Welcome back to the Overit SEO Brief for Q2 2024! We’ll touch upon some of the key news and notes in the world of search since our last Brief, including updates on some topics covered in previous Briefs. Ready? Let’s get started!
Mixed Messages and an Unclear Future for AI-Driven Search
May was quite the month for news stories about AI and search, with rumors swirling to start the month and a total lack of clarity to end it. To start, based on initial Bloomberg and Reuters reports, OpenAI was heavily rumored to be adding a feature to its popular ChatGPT that could search the web, cite sources and provide links within its answers, and even pull and return images sourced online. A true AI search engine to rival Google was THE rumor leading up to Open AI’s live-streamed Spring Update.
But while they announced and demo-ed the release of their new ChatGPT-4o, nothing featured during the event involved search. ChatGPT-4o is impressive and a clear improvement on earlier versions, but we’ll have to wait and see if and when search becomes an integrated feature of the tool.
A day after the Open AI event, Google held their own annual I/O Conference, where they quickly jumped into the void left by Open AI, announcing that a new feature called AI Overviews would be integrated into more search results, particularly for informational searches.
These AI Overviews are powered by Google’s Gemini AI and provide distilled summaries on a topic at the top of the page, more often than not without any “blue links” to 3rd party websites. They’ve immediately become a hot topic, because they push down the organic search results even further down the page, with some overviews reportedly taking up to 80% of the search result pixel space. This leaves fewer, if any, clicks for the organic results, which doesn’t bode well for publishers and website stakeholders that have come to rely on Google traffic over the last 20 years.
Additionally, we know that Large Language Models need to be fed immense data sets to train them. Early training sets were typically sourced offline, but it’s become clear that Google and others are now effectively scraping the web to power their machine learning, and in many cases, the overviews are distilling or even directly quoting online content that used to see organic traffic for the very same searches. Google, in the eyes of many, has stolen the content, used it for their own proprietary AI, and then entirely displaced the source of that content. Is that fair? It’s hard to say.
And this is where we’re getting a lot of mixed messaging. In a recent interview on CNBC, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt hinted at a future for AI-driven Google search with NO links to external websites. When asked about the growing role of AI in technology platforms, Schmit reiterated that the purpose of Google is to “organize the world’s information” and not necessarily provide “blue links.” Schmidt implied that AI-driven search would be capable of answering user searches directly without returning links to external websites, which would dramatically change the search ecosystem.
Schmidt’s interview, however, seemed at odds with recent remarks made by the current Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who in a recent Bloomberg interview said that links within search results aren’t going anywhere soon and that “links will always be an important part of search”. Pichai reminded readers that Google has long provided answers directly within search results, alongside links, and that AI search would just be extending those capabilities further. In a later interview with The Verge, Pichai addressed concerns about lost traffic and went so far as to say that “if you put content and links within AI Overviews, they get higher Click-through rates than if you put it outside of AI Overviews.”
With so many different companies and platforms now all-in on AI, it’s interesting that there doesn’t seem to be any clear consensus or direction on what AI search should be, not in terms of consumer expectations and certainly not with industry offerings. We’re going to have to wait and see how the search landscape evolves over the coming years, but we’re pretty confident that AI’s role is only going to expand from here. We’ve covered this topic before, and we’ll continue to keep you updated as we learn more.
The Google Antitrust Suit Comes to a Quiet Conclusion
Another story we’ve covered before had some recent updates as well. Lawyers for Google, the Justice Department, and a group of state Attorney Generals all presented their final arguments to Judge Amit Mehta in United States vs Google, the largest antitrust trial in decades. If you didn’t catch our coverage of this in a previous SEO Brief, Google was accused of effectively rigging the search engine market by paying 3rd parties, including phone manufacturers and wireless carriers, to lock in Google as the default search engine on handheld devices.
In the coming weeks or even months, Judge Mehta will determine whether or not Google broke state and federal laws with their business practices in order to maximize their market share in online search. The judgment will identify what laws, if any, Google may have broken and what steps will need to be taken to remedy any illegal actions. This could amount to something as minor as some fines or as drastic as a major reorganization of operations at Google. And besides this particular case, Google finds itself in the crosshairs of another antitrust case, this time for its outsized role in the digital ad space. Because of the potential outcomes here, a lot is at stake when it comes to search, so we’ll keep you updated as we learn more.
Google Looks to Acquire HubSpot
Despite the antitrust lawsuit, Google continues to explore expanding its business footprint, with a reported interest in acquiring the popular CRM and marketing platform, HubSpot. As also reported by Bloomberg, Google is actively kicking the tires on a potential acquisition of HubSpot, which focuses on more of a small business customer base rather than enterprise-level customers like other companies in this space, like Oracle and Salesforce.
Representatives from both Google and HubSpot declined to comment on the report, and Google may simply be biding their time until they learn the outcome of the antitrust case. But in the meantime, HubSpot outpaced their earning projections for the 9th consecutive quarter, announcing over $615 million in revenue for Q1 2024, which was up 40% YoY. The recent earning report places their market value at around $30 billion, so if Google does end up acquiring them it won’t come cheaply. As with the other stories this quarter, we’ll keep you updated in future SEO Briefs as we learn more.
That’s it for this Brief! We’ll see you next Quarter. Got SEO questions? Drop us a line at [email protected]!