When Google first emerged, its primary purpose was to map out the internet. By indexing the content, they were able to build a navigation tool (search), by which we found all that content and so develop a hugely profitable business model based around advertising spend. That is how they went from being a brand to being a verb. But it was supposed to be agnostic to the content itself.

As of this week, that has begun to change – they are no longer mapping out content for us to discover, they’re now interpreting the web for us. That is a whole different question. Google’s AI tool, Gemini, will power the new approach in which search results will be delivered as AI-driven summaries – scraped from, but unattributed to, their original source.

While it raises questions about the quality and potential bias of the algorithm, and there is competition from ChatGPT’s search intentions and others, we can be reasonably confident that Google’s central place in our digital culture will mean we adopt the new approach. What will be a novelty at first will swiftly become commonplace. The assumption in Google’s Kings Cross HQ for AI is that we’ll ask ever more complex questions and receive ever more nuanced answers. Just we won’t know from whom (and that in itself has already provoked legal disputes around the IP). Links will no longer be prominent on search, except for the most basic of searches.

So, it’s a seismic move for brands and content creators. Many consumer-facing organisations and news brands will see their carefully search-optimised links pushed further down the page, and their traffic (and revenues) fall. The sources scraped for the summaries will largely be a mystery, as the Google algorithm always has been.

How this pans out remains to be seen, but it is likely that the rustic crafts of search engine optimisation will need to change. A company’s site will still need the good hygiene of search – meta data, marked-up images and strong domains. Inbound links may be less important, and keywords will need to be ever more strongly connected to user intention rather than supporting the creation of a click-bait content factory.

For the moment, this only applies to searches in English in the US, but it will come to us all. For brands looking to prosper, the key will be authoritative, expert and original content. The written word is important, as ever, but both image and video search are likely to grow. This isn’t the time to bow out of the search race, it’s the time to re-focus and raise the content game.

Inevitably, search will drive fewer users to your site, but you can add your voice to the AI consensus, and you can build your own audiences with social media strategies and digital products driven by subscription.

The battle for digital visibility has entered a new age. If you would like to discuss what this means for your organisation, do get in touch: digital@cardewgroup.com