- The rise of AI-powered search could transform the internet.
- The ad industry is both excited and terrified about how this could impact their businesses.
- Despite the uncertainty, publishers and advertisers see opportunity.
As Microsoft and Google duke it out to control the future of search, the advertisers and publishers who rely so much on search-generated traffic are struggling to figure out how it will impact their businesses.
"It's possibly the most enormous set of changes in the tech industry since the birth of the web in the '90s," said Paul Bannister, chief strategy officer of CafeMedia, which oversee the ads business for about 4,000 publishers, like Merriam-Webster and the food blog Half-Baked Harvest.
While both Microsoft and Google are racing to bring AI-powered search to consumers, they have said nothing to either publishers or advertisers about how these tools will impact traffic and ad revenue, multiple sources told Insider. Microsoft declined to comment. Google didn't respond in time for publication.
"It's simultaneously exciting and terrifying," said Chris Schimkat, global head of analytics at the IPG-owned performance marketing agency Reprise Digital. He said he's used ChatGPT to write emails and speed up coding. "But for a lot of marketers in particular, if this is taking over content writing and image generation, where can we continue to provide value? And that's going to be a pretty prominent question."
If AI-powered search catches on, it will upend the practice of search advertising.
"We'll definitely see a shift in search advertisements due to new AI algorithms like ChatGPT and Bard, but it's hard to predict how that will affect ad costs," said Anastasia Kotsiubynska, SEO team lead at the SEO platform SE Ranking.
Right now, not a lot seems to have changed on the ad landscape, despite the media frenzy around the new AI search tools.
"We're monitoring Microsoft Ads traffic closely to see if the news is shifting query volumes significantly – but nothing yet," said Mazen Hussain, director of product strategy at the digital marketing agency Croud.
Publishers are assessing their search referral traffic strategies
One of the biggest concerns is that if AI-powered search engines provide all the information people need without them having to click through to any websites, it will reduce traffic and ad revenue for publishers. Bannister doesn't think AI-powered search will change advertising drastically in the short term, but even small changes can have an impact on business.
"If it decreases search click throughs by 3%, that's 3% less page views to a lot of sites," he said. "So I think it's right to be worried. But we also want to get the facts and figure out how it's going to work and what are the new opportunities."
Many publishers are familiar with how their traffic has been chipped away by search engines as they've evolved.
"We've been dealing with this shrinking search landscape for many years now, as Google and the likes have tried to answer these questions directly within search results," said Kyle Sutton, director of SEO and product at the publisher Gannett, which owns USA Today and local news sites. "Look no further than sports scores. You know that used to be guaranteed traffic?" Now, when people search for scores or similar types of basic information, Google populates the answer in a module called a Featured Snippet on the search page, Sutton noted.
Sutton is cautiously optimistic though that the addition of AI to search queries on Bing and Google Search won't impact publishers like Gannett, which owns mostly news sites. In a blog post, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said its Bard AI will help address questions where there's "no one right answer."
"If these AI services are focused on very complex questions, I don't anticipate that's going to impact us as prominently," Sutton said.
Some in the ad industry believe the addition of AI to search can be an opportunity for advertisers and site owners.
"I could see advertisers adding expanded content, more descriptive product pages to their websites so that the new Bing will understand what content to serve up and drive traffic to a website," said Nirish Parsad, practice lead of emerging tech at the agency Tinuiti.
The SEO consultant Brodie Clark, one of the few in the industry who has had hands on the beta version of Bing's ChatGPT-powered search engine, also sees opportunity for content owners. He noted that instead of having all search results dictated by AI, Bing posts AI-powered results in a separate search box, where users can ask follow-up questions. Other types of search results remain on the page.
"I feel like a lot of people in the space are using hysteria to prompt people to make changes to their existing approach and use it as a sales tool," Clark said. "This doesn't require a shift in how you'd approach SEO. This falls under the usual principles of creating content for people."
Advertisers have often seen their ads perform better when AI is added to their tools.
Mike Abadi, CEO and cofounder of DTC bedding and home brand Sunday Citizen, said AI-powered ad campaigns using Google's Performance Max and Meta's Advantage+ perform better than campaigns that don't use AI because the tech companies determine what ad, audience, and messaging to serve someone.
"They've really taken over the campaigns, and they've quickly become the best performers," he said.