. But back when they did the featured snippet before this AI came out, there was a link directly to the website that it came from. and that featured snippet typically was coming from one website. So if you were the featured snippet, if you got, you know, you did all the SEO work to get your article to the very top and you were the featured snippet, you were gonna, like some people come even complained about that.

7:07But at least you were going to get the traffic if someone wanted more information and clicked on that. Now, if this is true, there is no more featured snippet. It's just AI. And so there is no traffic going to be going to anyone necessarily, unless people are scrolling down below this kind of AI feature and doing that. So, you know, someone else said, congratulations on building what was already the greatest theft of intellectual property in history. I'm not seeing a lot of positive comments on this tweet, to be honest, and maybe that's just the nature of Twitter. But it's going to be really interesting to see who the winners are and if Google is going to keep this up, even if they get a lot of bad press for it.

7:43And if they even have a choice, because with companies like ChatGPT potentially stealing their market share, they really got to make sure that they are relevant and continue to be used by users. Otherwise, they lose all ability to generate revenue from advertising. So this will be a really interesting area to follow. It'll be interesting to follow Google's earnings reports as well and see if their ad revenue does take any sort of hit from this. And this is something we'll definitely be following very closely into the future.