Recently, the market research firm Gartner released a statement saying that web searches will decrease by around 25% in 2026 due to the availability of AI chatbots and other virtual agents.
Actually, this is a predictable trend as major browsers like Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge are increasingly featuring their respective Gemini (formerly called Bard) and ChatGPT capabilities in their search engines.
Historically speaking, when you type a web search query, the results given are typically links to related sites. Web crawler software counts the interrelationships and the number of times that each link has been viewed to rank these links.
The entire industry of search engine optimization (SEO) takes advantage of this relationship. By optimizing websites for SEO, you can ensure that a website ranks higher than other sites. For example, by using the right hashtags that most people will probably use, their ranking and visibility will likely increase. The same is true if your site is being referenced by other sites, which then is interpreted by the search engine as some sort of authority on your website’s part to write about that topic.
Ranking high and on the very first page of a query search, especially on Google search, gives many benefits. People are often pressed for time, and if the top search results are good enough, they will not have the patience to check other results on lower-ranked pages, unless they need to be thorough in their search. For many people, however, if the first result is good enough, then they do not need to proceed further.
Problems will of course crop up for companies that rely on their SEO rankings. The reason for this is that these new AI chatbots do not really prioritize giving links. Instead, these AI chatbots and other AI tools actually try to interpret the query and give an answer based on what they know from their training. The way these AI chatbots answer a question is by a process called inference.
Basically, they infer the answer from all the training data that they have learned in the past using their Large Language Models (LLM) such as those used by ChatGPT or Gemini. These bots will not revert back with links (or your company website) but will instead give their best-inferred answer.
In other words, if web search has benefited your business because your company link might be the one to show up on the search page, now you will soon have to deal with the search engine just giving its own answer and not displaying your link anymore.
So given this likely trend, companies and businesses that rely heavily on SEO should plan ahead. They should keep abreast of the latest trends in web search, particularly from the giant tech companies like Alphabet (Google) and Microsoft, and try to study and prototype some of these tools. Maybe they can get some trials of prompt engineering and feedback on ChatGPT as it relates to a company’s products or services.
Aside from the fact that their SEO visibility online may be negatively impacted, their own customers may want to deal with natural-sounding and -looking chatbots that are familiar with your company’s products and services. So there are now two reasons why your in-house (or contractor) IT group or team may want to develop some customized chatbot prototypes to test out.
Knowing that the death of SEO may become likely in the foreseeable future, you should plant the seeds to be ready for a time when people simply talk or chat to their computers to find the answer they need, and hope that your company is positioned well enough to take early advantage of that.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.