In a fascinating article that I picked up the other day, I think from the newspaper, but I can't remember where, they were discussing the changes in Google, and how it has changed as an organisation over the past 10 and 15 years, and its responses in the last 3 years to the AI and artificial general intelligence revolution.
At the start, the purpose of Google was to move you along as quickly as possible, and the founders were quite clear about the fact that their purpose was to do no harm, and you should not spend any time or any time longer on Google than you wanted; you bounced straight on, straight off. The quicker we could give you a positive result to your search, the better the product was, sending you to websites to go and buy your products, join your clubs or find your information.
It meant that they could create a revenue stream from advertising, which was unsurpassed in the world, bigger than anything anyone had ever seen, but now the game has changed, now they don't want you to leave, because now they understand that the only thing they've got left is your attention, and that they have to advertise on page now, to keep you there for as long as possible, because of the onset of the AI search.
If you haven't got there yet, using something like Perplexity, Claude, or even ChatGPT, it's way, way better than searching on Google. If you can stomach it, to pay your £19.99 a month or whatever it might be for Perplexity AI and to use even a 10th or 1% of the functionality and ability that it has is way, way more valuable and way more time-saving in terms of the hours spent than it is to try to navigate through Google now.
Everywhere on Google now is to keep your attention to stay on the site, but the problem here is that the game is changing, and the people who have invested huge sums of money and huge amounts of their IP in being in the place where Google bounces to (think aligner orthodontics in dentistry or composite bonding). These guys are going to struggle because their model is going to start to crumble.
You're going to have to be able to be searchable from AI, but the problem with the AI search is that it will look at everything that you've ever done, all of your presence online, all of your cross-referencing.
If you've ever done anything in public that you're less than proud of, it's gonna kill someone, and so all the stuff that you did to desperately, desperately gather attention through social media or other means will be visible, and viewable, and will be taken into the mix.
In the new world and the way that it's changing, it might be worth thinking about how you are presented online, what it looks like, not just for your professional portfolio, but also everything personal, because Perplexity or Claude, they will cross-reference all of that stuff unless it's private.
It could be the end of the search, this, not tomorrow, but in the next 2 or 3 years.
If you're chasing Google as your only means of attracting patients to your business, you're gonna struggle; it's time to pivot, because like all of these things, the pace of change is extraordinary, and it's already here.
Blog Post Number - 4554