How ChatGPT, Bard, and AI Will Impact Search

It’s so funny how many people are concerned about ChatGPT and Bard. Not necessarily from a content creation standpoint but more so how it is going to kill search.

When Google announced Bard, their stock fell 7%. It cost them more than 100 billion dollars… that’s a lot of money.

Why such a big drop in their stock price?

Google’s ad showed an incorrect description of the telescope used to take the first pictures of a planet outside our solar system, for example.

But here is the thing, when you currently perform a search on Bing, Google, or even ask ChatGPT a question neither of them is always correct, which I will get to in a bit.

But first, let’s go over what these AI tools really mean for marketers.

How AI impacting performance marketers

At least in its current form, the biggest thing ChatGPT or other tools like the Ubersuggest AI writer will help you write content faster.

For example, one of my co-workers, Caio Beleza created a song using my name. Here’s what ChatGPT spun up.

Verse 1:

Neil Patel, he’s a name you know

Marketing genius, the best of the show

Family and friends, they come first

Making money, that’s a thirst

Chorus:

Neil Patel, one of a kind

Changing lives, helping us all to shine

Teaching millions, about marketing with ease

His picky eating, just adds to his mystique

Verse 2:

A leader in the industry, a true master mind

His lessons and advice, we all hope to find

Helping businesses grow, that’s his goal

Making success a reality, for young and old

Chorus:

Neil Patel, one of a kind

Changing lives, helping us all to shine

Teaching millions, about marketing with ease

His picky eating, just adds to his mystique

Bridge:

He’s the expert, the one to call

When it comes to marketing, he gives it his all

Inspiring us all, to do better in life

Thanks to Neil Patel, we’ll overcome any strife

Chorus:

Neil Patel, one of a kind

Changing lives, helping us all to shine

Teaching millions, about marketing with ease

His picky eating, just adds to his mystique

Outro:

So, here’s to Neil Patel, our marketing king

A genius and a leader, who inspires everything

In business and in life, he’s truly one of a kind

Neil Patel, our marketing genius, we’ll always be mind.

The thing with these tools is the content isn’t perfect… but it is a great start. These AI tools will save you time, but they do require human intervention.

You need a human touch to make the content better or fix grammatical errors. For example, there were two grammatical errors in the song above that I fixed with the help of Grammarly.

And with blog content, you still need to find a good way to integrate experience, expertise, authority, and trust which is what search engines are looking for if you want to rank high.

The next evolution

Before ChatGPT there was Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant.

The way they work is you would ask them a question, they would then give you an answer based on their database.

For example, if you asked Alexa what 2 + 2 is, Alexa would tell you that the answer is 4. Or if you ask what the weather is like outside, it will tell you the temperature.

Or if you ask Alexa to order you more diapers, it will, and you would receive them in the mail in the next day or two through Amazon.

If you are driving your car and you ask Siri to find you the nearest gas station it will.

But if you ask any of these voice assistants to write you a song or type up a blog post they can’t do so.

The big difference is ChatGPT is not only gathering data from crawling the web, but it is able to dissect the data and give you a solution to more complicated answers.

In essence, it’s the next evolution of Siri, Alexa, or even Google Assistant. The data sources are pretty much the same, but the big difference is how the data is processed and comprehended so that you can get better-quality answers.

Over time you should expect Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant to evolve and also help you in similar ways that ChatGPT may be able to help you.

Search isn’t going anywhere

It’s funny how people are saying that this is all going to crush Google. Or that people won’t need to search anymore.

That’s far from the truth.

It’s like when Alexa first came out people were worried that it is going crush SEO and search. Back in 2016 people were talking about how you can get answers to your questions without even clicking on a website.

And that would hurt marketers.

Fast forward to today and we know that none of these technologies have crushed search even though they do give you the answer to some of your questions.

People said the same thing about Google’s Knowledge Graph back in 2012 and how it is going to make it hard for marketers to get traffic through SEO.

Now both have decreased clicks to websites. Roughly 25.6% of desktop searches and 17.3% of mobile searches get no clicks.

Here is a look at desktop searches.

What’s interesting is 9.7% of desktop searches click on other Google properties such as shopping or images or news. And 17.9% click through to another Google keyword or change the keyword they are searching for.

As for mobile…

10.3% of people click through to other Google properties such as shopping or images, and 29.3% refine what they are searching for by using another keyword.

Zero-click searches have been here for a while and they will continue to be here. But here is what no one is really talking about… Google has been sending more traffic to the open web each and every single year.

According to Danny Sullivan from Google…

In reality, Google Search sends billions of clicks to websites every day, and we’ve sent more traffic to the open web every year since Google was first created.

Google has driven more traffic to websites than it did in the previous year or any other time, even with zero-click searches going up 65%.

With Bard or ChatGPT yes they can help answer questions when you are searching. And it may cause fewer people to click over to your site just like when Google introduced the Knowledge Graph or the introduction of Alexa and Siri.

But keep in mind the queries that Bard may answer for you are more informational keywords. These keywords are less “transactional”.

These are the type of keywords that are less likely to generate direct sales, but they do help with branding.

It’s like what Google did back with the knowledge graph in 2012.

But sometimes it creates new opportunities. With voice search, voice commerce is expected to drive 19.4 billion dollars in revenue. And it is growing at a rapid pace.

People want quality over quantity

Now let me ask you a question… when you do a search do you ever go beyond page 1 of Google?

When we look at our traffic data from Ubersuggest less than 1.1% of people are clicking past the first 30 organic results on Google.

So, if websites use ChatGPT to create a large amount of content, it won’t be easy to rank that content.

Sure, you can easily target more keywords, but quality content with backlinks is what ranks.

Plus, search engines are already good at drowning out the noise.

Just look at the term “auto insurance”… 1.3 billion results.

The term “credit cards” has over 2 billion results.

Even if you search for longtail terms like “how to optimize your site for Google”, there are 685 million results.

Or “how tall are NBA players”… there are 327 million results.

This just shows that Google is already good at drowning out the noise. Whether the content is created through AI or manually by a human, it doesn’t matter. Unless it is amazing and people link to it and share it, you just won’t rank well.

These new AI tools that are popping up will make it easier for you to create content. But creating content doesn’t guarantee success as search engines already have enough good results for you to choose from.

And what these AI tools are doing is dissecting all the content they have indexed and creating new content based on the old content. Which means it won’t have the uniqueness and freshness that people are looking for. No one wants to read regurgitated content that’s just a spin or existing content.

You also have to keep in mind that the content these AI writers produce is off in many cases. That’s the same reason Google’s stock tanked. People weren’t happy with the answer Bard provided.

But that’s nothing new… there are a lot of inaccurate results that rank in search and search engines have continually improved upon this over time and you can expect the same with the AI results. They will get better.

It’s also why platforms prefer to rank and showcase content from well-known brands because they are less likely to produce “fake news” or inaccurate information.

And people will learn which search engines and sources of AI content to trust the most because it’s not just about getting a solution to your query, it’s about getting the right solution and an accurate one.

Again, expect Google and Bing to improve upon the results their AI systems provide over time. And expect users to use the sources that they trust the most.

Conclusion

Don’t worry too much about AI and how it is going to tank your SEO traffic or reduce your revenue. Because the chances are it won’t for the majority of the websites out there.

And don’t worry about more competition due to people creating content through AI. Content creation is not even half the battle… the hard part is promoting the content.

Instead focus on providing the most value to users with your products, your services, and your content. That’s how you win in the long run.

So, what do you think about AI and how it will impact search?