“This is a big change. This is a disruptive moment,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a recent podcast. He was referring to the arrival of artificial intelligence in its search engine. In recent weeks, Google has been testing AI summaries for some searches in the US, which are AI-generated paragraphs that try to respond to users' search queries. “Let Google search for you,” the company says.
The change has not reached Spain or Europe, and there is no timeline for when the AI overview will be available. But there is one group of Spaniards anxiously waiting to see how the change will work: SEO professionals who work to improve their clients' page rankings. How will they work if Google no longer provides links and answers them directly? Will they lose their jobs?
EL PAÍS asked these questions to several digital consultants who specialize in SEO. Their common answer was: “Don't worry, it's not a big deal.” “SEO has died many times,” says SEO consultant David Carrasco. The arrival of AI search engines will not completely eliminate links. For example, in the AI overview, Google will list the links that were sources, add others later, and also create a new tab called “Web” where users will see only links without AI.
“This has happened before,” says Betlem Cardona, SEO director at an agency. “Everyone sits around, believing that a revolution is coming, but in the end it isn't.” Since ChatGPT's appearance in November 2022, there have been constant whispers about the demise of traditional search engines. ChatGPT's developer, OpenAI, has partnered with Microsoft to improve the company's search engine, Bing, among other things. At the time, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said of Google, “I want you to know that we made people dance.” In February, there were rumors that ChatGPT was developing its own search engine, which was supposed to be launched in May, but it is still in development. There are already AI-powered search engines on the market, such as Perplexity, but their market share is small.
So far, none of the big changes that were predicted have happened. Pichai responded gently to Nadella in May, saying, “I think one of the wrong things to do is to listen to the noise and play other people's dance music.” For millions of people, the Google search engine is their gateway to the internet. Changes at Google won't happen soon, but in February, consulting firm Gartner predicted that traditional search engine volume will fall 25% in 2026 as AI chatbots and other virtual agents take over.
“They're scared of what others are doing, but it's been over a year and a half since ChatGPT, a year and two months since Bing Copilot, and a year and three months since Perplexity, and none of them have captured a significant share of Google,” says SEO consultant Juan González Villa. “Bing has invested and so far has seen very little return, even though 1% of a very large market is a lot. But Google isn't so scared,” he adds.
Changes of this magnitude will take time. “Day-to-day changes will come more slowly,” González Villa continues. “Google will be careful not to eat itself. Google is mainly funded by advertising revenue when people click on links,” he explains. Google has already announced that it will include ads in its AI summaries. Google does not provide AI summaries for every search query. Tests conducted by EL PAÍS and this group of SEO experts found that AI summaries are more likely to be used to answer strange searches or questions that previously could not be answered by links (what is the relationship between chimpanzees and astronauts) and not for lucrative Google searches such as “best coffee maker.”
It will also be harder for AI to react to news and breaking events. AI needs time to put together summaries, and it will be hard to summarize a football match or a bombing, or a moment that has just ended. But the media is one of the groups most concerned about the shift to AI search. Social media is reducing traffic to media, and Google is their last hope. But AI summaries will have a big impact on media if they allow users to find answers to simple questions (such as “Who is that?”) without having to click through articles. June 7, Business Insider CEO Barbara Penn sent a message to the entire editorial team: “Traffic from Google has been particularly volatile across the publishing industry over the past month,” she wrote. “The way people find and access information is rapidly changing. […] When our content is condensed and presented in this way, we don't make any money to support our journalism.”
These changes have already begun to stir controversy: In the early days of AI Overviews, users noticed that Google was returning incorrect or even ridiculous results for some questions, but in a more serious case, Perplexity openly summarized an exclusive news article. Forbes It was publishing paid content. Perplexity has attempted to clarify what happened, but either way, this is the latest example of an AI company thriving on other people's content.
A cautious approach
As an integral part of the internet, Google needs attention: “You can't assume that SEO will be gone in a year. Google needs attention because 70% of referred web traffic comes from Google. If we stop being referred, these sudden changes by Google will be unsustainable,” says González Valle.
But Google has no doubt that AI is on the brink of important change. “I was doing a training session at Google,” explains Beatriz Tejada, a digital marketing consultant who took a course at the company's headquarters in Madrid in May. “All of a sudden, in class, [that the traditional method] “The mentality is, 'It's dead, it doesn't work anymore.' But I think we're in a transition now.”
Some searches are based on keywords. These words are converted into a set of values that allow the algorithm to calculate how to best answer the question. “Previously, we would do keyword research based on the client's niche to look for keywords. Now, we focus on looking semantically for a set of words that are related to a keyword,” says Tejada. This is how AI searches become more responsive.
“We look at what the results are for questions that our users or our customer's target audiences ask, what results are driven by artificial intelligence, and then we analyze the sources,” Cardona said. “This gives us strategic direction to find out what content we need to develop to answer them, because we're discovering a lot of questions that we didn't know we had.”
Another change, Pichai said, is that users no longer blindly accept AI summaries, but instead seek out more information through links. Cardona agreed: “User behavior as Google's search results are built is very similar to a pinball machine. Instead of clicking on the first three results, you go down and scroll through all the pages, click here, scroll back up. User behavior is very different because there are more compelling results,” she said.
All these details mean that any real change will depend on how users accept the changes from the only one with all the metrics: Google. “With every update, we know how to be a little more cautious and skeptical,” says David Carrasco, who acknowledges that he has some reservations. “If search engines stop working the way they do now, maybe in five years Google will no longer be the leading search engine. Then we'll have to invent something different and evolve.”
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