In recent weeks, developments have driven Google ahead: ChatGPT has quickly gained so much popularity that Google has internally declared a “Code Red” to counter the threat. Google is in a bind. On the one hand, AI models have the potential to disrupt the search market and threaten Google’s dominant position. On the other hand, completely different expectations are placed on Google than on startups such as OpenAI with ChatGPT.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, has now announced a first reaction in a blog post. In the next few weeks, Google will introduce its own version of a ChatGPT function, dubbed Bard. Although the content of the article is aimed at the financial market, we SEOs can also draw initial conclusions: Google will first bring the new AI capabilities to its flagship product: web search. It seems that the danger posed by competitors like ChatGPT is considered large enough to take this risk now. A possible integration can also be found as an example in the Google article:
Similar to an extensive featured snippet, the answer to a question is given directly in the search results. Although other Internet sources can be seen at the bottom of the mobile phone screen, the click rate on these links will be manageable. Search results where only a few clicks result in organic hits are not new. For some search terms, Google has not shown any organic hits for some time, only the result.
We will have to adjust to the fact that the proportion of searches with little to no organic results and clicks will increase due to the integration of AI answers in the SERPs. It remains to be seen what that means in the long term for the Internet ecosystem and what motivation the content creators have in the long term.
