AI Enhanced Search Results

2024 has been the year of AI. It could be helping me write this email but I'm sticking to old school for this one. We now have AI starting up everywhere we look, from image generation, video creation, customer service chatbots, competitive analysis, and I could go on and on. Now we are starting to see it creeping up in our daily searches.

How does this affect you and your campaigns? There isn't a huge impact on the campaigns as of right now but that will change sooner than later. What will that change look like? It is going to force Google to really focus on how it is providing more helpful results than what they have done in the past. In the early days of Google they became King by providing real answers to real questions. This is how they toppled Yahoo, AOL, Alta Vista, etc. Over the years (and after going public) they started to focus more on revenue and less on answering those questions. The paid results have forced those organic results farther and farther down the page. (the do no evil motto was out the door).

The new era we are entering will force Google to help find those answers more easily in the future and I want to provide you with an example. Perplexity announced yesterday that they were going to start showing paid results in their search results. I have not done any searches on Perplexity in a while so I thought I would give it a try. The results were eye-opening. While this search didn't provide any ads I was struck by the thoroughness of the result. For contrast, here is the exact result in Google. Which is actually being more helpful in answering that question?

Now what does this mean for you and your campaigns? Google announced back in May that AI curated results would be happening in the future and provided an example of what they would look like (below). However this has not happened yet. When it does I don't expect major changes in how we build the campaigns but it will require advertisers to adopt a more automated bidding strategy if they are not already using them in order to be eligible for the ads to be shown in AI curated results. So that is something to keep in mind.

This was just a quick email to help shed some light on what we see happening and how it will possibly affect your campaigns in the future. Google is going to have to bend and get back to better results with the likes of increased competition from Bing+ChatGPT, Perplexity, and  Meta. Yes, Meta announced recently that they are building their own AI powered search engine.

We will be watching this happen in real time and I expect there will be some new news regarding AI enhanced search results coming from multiple sources over the next 3 to 6 months. We'll keep you updated with any major changes we see coming and advise whether we need to make changes to your accounts and campaigns to make sure they are as effective as they can be.