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When ChatGPT first appeared at the end of 2022, many people were convinced that it would mark the demise of the Google search engine. People weren’t going to be satisfied with getting page after page of Google search results when they could get the final answer from ChatGPT itself. So, in response, Google seems to be reclaiming any ground that it might have lost over the past six months by adding AI to its search engine results.
That’s right – Google is now integrating generative AI (the same type of AI used by ChatGPT) into its standard search results. This will give Google the opportunity to give quick answers to hard questions. For example, if you are looking for a list of nearby national parks to visit over the summer, Google will now be able to take into account factors such as the number of people traveling, the age of your kids, and even whether or not you are bringing pets with you, in order to give you the final answer you need. That sure beats having to research page after page of search results.
Will Google’s New AI Kill the Publishing World?
As a user, that probably sounds great. Google will still provide a list of best possible links to check out, but it will also do all the heavy lifting for you. It now looks like you won’t have to leave the Google website at all, and that’s what has digital publishers a bit concerned. What if you’ve been cranking out all kinds of articles about “The Top 10 national parks to visit with your kids”? You won’t get site visitors any more. Instead, Google will essentially just scrape your website for your content, and then feed all that content into its generative AI machine, so that Google can provide the answer on its own website.
As a result, some analysts are saying that Google has dropped the equivalent of a nuclear bomb on the publishing industry. That’s because no traffic = no advertising dollars. And, since most websites are advertising-supported these days, that’s a real problem. Even if you’ve SEO’d the heck out of your website, it won’t matter. Google will know you have a great site, but it won’t send visitors your way.
What happens next?
So there are a few possible scenarios about what happens next. The most obvious scenario is that Google wins and publishers lose. All of the digital publishers who built empires around ad-supported websites will need to find some way else to make their money. Maybe they will need to lean more into subscriptions, or find some other alternative to ads.
But another scenario, quite frankly, is that the people fight back. After all, in many ways, Google is plagiarizing your content. You worked hard to create that content, and Google is just taking it from you and giving it to others without handing you a cut. So if enough people wake up to what’s happening, that might lead to people boycotting the Google ecosystem. People might decide not to use any of Google’s products – ranging from Gmail to Google Maps – if they realize that Google is making it impossible to get new site visitors. And they will likely start putting more and more of their content behind paywalls, so that Google can’t access it.
At the very least, people might start using new search engines. While the Google search empire has a dominant position in just about every country in the world, there are still plenty of competitors out there. In the past, for example, people have turned to search engines like DuckDuckGo as a way to protect their online browsing history. That trend might increase, partially as a blowback to Google’s aggressive new move into AI.
Do we still need search engines?
The rise of ChatGPT raises an interesting question: Do we still need search engines to navigate the web? Google obviously thinks we do, and will do everything in its power to ensure that you will always turn to Google Search as the starting point on your web journey. But by some estimates, ChatGPT is already starting to have a huge impact on how people use the web. People are ignoring Google completely, and instead, making ChatGPT the starting point for exploring the web.
At the end of the day, people want the best answers possible, and they don’t want to waste time hunting through many different websites to get them. That’s the beauty of ChatGPT – it can deliver wonderfully accurate responses almost instantaneously to just about any question you can imagine. And it can learn from you over time. As a result, it’s easy to see how Google’s dominance in the Web 2.0 era might be coming to an end. Google’s ham-fisted response to the rise of AI might just end up backfiring spectacularly.
