How Google Gemini Will Change the Future of SEO (Probably)

Google is adding more artificial intelligence to its search engine in the months ahead. What does the future look like? And is it all bad news and a downtrend in your website’s traffic?

Let’s look at what we know (and can predict) so far…

A recent study estimates that Google’s changes to search (more about those below) will lead to an average drop in organic website traffic of between 18.29% and 64%.

How, why and what should you do about it? Read on!

First, what’s happening?

As you probably know, Google is planning to roll out a generative AI-powered search feature called Search Generative Experience (SGE).

It looks like this:

With SGE, Google aims to go further in answering the searcher’s query right on the search results page. I.e. without needing to send searchers to your website for the answer.

Yes, there are links to websites in the SGE results. But if searchers already get the answer in the search page, and if they can ask follow-up questions, how many of them will really be clicking through to websites?

So what about website traffic?

This excellent study from the team at Agile SEO predicts that most websites will see fairly significant losses in organic traffic as a result of this change.

However, smart marketers should be able to mitigate some of this traffic loss. And in some cases, SGE may even lead to an organic traffic gain.

But before we get to that, let’s understand which websites will be most likely to lose organic traffic, and what sort of traffic they’ll be losing.

Consider the Google search journey of someone researching moving home for the first time and researching conveyancing solicitors. Their search journey might look something like this:

Previously, most – if not all – of these searches would have led to website visits. Home sale platforms, removal companies, estate agents – and of course solicitors – would have content published on these topics, aiming to snap up searchers in the hope that they could sell their products or capture the email addresses of these potential future customers.

With SGE, Google aims to cover some of this search journey by answering many of the informational questions directly in the search results, and even suggesting follow-up questions to prevent the user from needing to do another search:

Some of these website visits will no longer be required:

It gets even more interesting…

The AI model behind Google’s SGE search tool is called PaLM 2. Think of PaLM 2 as the ‘engine’ and SGE as the car, like how GPT-4 (the AI model/engine) powers ChatGPT (the tool/car).

Although SGE isn’t perfect, and neither is PaLM 2, both are considered to be fairly state-of-the-art and generally perform well. Google is very bullish about SGE and has called it ‘the future of search’ to investors.

But Google has been working on something much more advanced than PaLM 2, GPT-4 and all the other AI models we have used up to now: Gemini.

Gemini is a next-generation AI model that is not only trained on text but has been designed from the ground up to be truly ‘multi-modal’, meaning it has been trained (and potentially outputs) content across text, video, audio, and image.

The CEO of Google’s DeepMind AI division claims that Gemini exhibits much greater reasoning and problem-solving capabilities than anything we’ve seen before – including GPT-4 (which powers ChatGPT).

While it’s too early to know exactly how good Gemini will be or even what sort of tasks it will be able to carry out, we do know that its release is due in Fall 2023… i.e. any time now.

What does this mean for SGE?

More importantly, what does it mean for your website traffic?

Let’s assume that Google will want to bring its most powerful AI tool (Gemini) to its most used product (Search), via SGE (which, remember, it called ‘the future of search’). It’s unlikely that Google will do this immediately when Gemini is released, but it’s highly likely that it will do it eventually.

Remember that Gemini’s strengths are reasoning and problem-solving. In particular, it has been claimed that Gemini will be better at anticipating what users want, even before they know it themselves.

If Gemini can understand the path that the searcher is taking, and shorten their research phase by providing the answers – right inside the search results – to the next questions they have, our search journey might look quite different:

There is also a school of thought that says, if Gemini is so good at problem-solving and reasoning, why not ask Gemini to recommend the best business to deal with? Let’s leave that aside for now though, because providing these sorts of recommendations brings all kinds of conflicts into play for Google’s ad-supported model.

Traffic drops… sounds scary

You can see how a potential searcher’s journey of 7 website visits before purchase has been cut to just 2, with the rest of the research being done entirely on the search results page.

Ouch.

Businesses that have come to rely on organic traffic – either for ad revenue or to convert leads in the research phase – will be feeling this drop once SGE rolls out.

A couple of things to remember though:

Silver lining 1: SGE Rankings.

Firstly, there are links in SGE results.

We don’t yet know what sort of click-through rates we can expect from being featured in SGE results. But one thing is certain: getting featured here will likely be an excellent source of traffic. And it will be the battleground of the next generation of SEO.

Silver lining 2: people will still buy stuff from websites

There is still a purchase being made, and that purchase is still being made via Google.

The competition for the most commercial keywords will likely go up, as Google will still (probably) serve websites (via organic results and ads) here.

For example:

Advertising is the Golden Google Goose that lays a $224 billion/year golden egg, so you can bet your bottom 224 dollars that Google is not about to cannibalise that traffic.

But for searchers that advertisers are keen to bid on, does it even make sense to show SGE answers at all? After all, if advertisers attach high values to these clicks, doesn’t that mean they have strong commercial intent? Customers can’t buy through SGE (yet…………) so forcing them to scroll past an SGE result for the websites they really want, so that they can buy, would be “a bad user experience”.

What is your plan?

We’re recommending that marketers prepare for the next evolution of search (and SEO) by doing four things:

1. Spend time getting to know and understand the Search Generative Experience. Play with it. See which queries prompt an AI-powered answer and which go straight to website results.

2. Optimise your web pages to rank in SGE results. More about that in the future ;-)

3. If you haven’t already, build and optimise a profitable Google Ad campaign. This will give you a backup plan, should organic traffic drop. Others will be doing the same, so CPCs can be expected to go higher. It’s better to optimise your campaign now.

4. Increase your targeting of commercial intent pages. Do what you can to get these rankings as we expect fewer commercial searches to result in traffic-gobbling SGE search result pages.

Staying Updated

Exposure Ninja has always been at the forefront of disruption and change in SEO. Over the past decade, we’ve seen it all and earned significant search rankings and organic traffic successes for our clients. We always have our ear to the ground and we share everything we learn along the way.

As the future of SEO becomes our present, we’ll be sharing everything we learn about Google’s Search Generative Experience, Google Gemini, and ongoing changes to search.

To stay updated with all the changes and our key learnings, make sure you not only revisit our blog but also subscribe to our YouTube channel and our podcast.

And if you haven’t done so already, request a free review of your website and marketing.

Our team will take a look at your website’s performance and record a video for you outlining how we’d recommend you make improvements. Our Ninjas are superb at this kind of thing, so make sure you don’t miss out. Request one now.

Originally published on my agency's website: How Google Gemini Will Change the Future of SEO (Probably)

You can also listen to me talk all about this in the podcast episode: