Excerpt from PhocusWire

For publishers and content creators, the furor surrounding the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT was certainly a shock. But for businesses dependent on Google’s organic search traffic, the initial hubbub on what generative AI would do to (human) content creation was just the warm-up act. 

The real game changer came next, once Google’s big AI move became clear. Harnessing generative AI trained on the billions of websites in its index, Google intends to turn itself from a search engine into an “answer engine.” Instead of the familiar pages of blue links to third party websites, Google will now provide an AI generated response and a chatbot interface.

The upshot is clear: expect a world with vastly fewer organic search clicks once Google starts to answer informational queries itself. This could be cataclysmic for the travel industry, where the top of the marketing funnel is dominated by Google search: itinerary and trip planning, destination research, experience and activity recommendations, there aren’t many travel queries that won’t be answered by the new AI interface.

There are massive legal, regulatory, social and economic questions around the shift that we are witnessing. What is the legal basis for training large language models (LLMs) on other peoples’ content without attribution? What happens to Google’s travel revenue when half the industry has gone bust?

Fortunately, these questions are all well beyond my pay grade. I’ll happily stay in my lane and confine ourselves to the implications for travel publishing and marketing.

Instead of millions of pages of search results, we’ll have a tiny number of “read more” citations within or alongside the AI answers that link out to a handful of source websites. Getting featured in those citations will be the new SEO, driven by an entirely new set of ranking factors which have been outlined over 2023 by keen Google watchers, notably the excellent Marie Haynes.

First, Google is going hard on “helpful content” – or how well a page actually answers a query vs how well it’s optimized for SEO.

I think Google would be pursuing this regardless of the AI revolution, as it’s a common complaint that SEO has ruined the search experience, and the web in general.

If you’ve ever tried to read a recipe, a product review, or a typical travel blog article you’ll know what I’m talking about. For the last decade, the SEO game has been largely about crowding ever more text onto a page, forcing readers to root through thousands of words and dozens of vaguely related keyword-optimised subheadings to find the answer they’re looking for.

The second indicator of a changing landscape was a small but significant tweak to what Google calls E-A-T, or “Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness”. This is Google’s system for determining what constitutes content credibility – i.e. whether the author is a qualified expert, and if they’re talking from their own personal knowledge.

Around the time of GPT3’s big launch in December 2022, Google added a second ‘E’ for “Experience” to the guidelines. I don’t think they’ve explicitly said that this precludes AI-generated content, but I’m not sure ChatGPT is currently able to get on a plane to Tanzania to research the latest safari camp openings, so it’s a safe bet that this is aimed at surfacing human-produced content based on direct personal expertise.

Once again, travel sites and businesses who want to thrive in this new world will need to think carefully about the provenance of their website content. For years desk researched blog articles churned out by non-expert copywriters have been considered a perfectly acceptable SEO tactic. Now, lots of people are going all-in on generative AI, which is essentially the same thing on steroids.

Google has clearly said that there’s no rulepenalizingAI-generated content in the search results, but that’s a long way from saying it will perform well when they’re trying to surface personal experience and expertise.

Click here to read complete article at PhocusWire.