Businesses that depend on Google are preparing for a new era in search as AI begins to change the way people find information online.
from Richard NievaForbes Staff
Wwhen Google started AI-Generated Search Results In May, the announcement came with some chaos: Google’s AI models instructed people to make pizzas out of glue, eat a stone a day and drink plenty of urine to pass a kidney stone.
But for the legions of businesses that rely on Google for traffic, the change was uncomfortable for another reason. Some companies, such as travel booking site Kayak, said the new product, called AI Overviews, could discourage people from visiting their websites because they get all the answers they need right on the home page. of Google.
“They no longer go to Kayak to check flight status, for example,” said Steve Hafner, CEO and co-founder of Kayak. Forbes. “They can do it right in the AI brief.”
It’s just one way the product shift is starting to hurt some companies that rely on Google search for traffic. Hafner said AI-generated results have had a “small negative impact on our business,” though he declined to share exact metrics. Kayak has responded by offering more for the first sponsored links that appear under AI Highlights. “There are fewer clicks across the entire ecosystem,” Hafner said. “So it’s more important than ever to fight for the clicks that still happen.”
Google’s iconic homepage isn’t just the world’s Internet answer center. As the most valuable real estate on the Internet, it’s a cornerstone for millions of businesses, which find customers when people type in travel destinations, plumbing questions, or food cravings. AI search results can overturn that model by answering more people’s questions without having to click away from Google. Now, businesses that rely on those clicks are trying to find new ways to lure users by adapting their marketing strategies and even teaming up with artificial intelligence, hoping to topple the search giant.
Google did not respond to a request for comment.
“It’s kind of like putting our eggs in this basket. Now the basket doesn’t exist.”
Companies in the travel sector in particular are already dependent on the whims of Google search, and the insights of AI have caused them to reevaluate how they’re reaching people. For Tripadvisor, the travel review site, it prompted more internal testing of its SEO, or search engine optimization, methods, such as observing how content appears differently around the world — something brands that rely on Google do regularly to analyze how the latest changes to its search algorithm affect their visibility.
Matt Dacey, Tripadvisor’s vice president of global marketing, said Forbes the company predicts that more people will start using AI search over the next six to 18 months as Google deploys AI Summaries for more types of queries. “Once that starts to change in a really meaningful way, then I think the actual research results will start to change in a bigger way,” he said. “And that’s very carefully what we’re looking at right now.”
For now, it’s more a harbinger of a changing Internet economy than any direct revenue impact, at least according to publicly reported numbers. Kayak parent Booking Holdings, which also owns Booking.com, OpenTable and Priceline, saw third-quarter revenue rise 9% year-over-year to $7.9 billion — before and after the launch of AI Summaries. The company does not release specific revenue for Kayak. In the same time period, Yelp also saw a 4% increase to more than $360 million, while Tripadvisor saw a slight decrease of less than a percentage point to about $532 million.
SEO experts said Forbes they haven’t seen a big change in SEO – yet. This may be because the move to AI Summaries is the natural evolution of the changes Google has made over the last decade, moving away from the “10 blue links” that appeared in response to a query. Even before AI summaries debut, you can see charts, videos and maps before you ever get to third-party organic search results. More than a decade ago, the company debuted “featured pieces,” which take parts of websites and present them as definitive answers to questions like how to clean a cast iron skillet (a little soap is fine, says Google) or where the martini was invented (supposedly San Francisco, but disputed). Companies were already struggling with real estate’s slow decline in search results. Although, it should be noted, Google’s AI overviews provide referral links to other sites.
Like Kayak, Yelp is also concerned that Google will focus eyes on its homepage instead of sending people to the open web. “Over time, there’s a good chance this will lead to less traffic to third-party sites,” said David Segal, Yelp’s vice president of public policy. Forbes.
The problem, Segal argues, will ultimately hurt Google in the long run: As the search engine takes content from third parties and recreates it in the form of AI results, those companies may become less incentivized to create content. new. Then, the quality of information on the Internet as a whole begins to degrade, and Google has less useful content to serve users, Segal said, which could eventually destroy Google’s formidable ad business.
“If it doesn’t reign, we really run the risk of Google increasing its monopoly by using the same playbook that has been used in the past.”
Pushing AI into search raises old antitrust fears, added Yelp General Counsel Aaron Schur. “If it doesn’t reign, we really run the risk of Google increasing its monopoly by using the same playbook that has been used in the past,” he said.
Google has long been at loggerheads over how it displays search results. When the Justice Department was preparing its successful case against Google, it initially involved claims of “self-preference,” or Google’s alleged practice of ranking its own products or services over those of rivals such as Yelp and Tripadvisor. The self-preference claims were eventually dropped from the federal case, but the European Union’s top court last year ruled against the company on similar claims. Since 2021, the House and Senate have also cited Google’s alleged self-preference when introducing bipartisan legislation aimed at reigning in the tech giants.
In August, Yelp sued Google for self-preference, emboldened by the DOJ’s victory over Google over other business tactics, such as its lucrative search distribution deals with Apple and other vendors. At the time, Google called Yelp’s suit “without merit.”
Google’s AI summaries are a clear response to the growing threat from ChatGPT, which beat Google to market, said Mike Salvaggio, CEO of SEO Brand, a digital consultancy. The OpenAI service, which does not include citation links, is quickly becoming a leading alternative to traditional search. Both Tripadvisor and Yelp have also announced deals to license their data with another (albeit very small) competitor, Nvidia- and Jeff Bezos-backed AI search engine Perplexity. Yelp emphasized that its data will not be used to train Perplexity’s algorithms and that search results will provide links to Yelp. Neither company disclosed the terms of their agreements, and neither has a similar licensing agreement with Google. (In June, Forbes sent Perplexity a cease and desist after accusing the startup of using its reporting without permission.)
Meanwhile, Kayak and other brands have also expanded their use of other customer acquisition methods, including social and influencer marketing; a Kayak-sponsored content piece from last January currently has almost 44 million views on TikTok. And since the launch of Google’s AI Roundups, Kayak has sponsored several other posts, including a video that got 18 million views and a handful of others that got more than a million views each.
The idea is to find younger users as they’re changing the way they discover things online. “If you’re under 25, you’re just creating lifelong behaviors right now,” said Kayak CEO Hafner. “If you form the behavior of, ‘I’m going to search TikTok or Instagram and look at influencers,’ or ‘I’m going to use ChatGPT as my default search engine,’ those are people we can compete for. “
Of course, you can’t book flights on TikTok or ChatGPT — for now. But businesses still fear that Google’s referral traffic, a critical revenue stream for companies for decades, is in decline, said Nadja Sumter, founder of Pepper, a Los Angeles-based creative agency that works with Kayak. to create social campaigns. “It’s kind of like we put our eggs in this basket,” she said. “Now the basket doesn’t exist.”
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