Yasin Durmus
Head of SEO & UX
Bing and Bard: AI is revolutionizing how we search, find, and create content. These changes also affect on SEO and will present website owners and content creators with major challenges in the future. In the blog post, we'll explain what these look like and also provide a few possible solutions.
Simply put, a major part of the Internet works like this: websites deliver content, and search engines lead users to them. Even large sites depend on search engines to get visits. How many visits they get is largely determined by their position in search results. This position can be optimized by clever SEO strategies. That's why many websites are designed primarily to meet search engine requirements. With the advent of AI, this model could change fundamentally. This in turn influences SEO. Anyone who wants to be found online in the future will have to face two major challenges.
AI search engines: The biggest challenges to SEO
Zero-Click Search
Google is transforming from a search engine to an answer engine. Search queries no longer lead to a long list of links. Bard and Bing present ready-made, curated, summarized answers that often make deeper searches superfluous. Zero-click search is the name of the game. True, links should still be displayed, but how likely is it that users will continue to click if they have already been served the answers on a silver platter? It can be assumed that the traffic for many websites will decrease, but the quality will increase. The users who land on the website have often already informed themselves and are interested or have concrete purchase intentions.
Microsoft Bing lists links to relevant sources at the end of the answer that can be used for further research.
Google Bard does not provide any further links, but offers the possibility to switch to the classic Google Console via a button and search for information there.
Content Overload
AI is used not only to filter and summarize content, but also to create it. Tools like ChatGPT generate masses of texts in a short time. However, these texts are often primarily designed to meet the needs of search engines, not those of readers. The quality is questionable, the truth content uncertain. There are already hundreds of websites with this AI-generated content. Currently, such texts are mostly classified by Google & Co. as low quality and are ranked poorly accordingly. But will this also work if search engines themselves increasingly use AI in their algorithms?
Solution approaches for SEO: Meeting the challenges through AI
How can companies still be found in the AI-generated flood of content in the age of zero-click search? These approaches can help you:
- In the new search engines, users no longer search for individual keywords, but instead prompt complex questions to a chatbot. Therefore, it’s helpful to focus on whole keyword clusters and long-tail keywords.
- Google itself explains what is important when creating high-performance, useful content. When creating content, it helps to remember the E-E-A-T and Helpful Content guidelines and to check AI-generated text for quality before publishing.
- Strategy is key. A sophisticated content strategy is the best way to counter the potential content flood. To do this, it's critical to understand the problems and needs of the target audience to provide relevant content. Good content answers users' questions and potential follow-up questions with expertise and in detail.
AI & SEO - Relationship status: It's complicated
«AI is changing the Internet. Whatever these changes may look like in detail, one thing is clear: SEO is becoming increasingly complex. Companies that want to be found online in the future are well advised to seek the support of experts who can maintain an overview, even in times of upheaval.»Yasin Durmus
Head of SEO & UX, Webrepublic AG
