The Google I/O being focussed on AI wasn’t unexpected. But I think just how far they have taken it and the rate of change has caught a lot of the industry off guard. I’m seeing a surprisingly small response to what might be the biggest changes to the SEO industry in my career.
So as no one else seems to be saying much about it, I thought I would. So here’s what I think might be happening. And it all starts not in the organic results, but in what Google is doing with the paid results.
PPC makes up 80% of Google’s revenue. PPC is people clicking on things. Google is not going to train people out of that behaviour. They still want you clicking on stuff. But there are a couple of big signals that this might change to watch out for:
- If Google introduce a CPM model into AI Max this could signal their intent to move away from the current search model entirely.
- If Google introduces a new publisher incentive for allowing them to crawl and index your content.
Either of these is a strong signal that Google is preparing for a change where people will no longer click on a result and go through to a webpage. But rather Google pulls the content and functionality into the AI Results Page (AIRP) and the user interacts with it right there.
What’s the plan for making up the shortfall from the decrease in clicks in AI Max results as the CTR is so low
Google would obviously lose a massive percentage of revenue from this, and I asked a Google representative about this the other day… “What’s the plan for making up the shortfall from the decrease in clicks in AI Max results as the CTR is so low?”. They didn’t have an answer to that question… well at least one they were willing to tell me. But the only possibility has to be shifting to a display based model.
If or when that happens we know that SEO is looking at at extremely difficult future. As it is CTR’s have fallen massively (even Google admitting to a 25% fall, but the reality is that for many industries it is far higher) and with the new AI search box folding AI mode and Overviews together and moving to an AI first model, that’s only going to be getting worse.
Google knows this. Google also knows ChatGPT and Claude are gaining users fast and stealing an ever increasing chunk of their market. What Google has benefitted massively from is being a search panacea. A slip of a few percent, a few billion searches a month here or there, doesn’t seem that important on the surface. But it represents something much more terrifying to Google. Changing user behaviour.
Google is trying to get ahead of that. They are trapped though between the need to incorporate AI so users can get the benefits platforms like Claude and ChatGPT with the need to preserve ‘search and click’ behaviour.
The point of search is to surface the information sources, the point of AI is to surface the information.
These two objectives are fundamentally impossible to marry together. People use AI because it pulls the information to them. The point of search is to surface the information sources, the point of AI is to surface the information.
So if Google do want to both preserve market share (or dominance) and revenue at the same time they have to change the revenue model to fit. If people are either no longer clicking or clicking less often they will need to use a model that doesn’t rely on those clicks occurring. A CPM model means you would pay for your inclusion within then AIRP and in return you get the brand exposure.
As Google are now going to be allowing you to complete actions that would have previously taken place on the page in the AIRP, such as completing purchases there is vanishingly small reason to need to visit the actual website.
This brings me to the second point. If the reward from allowing Google to index your content is so low then what’s the point in letting them? Google will need to give publishers a reason to want to be involved in this new system. As the traditional content for clicks model is gone.
What that new system would look like, I have no idea. For those that sell something the reward is obvious. You get a sale, you don’t care where it occurs. But for everyone else, including affiliate sites, then it’s a little more difficult to understand why they would want to participate in the system.
That leaves us with a lot of unknowns, but we do know Google have said the new results format is rolling out this summer. We also know Google has a history of introducing new initiatives in the I/O which don’t end up living up to the initial hype.
you have to wonder where that leads Search Engine Optimisation, with no search engine to optimise
If Google does what it presented, shifting from being a Search Engine to an AI platform then you have to wonder where that leads Search Engine Optimisation, with no search engine to optimise.
For me, that all hinges on if the search results, when displayed as part of the AI Results Page, will be powered by the search algorithm or if the whole thing will be through Flash 3.5. If it’s the former then SEO becomes a subsection of AI Optimisation. If it’s the latter, I’m not sure I can see a future for SEO beyond that point.