Recently, market research firm Gartner released a statement stating that web searches will decline by approximately 25% in 2026 due to the availability of AI chatbots and other virtual agents.
In fact, this is predictable, as major browsers such as Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge increasingly include their respective Gemini (formerly known as Bard) and ChatGPT features in their search engines. It's a trend.
Historically, when you enter a web search query, the results usually include links to related sites. Web crawler software ranks these links by counting their interrelationships and the number of times each link is viewed.
The entire search engine optimization (SEO) industry takes advantage of this relationship. Optimizing your website for his SEO will help your website rank higher than other sites. For example, using the right hashtags that most people would use can improve your rankings and visibility. The same goes if your site is referenced by other sites, which search engines interpret as some kind of authority on your website's side to write about that topic.
There are many benefits to ranking high on the first page of a query search, especially in Google search. People are often pressed for time, and if the top search results are good enough, they don't have the patience to check other results on lower pages unless they need to do an exhaustive search. However, for many people, if the initial results are good enough, there is no need to proceed further.
Of course, businesses that rely on SEO rankings run into problems. The reason is that these new AI chatbots don't really prioritize giving out links. Instead, these AI chatbots and other AI tools actually try to interpret the query and give you an answer based on the knowledge they have gained through training. The way these AI chatbots answer questions is through a process called inference.
Basically, it uses a Large-Scale Language Model (LLM), like those used in ChatGPT and Gemini, to infer the answer from all the training data learned in the past. These bots will not return to the link (or the company's website), but instead will return a best guess answer.
In other words, your company's links can appear on search pages, so if a web search benefits your business, soon the search engines will just provide their own answers and your links will no longer appear. need to be addressed.
Therefore, considering this expected trend, businesses and businesses that rely heavily on SEO should plan ahead. They should stay abreast of the latest trends in web search, especially from big tech companies like Alphabet (Google) and Microsoft, and try to research and prototype some of these tools. Perhaps you could try some quick engineering and feedback on ChatGPT related to your company's products or services.
Apart from the fact that your online SEO visibility may be negatively affected, your customers will appreciate dealing with a chatbot that sounds and looks natural and familiar to your company's products and services. You might want to. Therefore, there are two reasons for his in-house (or contractor) IT group or team to develop a customized chatbot prototype for testing.
Knowing that SEO is likely to disappear in the near future, plant the seeds for a time when people will talk and chat into their computers to find the answers they need, and make sure your company is well-positioned. We should hope so. To take advantage of it early.
rare knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom, finding common ground and finding connections.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom, finding common ground and finding connections.