Google is leading the AI apocalypse

A new Google search engine powered by AI is coming for your business.

That’s the current panic driven rumour mill doing the rounds in businesses across the world.

Tentatively titled SGE, Google is planning to use the new AI powered search engine to give people information faster. If you want to know something, the search engine will give you a mini AI-generated text overview.

This is why brands aren’t happy. It’s removing their bacon. Google was meant to display their brands and their answers, not give people answers straight from Google. What’s more, Google’s AI content will be created by amalgamating the existing content of others. 

Is this legal? Is it ethical? Who knows.

What could the consequence of this be?

In the worst case scenario, we could see massive traffic losses, with sites losing visibility, hurting anyone reliant on ad impressions. People will stay on Google’s own site and not move to another. Impressions and traffic will vanish.

The other possible option is that brands see only a possible 25% loss. After all, Google relies on display ads to make billions. It is highly unlikely that it will want to kill off that revenue generating option. 

Google’s SGE will provide information faster to people, reducing the time needed for research to purchase. Given that at present it is big brands being referenced by SGE, these brands will be the ones that win. Especially, as these brands are brands that are likely to be trusted by the large language models, which are trained to peruse the best sites in the world for information. So, larger brands in any category will likely be featured and pick up revenue.

For smaller brands, less likely to have such exposure, the other recommendation from Andrew Holland, is to build their brand. Produce great content that will build their reputation and earn trust from customers and from Google.

The AI apocalypse may not actually be here.