Why Google Search Will Never Be the Same Again!

Well, Google’s done it. They have killed the search experience that you’ve potentially been optimising for for years and years and years. At Google I/O, this is their tech conference just a few weeks ago, they announced AI Mode. It’s a complete beast. It’s a replacement, essentially, for a traditional search that’s rolling out across the US, and it’s rolling out right now. And when you’ve been sitting there worrying about your rankings on page one, Google at the same time has been building a system where literally there is no page one anymore. There’s no little blue links that we have been optimising for year after year, and potentially no clicks to your website as well.

It’s just AI Mode answering your questions directly in search. And it’s changing the way in which businesses are going to be able to be found for pretty much forever from now on. So we’re going to look into it together today. If we haven’t met before, my name is Jordan McFadyen. Welcome to For The Daring Growth Seekers podcast.

And like I say, Google I/O, it wasn’t just another little tech conference. And it’s probably something that you didn’t even know was going on. If you listen to this podcast, you would have seen a few weeks ago that we did do our initial reaction based on Google I/O. But today what I wanted to do was kind of reflect on the past few weeks of learnings and things that we’ve heard in the market, and about how AI Mode is literally transforming the way US businesses and companies are actually trying to market themselves over there.

And it just happened a few weeks ago. A lady called Elizabeth Reid, now, she’s Google’s head of search, she stood on stage and she suddenly stood there and declared AI Mode is the future of search. And we’re going to take note there. She didn’t say it might be the future of search. She said it is the future of search.

And that really matters, because AI Mode is built from Google and it’s not to help improve the search experience. It’s literally replacing it. So instead of, again, showing different websites, like what we see now with all the little blue links, what it’s actually doing is it’s working more like how we would use ChatGPT right now. It’s reading all the different websites and it’s actually giving you contextual answers. So potentially, when customers are looking to do business with you and your company or your product or your service, they potentially aren’t going to click through to your website anymore, because they just won’t need to.

And the data from clients, and the data from other businesses in the US, is showing that this is already happening. And we’re seeing this here in New Zealand and Australia as well. We’re already seeing referral traffic from ChatGPT search. But traditional search traffic is, and will continue, to decline over time. And so some brands already are starting to see that potentially they are quite invisible to AI search, when others are actually starting to see that they’re actually getting found more than ever.

So what I want to cover today in this real kind of overview podcast is just have a look to see how AI Mode is actually working in principle, and potentially why your current marketing strategy is actually starting to fail, and what you need to be doing differently, and even thinking differently, in terms of discovery.

Now, this is my main mission this year, and I’m going to start the podcast with this as well, because my main mission is I want you to start thinking about how AI isn’t just replacing how we work in our businesses or how we create content. It’s fundamentally changing how businesses are going to be found, how customers and clients are actually going to find your business, and potentially even work with your business as well.

But first, let’s just take it all back and let’s just, for the uninitiated, understand what AI Mode actually is. Essentially, in a nutshell, it is the end of those little blue links. If you Google something now, you get given all the different listings on there. It’s all the links through to websites. You choose a website, you click through, you see if it’s going to answer your question. You bounce back if it doesn’t, you get your answer if it does, that type of thing.

But AI Mode is using what Google is calling a query fan-out. Now, that’s going to be a term we’re going to use a lot more over the next couple of weeks as well, in the next couple of months and years as well. A query fan-out is essentially when you ask it one question, it’s automatically going to then start to have that conversation and ask dozens of related questions, and searches all for those answers at once. Then it’s going to read through all of those results and actually give you one comprehensive answer, based on all different sources and all different types of information and different websites and things like that.

So think of it like this. As an example, you’re searching for, I don’t know, the best CRM for a small business. AI Mode is going to, at the same time, be searching for things like CRM pricing. It’s going to be having a look at different CRM reviews across the internet, CRM integrations. It’s also going to really have a look at what business needs a small business might have. And then it’s going to combine all of that information, all of that query fan-out, into one response. It’s potentially then going to ask you more questions about it, to help qualify and help you make a better decision as well.

And where it gets really tricky as well is the personalisation factor. So Google have also told us, and we’re seeing this now with tools even like Claude.ai, which is an incredible tool, that the personalisation factor is getting more and more important. So the search response that you get could be completely different to what I get, even if we search the exact same search query. Because Google AI Mode is going to use things like your emails. It’s going to use, obviously, your search history and what you’ve been searching for in the past. It’s going to use your behavioural data, and how long you’re staying, and what type of questions you’re asking over time as well. It’s going to build up that knowledge of you.

It’s even going to connect to your Google Drive. It’s going to understand the type of files that are in your Google Drive. It’s going to understand the type of business that you’re running, the different files and the data that you have in there. It’s going to put all of these pictures together to get an understanding about whether you are a small business, whether you are in a marketing team, whether you lead a marketing team in a large organisation, a large corporate, for example.

It’s going to be able to pull all of those different nuances into its results, which is great for the user. And I must admit, if I’m thinking about how this is going to change even the way that I do research and how I find products and services, I think it is going to be fantastic. But from a marketer’s standpoint, and from a data standpoint, it’s going to get really interesting, because Google is also saying that they’re not actually going to give us all of that data. It’s going to be much harder for us to find out what type of search queries people are actually putting into them, be able to read and access and get access to our content, or access to our business or our branding or anything like that.

So that piece is going to get really difficult, along with that personalisation factor. And I think the personalisation thing, from my side, is I think that’s going to be the new marketing superpower that we really need to focus on: how much your strategy and your business understands perfectly who you’re trying to reach. Personalisation is not going to be such a broad thing anymore. It’s not going to be, I need to serve all small businesses. It’s going to be, I need to service all small businesses that work in a service-orientated industry, within this geographic location, with this many team members, with no marketing team, with a large sales team, with… It’s going to have to be really detailed about how you are going to target, because that personalisation is going to be really interesting.

So the immediate impact on your business right now, and what we’re seeing from US businesses, is that clicks are likely going to decrease significantly across your website. So try and explain that to your next board meeting and things like that. And we’re already seeing that now with AI Overviews. So when, in New Zealand and Australia right now, we have those AI Overviews, we’re seeing that clicks are starting to decrease a little bit from organic search now anyway. But that’s likely to continue and get worse as AI Mode is released.

What we might see, though, is higher intent visitors, okay, but less volume. So clicks are potentially going to go well down, but hopefully they’ve got a higher intent. So it goes back to that personalisation, understanding who your typical client or customer is, but also, as part of that customer persona, understanding their intent. Are they searching for information, or are they actually looking to purchase?

And then the other thing that you need to consider is that traditional ranking is going to become less relevant due to all this personalisation that we’re talking about. So whether you’ve got a number one spot or a number two spot or a number 10 spot, that kind of disappears. And what we’re going for now is how personalised is your marketing, and how much do you know about that particular client that you are trying to reach.

And so what do we need to do to make sure that our content strategy aligns with that? I think we need to go back to Google’s principles of E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness. They now become the non-negotiable. And we have been talking about this for ages, you and I, on this podcast. So we need to be thinking about all of our content, not just your blog content, your website content, but your entire online ecosystem.

Is it demonstrating these E-E-A-T principles? Are you showing your experience, your expertise, your authoritativeness? Are you showing that you are trusted by others? We need to be impeccably sure that we are showing these E-E-A-T principles, but aligning that perfectly to your target customer, your target client as well. And this is about real experts creating real content, versus fake authors and ChatGPT-written content. We’ve got to stop with that. That AI slop, this has got to be the end of that. If you’re still doing that now, please message me. I’ve got some resources I’ll send you, as my mission to get you off AI slop, and start thinking about how you can use AI tools to actually show the internet and Google and AI that you are the real expert and you can create that content.

So that’s going to be the other big one. So the other immediate actions I want you to think about now: with AI Mode, maybe you need to start thinking about how you can diversify beyond Google. If your strategy right now is very Google focused, have a think about some of the other places where your target customer is. And again, this goes back to your new marketing superpower, which is understanding who your audience is, who that client is, every little nuance about that person. Are they on TikTok in the evenings to chill out? Are they researching or watching long-form videos on YouTube? Are they reading industry publications?

You need to think about where those people are, and make sure you are also where they are. And thinking about how you can strengthen your authority in those places. I think original research that you’re creating, trying to get mentions from the media, really try and strengthen that authority that you’ve got.

And then what we also saw was some of the local business considerations that you need to be thinking about. Google My Business profiles are going to get back. You need to keep optimising those profiles, being able to build familiarity with your brand, and build up that local reputation, building up those local reviews. That is going to be one surefire way to be able to show Google that you are trusted, and that you are authoritative in your market and your niche, to your direct customer that you are trying to reach as well.

So the key things I want you to take away so far from what we’re learning about AI Mode is that AI Mode isn’t coming. It is literally here, and it is defining the way that customers are going to find your business moving forward. The traditional SEO metrics, they’re starting to become obsolete. Okay, so we’re not focusing on position one and two and three anymore. We’re focusing on authority metrics, personalisation metrics, and how we can drive high intent users, and high intent, I mean people who are actually wanting to purchase, through to your website.

Also thinking about content quality over quantity. A heap of content now is not going to be the way to go. We need to show your expertise, originality. That is going to matter more than ever in a world where you can create as many blog posts as you want right away. We need to stop with that. And like I said before, AI slop, done, dusted. Content quality over quantity.

And also diversification. I think that is one of the keys to survival as well. Not putting all your eggs into one basket. We’ve been trying to talk to clients. We had a client conversation this morning who has the majority of their advertising on Google. We need to start thinking about how do we diversify, and diversifying now. Testing other platforms where their audience potentially is, and not having all of their eggs literally in their Google Ads account or on their Google Search account. How can we diversify that content? Because SEO, I’ve seen it recognised across the industry as not search engine optimisation, but instead search everywhere optimisation.

So that diversification is going to get really, really important. You need to have that understanding that AI is changing customer behaviour. It’s changing search results, the way that we see results now. And it’s not all doom and gloom. It’s an opportunity for even smaller businesses to show their authority and to play up against the big boys. Because the fact of the matter is your customers, they are already using AI to find your business. You may just not know it. They may already be going into ChatGPT and Claude. But even though AI Mode isn’t out in New Zealand and Australia, they may be already using AI to find your business.

So the question is going to be whether they’re actually going to find your business when they’re searching on AI. So honestly, stop optimising for yesterday’s Google. Start preparing for today’s and tomorrow’s reality with search and discovery.

And if this is all very confusing, very overwhelmed, obviously that’s what me and my team do. We’re at Done By Nine. We’re a marketing strategy agency and company. We can start with consultation. We can go all the way through to implementation for you. Or the easiest option is we also run workshops, and a community called For The Daring Growth Seekers, which is tied directly to this podcast, which you are more than welcome to join.

If you want any of the details on any of those workshops or resources or our support, you can go along to our website, donebynine.com. We’ll be more than happy to help you to transform your marketing into this AI era and all these challenges that we have. And thank you again for joining us on another episode of the For The Daring Growth Seekers podcast. And we look forward to seeing you on the next one.