Is AI going to kill Google Search? Oh no!
I’ve seen a lot of discourse about this issue recently. As a marketer, this has the potential to disrupt almost everything I’ve built my and my clients’ platforms on.
But – keep reading to understand why you don’t have to worry:
So what’s happening, exactly?
Maybe if you’ve googled something recently, you’ve seen the AI Overview at the top of the page.
Here’s an example:
My husband and I recently purchased a home (yay!) and I was looking up how much it usually costs to replace laminate flooring with hardwood — a project we hope to tackle down the road.
Here’s what Google served me at the top of the page:
I promptly went to my calculator app to run some numbers and then exited the page. I had my answer!
Who this hurts: This is very bad for companies that have built their business model on content marketing + SEO. For example, let’s pretend that Cincinnati Flooring Inc. (a company I just made up) has spent the last 5 years publishing articles about hardwood flooring installation and optimizing their site to rank at the top of the page when someone with a Cincinnati IP address (me) searches, “how much does it cost to install hardwood floors,” or other similar keywords.
Before AI Overview, perhaps I would have clicked on their link, read their article about the average cost to install hardwood, and perhaps followed their funnel: signing up via email for a discount code or booking a free quote.
Now, after AI Overview, I don’t even make it to the first link. The information I needed is even more accessible.
Now — don’t panic. Luckily, the real world does, in fact, still exist.
There are two reasons why, as of today, this isn’t exactly a house-on-fire moment:
1) Eventually, when I am ready to find someone to install floors in my house, I can’t hire AI Overview. (Maybe someday I will be able to? Let’s hope a robot makes the project cheaper…🤞) For now, I will need to find a real human to do the job. No doubt, I’ll use Google to do this.
Similarly…
2) When someone is looking for a church or school using Google, they have high intent to visit a brick-and-mortar location. AI isn’t overviewing a “church near me” search right now. And, even if it eventually does, it will likely pull suggestions from… you guessed it… top Google results.
What are your thoughts on this? After everything I’ve seen and read, I believe SEO (in combination with a strong lead magnet & email list) is still the strongest digital outreach strategy, even if AI someday forces us to evaluate the details of our approach.
