As we discussed in our last EnergyWire, rapid advancements in generative AI are changing the ways we find and create content before our very eyes. It's an exciting time to be a digital citizen—and it can feel like an intimidating time to be a brand or website owner as well. No one knows exactly what the future looks like, but we all know AI is here to stay.
We don’t necessarily have all of the answers, but this is what feels right to us based on our experience, insights, and values: Embrace AI, but never abandon your pursuit of high-quality work and the needs of your audience. In this crazy AI-assisted world, it’s what users want—and oddly enough, it may be your best answer to coexisting with AI and winning the fight for attention.
Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to the future of search marketing.
AI and the Future of Search: an Overview
Successful search engine optimization (SEO) has long been the bread and butter of a strong marketing campaign. When done right, SEO builds awareness and drives traffic to a brand’s website by moving it up in a person’s search results.
AI is making “semantic search”—search that interprets the meaning of words (vs. “lexical search,” which matches exact words and phrases)—even better by helping search engines anticipate user intent and incorporate complex contextual factors into search results. This ultimately is going to evolve to make search more conversational and less transactional.
What does this mean for paid search? At this point, no one really knows for sure. One thing we can infer based on the long history of Google being Google, is that the platform isn’t likely to just walk away from one of its major revenue centers, so paid search will continue to be an important part of any digital strategy.
That said, if the goal of AI-powered search is to provide more personalized, streamlined, and relevant results for users, it feels likely that paid search campaigns will only need to be all the more airtight in their targeting and copywriting. Some industry experts even speculate that advanced personalization of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) may result in fewer opportunities to get ads in front of consumers overall, potentially making paid search less cost-effective. As a result, solid SEO/organic search strategies and other channel mixes are worth considering to help support paid search tactics.
Developing an Effective Search Strategy with AI in Mind
Since AI is proving to be successful at anticipating user needs in order to serve up relevant results (and ads), brands need to really lean into who their customers—or potential audiences—may be. The mindset can’t simply be about keyword stuffing and pay-per-click.
A few strategies to consider:
- Quality over quantity: When it comes to organic search, incorporating keywords into content still matters, but it’s not the only thing that matters. AI-powered search engines need to see keywords matched with high-quality content according to experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (i.e., Google’s E.E.A.T. system).
- Find a strong balance: Future SEO, UX, and content strategies will need to rely on a “balance of human creativity and AI efficiency.” In terms of UX and content creation, AI is able to use advanced language processing to detect (and filter out) poor quality for the sake of user experiences. So, even though AI may be the gatekeeper of search results/content, it is theoretically doing so in the interest of giving the user what they want, and what they want is something that feels real, authentic, trustworthy, and valuable.
- Give your website structure some serious consideration: AI is helping search engines do a better job of ranking page results that factor in both domain quality and page quality. Website owners need to be thoughtful and strategic about their entire website structure and identity as well as the quality of their page content if they are going to win the organic search game.
- Befriend AI to enhance content creation, but don’t rely on it to do the job: While AI is rapidly changing the way search engines work, it is also changing the way content creators and website owners actually make content. Content creators should absolutely befriend AI to optimize for trends, keywords, user behavior, and more. But they cannot rely on AI alone. In fact, human creativity, intuition, and storytelling is needed not just for good UX but also for SEO. This is often described as the AIO framework (artificial intelligence optimization).
What’s Next for Search and AI
Looking forward, it stands to reason that AI-chat functionality will become increasingly common in the future of search. This will undoubtedly have an impact on both organic clicks and paid ads alike, but it shouldn’t be perceived as all doom and gloom for website owners. Many signs point to these AI-chat features relying heavily on “including organic links for the sake of citation” because they know that users want to know the source of the information. AI-chat will also likely include ads as part of its “conversations” with searchers.
What does all of the above mean? Website owners and advertisers should not abandon hope. Doubling down on relevance, authenticity, and quality of content will still pay off even in that AI-chat scenario, because you can be listed as a top citation or sneak in as an ad. You might still capture clicks, and at the very least, you capture awareness.
Among all that has already evolved and all that will continue to do so when it comes to search and AI, content creators and website owners cannot lose sight of the basics. A clear content structure needs to be in place with clear themes, topics, and subtopics. Developers should make use of HTML headings, tags, visually appealing high-res images, and sitemaps (among other strategies) to help search engines read their content. Not only is this all good practice, but these fundamentals all serve to improve the UX too.
At the end of the day, AI-powered search engines seem to be solving users’ pain points of finding relevant, high-quality content as efficiently as possible. As search engines lean more into the needs and goals of users, it is up to content creators, website owners, advertisers, and brands to rise to the occasion and proactively do the same if they are to win the fight for attention.