When Google launched AI-generated search results in May, the announcement came with some chaos: Google’s AI models instructed people to make pizza with glue, eat a rock a day, and drink a lot of urine to pass a stone renal.
But for the legions of businesses that rely on Google for traffic, the change was disconcerting for another reason. Some companies, such as travel booking site Kayak, said the new product, called AI Overviews, may discourage people from visiting their websites because they get all the answers they need right on the Google home page.
“They no longer use Kayak to check the status of a flight, for example,” he said. a Forbes Steve Hafner, CEO and co-founder of Kayak. “They can do it directly in the AI summary.”
This is just one way the product shift is starting to hurt some businesses that rely on Google search for traffic. Hafner said the results generated by AI have had a “small adverse impact on our business,” although he declined to share exact metrics. Kayak has reacted by bidding more for the first few sponsored links that appear below AI Overviews. “There are fewer clicks out across the ecosystem,” Hafner said. “Therefore, it is more important than ever to fight for the clicks that are still happening.”
Google’s iconic home page isn’t just the world’s online answer center. As the Internet’s most prized real estate, it is the foundation for millions of businesses, finding customers when people type in travel destinations, plumbing questions or food cravings. AI search results could collapse that model by answering more people’s questions without them having to click away from Google. Now, companies that depend on those clicks are scrambling to find new ways to attract users by adjusting their marketing strategies and even allying with AI startups hoping to dethrone the search giant.
Google did not respond to a request for comment.
“It’s like we put our eggs in one basket. Now the basket no longer exists.”
Nadja Sumter, founder of Pepper
Companies in the travel sector, in particular, are already dependent on the whims of Google search, and AI summaries have prompted them to reevaluate how they reach people. In the case of Tripadvisor, the travel review site, this prompted more internal testing of its SEO (search engine optimization) methods, such as looking at how content is displayed differently around the world, something that brands They rely on Google do regularly to analyze how the latest changes to their search algorithm affect their visibility.
Matt Dacey, vice president of global marketing at Tripadvisor, said Forbes said The company predicts that more people will start using AI-powered search in the next six to 18 months, as Google rolls out AI Overviews for more types of queries. “Once that starts to change in a significant way, then I think the actual search results will start to change in a more significant way,” he said. “And that’s what we’re watching very closely right now.”
At the moment, it’s more of a harbinger of a changing online economy than a direct impact on revenue, at least according to publicly reported numbers. Kayak’s parent, Booking Holdings, which also owns Booking.com, OpenTable and Priceline, saw revenue rise 9% in the third quarter year-over-year to $7.9 billion, before and after the launch of AI Overviews. The company does not break out Kayak-specific revenue. In the same time period, Yelp also saw a 4% increase to over $360 million, while Tripadvisor saw a small drop of less than a percentage point to around $532 million.
SEO experts said a Forbes They haven’t seen a major change in SEO, yet. That could be because the move to AI Overviews is the natural evolution of the changes Google has been making over the past decade, moving away from the “10 blue links” that used to appear in response to a query. Even before you debut AI Summaries, you may see tables, videos, and maps before reaching third-party organic search results. More than a decade ago, the company debuted “featured snippets,” which take passages from websites and present them as definitive answers to questions like how to clean a cast iron skillet (a small amount of soap is fine, Google says) or where the martini was invented (ostensibly San Francisco, but debated). Companies were already fighting for the slowly diminishing space in search results. However, it should be noted that Google AI Summaries provide referral links to other sites.
Like Kayak, Yelp is also concerned that Google will monopolize visits to its home page instead of sending people to the open web. “Over time, there is a good chance this will lead to less traffic to third-party sites,” he said. a Forbes David Segal, vice president of public policy at Yelp.
The problem, Segal argues, will end up hurting Google in the long run: As the search engine takes third-party content and regurgitates it in the form of AI results, those companies could lose incentives to create new content. Then, the quality of information on the Internet as a whole begins to degrade and Google has less useful content to offer users, Segal said, which could end up undermining Google’s formidable advertising business.
“If we don’t control it, we run the risk of Google reinforcing its monopoly using the same strategy it has used in the past.”
Aaron Schur, General Counsel, Yelp
The push for artificial intelligence in search evokes old antitrust fears, added Yelp general counsel Aaron Schur. “If it is not stopped, we run the risk of Google reinforcing its monopoly using the same playbook it has used in the past,” he said.
Google has long been in the spotlight for the way it displays search results. When the Justice Department was preparing its successful case against Google, it originally included claims about “self-preference,” or Google’s alleged practice of ranking its own products or services above those of rivals, such as Yelp and Tripadvisor. The self-preferential claims were eventually removed from the federal case, but last year the European Union’s highest court ruled against the company over similar claims. Since 2021, both the House and Senate have also cited Google’s alleged self-preference in introducing bipartisan legislation aimed at reining in the tech giants.
In August, Yelp sued Google for self-preemption, emboldened by the Justice Department’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 lawsuit “baseless.”
Google’s AI Overviews are a clear response to the growing threat from ChatGPT, which came to market before Google, said Mike Salvaggio, CEO of SEO Brand, a digital consultancy. The OpenAI service, which does not include citation links, is quickly becoming an important alternative to traditional search. Both Tripadvisor and Yelp have also announced agreements to license their data to another (albeit very small) competitor, the artificial intelligence search engine Perplexity, backed by Nvidia and Jeff Bezos. Yelp emphasized that its data would not be used to train Perplexity’s algorithms and that search results would 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 order after accusing the startup of using its reports 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 from last January currently has nearly 44 million views on TikTok. And since the launch of Google’s AI Overviews, Kayak has sponsored several more posts, including one video that garnered 18 million views and a handful of others that garnered more than a million views each.
The idea is to find younger users as they change the way they discover things online. “If you’re under 25, you’re just forming lifelong behaviors,” said Hafner, CEO of Kayak. “If you form the behavior of ‘I’m going to look on TikTok or Instagram and look for 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 companies still fear that Google’s referral traffic, a source of revenue that has been critical to businesses for decades, is on the decline, said Nadja Sumter, founder of Pepper, a Los Angeles-based creative agency that works with Kayak to create social campaigns. “It’s like we put our eggs in this basket,” he said. “Now the basket does not exist.”
This article was originally published by Forbes US.
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