As an SEO agency in Salt Lake City, Webtek Digital Marketing works on behalf of clients to help them improve performance on search engine result pages (SERPs). As their performance improves, their sites receive more traffic. And more traffic leads to more opportunities to bring customers into the full. But with AI now part of the equation, where do we stand?
There are a lot of people with a lot of ideas about AI and SEO. Our perspective as an SEO provider is rooted mainly in what big tech companies are doing. After all, these are the companies driving the future of search and, by extension, SEO. Take Meta, Facebook’s parent company.
A number of tech news reports suggest that Meta is currently developing its own AI-powered search engine similar to Perplexity and Brave Search. The idea is to come up with a search engine capable of leveraging AI so that Meta doesn’t have to depend so much on Google and Bing for search queries.
AI Is Changing How We Search
Why would Meta go in this direction? Because AI is changing how we search. To understand how, you need look no further than Perplexity. When you search something in Perplexity, you don’t get the standard, Google-centric list of results to click through on your own. Instead, you get an actual answer to your question.
The answer contains external links you can check if you so desire. But you don’t ever have to leave Perplexity to find the information you want. Perplexity presents it in conversational style.
The people behind Perplexity were among the first to approach search this way. It has worked so well that others have followed suit. This post already mentioned Brave Search, but there are others including OpenAI, SearchGPT (ChatGPT), and You.com.
Even Google and Microsoft are on the AI-driven search train. Google is feverishly working to incorporate Gemini into its search engine to replicate what Perplexity is already doing. Microsoft is doing the same with Copilot.
Google and Bing Independence
The fact that Meta is developing its own AI-powered search demonstrates its commitment to being independent from both Google and Bing. They join a growing army of search providers looking to offer consumers an alternative to Alphabet and Microsoft.
As they pursue their independent search engines, they are forcing SEO providers to rethink long standing principles and strategies. Something as simple as keyword research changes when AI is added to the equation.
For the record, we are talking about generative AI here. There are various forms of AI that have nothing to do with online search. Regenerative AI is concerned, algorithms are built on natural language processing. They are designed to understand, parse, and interpret human speech.
We Must Think Conversationally
As an SEO agency in Salt Lake City, we can’t afford to stop giving our customers industry leading service. So if we intend to continue being a leader in the AI era, we have to adapt. That means thinking conversationally.
The combination of voice assistance and AI-driven search is compelling people to use their devices conversationally. They speak to their phones like they would speak to other people. They ask search engines questions instead of typing in one or two keywords.
It’s quite possible that the days of traditional search are numbered. It would be wise for every SEO agency to consider that eventuality. Our industry must adapt to the new way people search. More importantly, we need to adapt to the new ways in which AI-driven search engines respond to user queries.
