12 ms·

Google I/O: Big changes coming for SEOs with ubiquitous AI

187 points by rgrieselhuber 3y ago

capableweb 3y ago
So if this is coming to proper google.com and the search, what is Google Bard then? I guess it is something like a disguised alpha release in order to gather data?
Smoosh 3y ago
I see mention in the article of content creation. But are search engines working on task-related personal assistants? For one example, If I want to take a holiday, could an assistant work out the best dates (based upon preferences of availability, cost etc), and research the best airfares (excluding that particular airline I hate) and find a hotel room with the features I want, and throw in a few sightseeing activities which appeal to my personal tastes, then summarise it up into a travel itinerary for me to approve. Then, upon approval it proceeds to book (and pay for?) all the things.
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  GPT-4 with a calendar plugin can likely already do this.
- WirelessGigabit 3y ago
  While it could automate it I don't think it would be better. In fact it would be worse. Websites would try and game the system to be the one that ChatGPT chooses for you. And now you are relying on a system that has no incentive of telling you the truth. At least if I check to go kayaking on day 2 of my vacation, I can compare the top 3 websites, cross reference with Yelp to see which one has the best value for the $. Plus there still is the part where the data being sourced isn't formatted the same, so mistakes will be made. It even happens with manual research. You miss the part where one offers a pickup and the other one doesn't. ChatGPT will suffer from that too.
  - shostack 3y ago
    It isn't just websites trying to game it. It's brands wanting to pay for placement in the results, aka search ads. And Google wanting to maximize their metrics. In the short term this may bias towards giving me the best organic results, but will it shift to pushing me ever more aggressively to what advertisers are bidding on?
- freediver 3y ago
  We are working on this as a part of Kagi Search Labs, but it is worth noting that this steps outside the domain of search engines. By the time this technology matures, we will be talking about digital assistants.
- water-your-self 3y ago
  >best airfares >hotel room >sightseeing activities You can bet that there will be a bidding war behind the scene by those wanting to be the "best" airline and the "best" hotel and the "best" activity.
  - questime 3y ago
    This has been the case for decades now - Google, Booking, Expedia etc. are not something new.
TheObviousOne 3y ago
I think we should call it GEO - GPT Engine Optimization. :) Furthermore, the article lack of how to tackle those shifts with depth analysis. For example: How can one put their info to be presented by a GPT/GPT-plugins.
- tr90814 3y ago
  I prefer LLMAO: Large Language Model Appearance Optimisation
candiddevmike 3y ago
Hot take: SEO is dead, content farms are done, almost no one will leave Google/Bing to read more than what it generates. Thank you content writers for your service training LLMs. Here's 10 amazing ways to find a new career in a LLM world.
- grrdotcloud 3y ago
  Prompt trainers and tweakers and optimizers will probably replace the SEO types. I'm terrified of a world where I ask, what beverage will be served on Mars, and the answer will be engineered to be given as Coca-Cola is a popular drink possibly available on Mars, or right now. Would you like it delivered?
  - hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
    I’m more worried about automated astroturfing and propaganda.
    - arsome 3y ago
      Well, it's a little late for that one. Fire one of the many offline LLMs up on a university network or somewhere else that a single IP connecting many times won't be too suspicious and let it go to town.
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      Why? The only difference is that everyone can afford it. It is probably better in the end than only having paid chills doing it, since people will realize they can't trust "internet consensus" as being a actual consensus. The real problem for some sites, is the amount of believable spam on mindless rant feeds, like Twitter and Reddit etc.
  - arsome 3y ago
    "Prompt trainers" and such will just be replaced by slightly better LLMs that can do that part already or inquire for further details from a user.
  - 3y ago
jacooper 3y ago
The issue is getting people to click on your website, why would any one do that if the entire content is already extracted by the ai, which directly gave it to the user?
- fny 3y ago
  Isn’t this an issue as is? Theres a lot of content summarized at the top which answers the question I have more often than not.
  - waboremo 3y ago
    Somewhat, it's only not really an issue currently because most of the top answers aren't great and you want to look for a better overview. You can't currently get the overview from Bing or Google, only whatever sentence they've decided to highlight.
- pers0n 3y ago
  Exactly, just like info gets ripped off websites onto Wikipedia, with very few references, it’s hell getting them cuz they claim you want the link back, cahtgpt references hardly anything
- add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
  Maybe we'll end up in a place where most people ask an LLM and take the first opaque answer they're given and be done with it. But others with more curiosity and skepticism will continue to go to real sources, evaluate their trustworthiness, weigh a few against each other, bypass intentional or unintentional bias/censorship in some tech giant's algorithm.
- brookst 3y ago
  Are you saying that the motive for posting a bread recipe that starts with 5000 words about the history of bread will evaporate, so we'll be left with websites from enthusiasts who have something interesting to say?
  - 3y ago
WirelessGigabit 3y ago
I don't know if I'm against this. If it means that websites will return to having less noise on their pages so that I get to the information I want faster, I don't care. The way Google shaped SEO meant that many websites have tons of text just to prove that they are the authority. Googling for like a Jerusalem Bug bite risk or Black Widow bite risk makes you end up some local pest control website telling you will get a fever (former) or die (latter) from the bite. Of course, they want to sell you services, so they build their SEO stating that they are the authority. They are not. And this is the problem with the web. There is no authority of information.
- Havoc 3y ago
  I suspect expecting noise levels to go down with rising AI is uhm optimistic
skilled 3y ago
All this will do is amplify the rise of paid spam for product promotions. What is the best network monitoring tool? Oh wow, Bard says it is, “NetShark”. I will formulate my own thoughts on this in the next 6 months. If serious damage is about to happen (to SEOs) then I fully expect huge swings in traffic for a lot of sites, which is easy to monitor. Google also said they are rolling out another helpful content update soon. I wonder how much they have integrated LLMs into the search updates for processing text for sentiment and maybe even accuracy.
dreamcompiler 3y ago
Oh great, yet another way for Google to return junk pages I didn't ask for because "I think you meant xyz." No I did not. I meant exactly the keywords I asked for you stupid bozo bot. It's already impossible to search for web pages that contain the actual keywords I asked for; it used to be that you could surround your keywords with double-quote marks but that stopped working some time ago. There's a market for a dumb search engine that just finds literal keywords and doesn't use AI. Of course it won't be very useful for selling ads.
- post-it 3y ago
  The worst is trying to search for something like `Unexpected token ?` because it always strips out the punctuation no matter what I do.
  - userbinator 3y ago
    Or error codes, because it thinks that all numbers are almost the same. AI is the imprecision and stupidity of a human, amplified by the speed of machines.
    - water-your-self 3y ago
      We've automated human error. Poetic
TrevorFSmith 3y ago
I'm pretty happy with Kagi's results since they down-rank sites with loads of ads and tracking scripts. It feels like the era for ad-funded information is ending and only paid services will be able to provide a useful noosphere. (this isn't a sponsored comment. I'm just a machinist who likes good search results)
- theage 3y ago
  Pretty soon when the novelty wears off they will realize they still have to gimp their generated responses if they want to have things to scrape in future. A world where you want websites to exist to direct users to clashes with building perfect chatbots. Kagi have every incentive to engage in sandbagging their upcoming chatbot just like google, they just prefer you knew it as "your safety" rather than "their sinking ship".
m3kw9 3y ago
What I think can happen is that a lot of sites will become plugins for the LLM to get info, and Google will become a sort of conduit to the web.
tracyhenry 3y ago
It's not hard to embed links in the generated answer as demonstrated by Bing Chat. Under the hood, it still uses Bing Search as a first-step filter. So you still want to very much rank high on search results. SEO will not change much in that sense.
sourcecodeplz 3y ago
Edit: forget about clicks, it's about typeins now. People always said to build a brand. I think today that is most important than ever. I just read documentation pages nowadays. Rarely do I click on a tutorial article. The news, I get from my usual sites. Entertainment, from streaming. And with the flood of AI generated books, this really could be the return of the blog. Long live blogs!
- britch 3y ago
  an ai book is surely more work than an ai blog
siliconc0w 3y ago
you gotta get on the next wave - LLMO or content optimized (or adversary tuned) to be cited by large language models
keithalewis 3y ago
Sigmund's nephew would like to have a word with you https://search.brave.com/search?q=edward+bernays+propaganda https://search.brave.com/search?q=edward+bernays+propaganda
varenc 3y ago
From the article: > "The two areas where we see automated writing tools for SEO purposes having an advantage will be ... 2) generating content that is not watermarked by Google as synthetic content." Wow. They're basically saying that AI tools will lets SEOers generate content that isn't detected as "synthetic content" by Google, even though it clearly is synthetic. It's surprising to see the SEO industry acknowledge this so directly. Whether the generated content is useful or not, I'm now even more ready for the world where 90% of my queries can be answered on search engines directly since it's just cutting out the middleman.
- rgrieselhuber 3y ago
  This basically came down to being “allowed” after Google announced that they would not penalize content simply because it was fully or partially synthetic. What they say matters is how helpful that content is. Whether or not synthetic = spam is probably a longer discussion.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nologic01 3y ago
Keywords (tokens) are the very basis for LLM but they no longer need to be spoonfed or gamed, they are extracted from the text, so in an objective and naive sense the content becomes ever more of a king. Ofcourse what the search decides to surface to the user and eventually link to is another story altogether. "Learning" from one site and promoting another more lucrative one is entirely possible, if somewhat evil.
0proboy0 3y ago
[dead]
vrglvrglvrgl 3y ago
[dead]
wslh 3y ago
Google results quality should be community tested to deface the monster hidden there. Nowadays most search results in Google are easily identified as a failure. I wonder which results we will obtain when we look for specific recipes with these changes. Or, comparison of hardware.
flerovium 3y ago
Now it means google will control everything you see, not just which pages you see.

187 points by rgrieselhuber 3y ago

So if this is coming to proper google.com and the search, what is Google Bard then? I guess it is something like a disguised alpha release in order to gather data?

Smoosh 3y ago

I see mention in the article of content creation. But are search engines working on task-related personal assistants? For one example, If I want to take a holiday, could an assistant work out the best dates (based upon preferences of availability, cost etc), and research the best airfares (excluding that particular airline I hate) and find a hotel room with the features I want, and throw in a few sightseeing activities which appeal to my personal tastes, then summarise it up into a travel itinerary for me to approve. Then, upon approval it proceeds to book (and pay for?) all the things.

ShamelessC 3y ago
GPT-4 with a calendar plugin can likely already do this.
WirelessGigabit 3y ago
While it could automate it I don't think it would be better. In fact it would be worse. Websites would try and game the system to be the one that ChatGPT chooses for you. And now you are relying on a system that has no incentive of telling you the truth. At least if I check to go kayaking on day 2 of my vacation, I can compare the top 3 websites, cross reference with Yelp to see which one has the best value for the $. Plus there still is the part where the data being sourced isn't formatted the same, so mistakes will be made. It even happens with manual research. You miss the part where one offers a pickup and the other one doesn't. ChatGPT will suffer from that too.
- shostack 3y ago
  It isn't just websites trying to game it. It's brands wanting to pay for placement in the results, aka search ads. And Google wanting to maximize their metrics. In the short term this may bias towards giving me the best organic results, but will it shift to pushing me ever more aggressively to what advertisers are bidding on?
freediver 3y ago
We are working on this as a part of Kagi Search Labs, but it is worth noting that this steps outside the domain of search engines. By the time this technology matures, we will be talking about digital assistants.
water-your-self 3y ago
>best airfares >hotel room >sightseeing activities You can bet that there will be a bidding war behind the scene by those wanting to be the "best" airline and the "best" hotel and the "best" activity.
- questime 3y ago
  This has been the case for decades now - Google, Booking, Expedia etc. are not something new.

TheObviousOne 3y ago

I think we should call it GEO - GPT Engine Optimization. :) Furthermore, the article lack of how to tackle those shifts with depth analysis. For example: How can one put their info to be presented by a GPT/GPT-plugins.

tr90814 3y ago
I prefer LLMAO: Large Language Model Appearance Optimisation

candiddevmike 3y ago

Hot take: SEO is dead, content farms are done, almost no one will leave Google/Bing to read more than what it generates. Thank you content writers for your service training LLMs. Here's 10 amazing ways to find a new career in a LLM world.

grrdotcloud 3y ago
Prompt trainers and tweakers and optimizers will probably replace the SEO types. I'm terrified of a world where I ask, what beverage will be served on Mars, and the answer will be engineered to be given as Coca-Cola is a popular drink possibly available on Mars, or right now. Would you like it delivered?
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
  I’m more worried about automated astroturfing and propaganda.
  - arsome 3y ago
    Well, it's a little late for that one. Fire one of the many offline LLMs up on a university network or somewhere else that a single IP connecting many times won't be too suspicious and let it go to town.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    Why? The only difference is that everyone can afford it. It is probably better in the end than only having paid chills doing it, since people will realize they can't trust "internet consensus" as being a actual consensus. The real problem for some sites, is the amount of believable spam on mindless rant feeds, like Twitter and Reddit etc.
- arsome 3y ago
  "Prompt trainers" and such will just be replaced by slightly better LLMs that can do that part already or inquire for further details from a user.
- 3y ago

jacooper 3y ago

The issue is getting people to click on your website, why would any one do that if the entire content is already extracted by the ai, which directly gave it to the user?

fny 3y ago
Isn’t this an issue as is? Theres a lot of content summarized at the top which answers the question I have more often than not.
- waboremo 3y ago
  Somewhat, it's only not really an issue currently because most of the top answers aren't great and you want to look for a better overview. You can't currently get the overview from Bing or Google, only whatever sentence they've decided to highlight.
pers0n 3y ago
Exactly, just like info gets ripped off websites onto Wikipedia, with very few references, it’s hell getting them cuz they claim you want the link back, cahtgpt references hardly anything
add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
Maybe we'll end up in a place where most people ask an LLM and take the first opaque answer they're given and be done with it. But others with more curiosity and skepticism will continue to go to real sources, evaluate their trustworthiness, weigh a few against each other, bypass intentional or unintentional bias/censorship in some tech giant's algorithm.
brookst 3y ago
Are you saying that the motive for posting a bread recipe that starts with 5000 words about the history of bread will evaporate, so we'll be left with websites from enthusiasts who have something interesting to say?
- 3y ago

WirelessGigabit 3y ago

I don't know if I'm against this. If it means that websites will return to having less noise on their pages so that I get to the information I want faster, I don't care. The way Google shaped SEO meant that many websites have tons of text just to prove that they are the authority. Googling for like a Jerusalem Bug bite risk or Black Widow bite risk makes you end up some local pest control website telling you will get a fever (former) or die (latter) from the bite. Of course, they want to sell you services, so they build their SEO stating that they are the authority. They are not. And this is the problem with the web. There is no authority of information.

Havoc 3y ago
I suspect expecting noise levels to go down with rising AI is uhm optimistic

skilled 3y ago

All this will do is amplify the rise of paid spam for product promotions. What is the best network monitoring tool? Oh wow, Bard says it is, “NetShark”. I will formulate my own thoughts on this in the next 6 months. If serious damage is about to happen (to SEOs) then I fully expect huge swings in traffic for a lot of sites, which is easy to monitor. Google also said they are rolling out another helpful content update soon. I wonder how much they have integrated LLMs into the search updates for processing text for sentiment and maybe even accuracy.

dreamcompiler 3y ago

Oh great, yet another way for Google to return junk pages I didn't ask for because "I think you meant xyz." No I did not. I meant exactly the keywords I asked for you stupid bozo bot. It's already impossible to search for web pages that contain the actual keywords I asked for; it used to be that you could surround your keywords with double-quote marks but that stopped working some time ago. There's a market for a dumb search engine that just finds literal keywords and doesn't use AI. Of course it won't be very useful for selling ads.

post-it 3y ago
The worst is trying to search for something like `Unexpected token ?` because it always strips out the punctuation no matter what I do.
- userbinator 3y ago
  Or error codes, because it thinks that all numbers are almost the same. AI is the imprecision and stupidity of a human, amplified by the speed of machines.
  - water-your-self 3y ago
    We've automated human error. Poetic

TrevorFSmith 3y ago

I'm pretty happy with Kagi's results since they down-rank sites with loads of ads and tracking scripts. It feels like the era for ad-funded information is ending and only paid services will be able to provide a useful noosphere. (this isn't a sponsored comment. I'm just a machinist who likes good search results)

theage 3y ago
Pretty soon when the novelty wears off they will realize they still have to gimp their generated responses if they want to have things to scrape in future. A world where you want websites to exist to direct users to clashes with building perfect chatbots. Kagi have every incentive to engage in sandbagging their upcoming chatbot just like google, they just prefer you knew it as "your safety" rather than "their sinking ship".

m3kw9 3y ago

What I think can happen is that a lot of sites will become plugins for the LLM to get info, and Google will become a sort of conduit to the web.

tracyhenry 3y ago

It's not hard to embed links in the generated answer as demonstrated by Bing Chat. Under the hood, it still uses Bing Search as a first-step filter. So you still want to very much rank high on search results. SEO will not change much in that sense.

sourcecodeplz 3y ago

Edit: forget about clicks, it's about typeins now. People always said to build a brand. I think today that is most important than ever. I just read documentation pages nowadays. Rarely do I click on a tutorial article. The news, I get from my usual sites. Entertainment, from streaming. And with the flood of AI generated books, this really could be the return of the blog. Long live blogs!

britch 3y ago
an ai book is surely more work than an ai blog

siliconc0w 3y ago

you gotta get on the next wave - LLMO or content optimized (or adversary tuned) to be cited by large language models

keithalewis 3y ago

Sigmund's nephew would like to have a word with you https://search.brave.com/search?q=edward+bernays+propaganda https://search.brave.com/search?q=edward+bernays+propaganda

varenc 3y ago

From the article: > "The two areas where we see automated writing tools for SEO purposes having an advantage will be ... 2) generating content that is not watermarked by Google as synthetic content." Wow. They're basically saying that AI tools will lets SEOers generate content that isn't detected as "synthetic content" by Google, even though it clearly is synthetic. It's surprising to see the SEO industry acknowledge this so directly. Whether the generated content is useful or not, I'm now even more ready for the world where 90% of my queries can be answered on search engines directly since it's just cutting out the middleman.

rgrieselhuber 3y ago
This basically came down to being “allowed” after Google announced that they would not penalize content simply because it was fully or partially synthetic. What they say matters is how helpful that content is. Whether or not synthetic = spam is probably a longer discussion.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

nologic01 3y ago

Keywords (tokens) are the very basis for LLM but they no longer need to be spoonfed or gamed, they are extracted from the text, so in an objective and naive sense the content becomes ever more of a king. Ofcourse what the search decides to surface to the user and eventually link to is another story altogether. "Learning" from one site and promoting another more lucrative one is entirely possible, if somewhat evil.

0proboy0 3y ago

[dead]

vrglvrglvrgl 3y ago

[dead]

wslh 3y ago

Google results quality should be community tested to deface the monster hidden there. Nowadays most search results in Google are easily identified as a failure. I wonder which results we will obtain when we look for specific recipes with these changes. Or, comparison of hardware.

flerovium 3y ago

Now it means google will control everything you see, not just which pages you see.