What does an AI-powered Google search mean for SEO?

“Google search as you know it is over,” according to TechCrunch. Is that actually true?

If you’ve been subjected to constant promos and alerts for Gemini while using Gmail or Google docs, then it’ll come as no surprise that Google recently announced sweeping, AI-driven changes to how their flagship search tool will work in the near future.

That TechCrunch headline is… probably a dramatic assessment. That said, some of the coming changes could be a problem for folks who depend on SEO for growing their clientele.

Google’s new search box serves “conversational” results instead of links

In their announcement of Google’s “intelligent search box,” they shared that it’s intended to encourage more “conversational queries,” and to encourage follow-up questions. 

In the search results, users will also receive descriptive results that are filtered through its AI, rather than lists of links we’ve all become so accustomed to over the past couple of decades. We’ve already seen the direction of what those results will look like, just by looking at the AI summaries that Google has shoehorned into their current search results pages.

When I peeked into Google’s new AI Mode, I immediately noticed that it felt a lot like the test searches I did via ChatGPT and Perplexity. I also noticed that, well, it also wasn’t entirely on-point as far as accuracy, so it remains to be seen if Google will improve upon its chatbot competitors.

Changes to Google search will hurt SEO… somewhat.

Google has been the biggest name in search for years, so we’re bound to see changes in the website traffic we receive, if we’re used to getting it via Google’s traditional ranked list of links. Their shift towards AI Mode undercuts the value of having a website that shows up on Page 1 of Google, because those paginated lists of links won’t be the norm for this AI-driven search.

We’ve already seen shifts in website traffic from search since Google implemented its AI summaries, and the declines have hit major publishers, in particular. Those same reports also noted that traffic had increased for lower-ranked results, however, so it’s not necessarily a doom-and-gloom scenario.

It also remains to be seen whether or not Google’s users will enthusiastically adopt AI Mode, or avoid using it. Some radical-minded users had shifted away to other search engines even before this latest announcement–if you forgot that Duck Duck Go existed, consider this a reminder. ;)

If your website content is still relevant, and includes key search terms your audience might use, you’ll likely still show up in AI Mode. However, it wouldn’t hurt to do some housekeeping: make sure your online presence has up-to-date information about you and what you offer, to give AI-powered search the certainty it needs to place you in those top results.

We need to stay alert when dealing with AI search

I’d probably be preaching to the choir when it comes to a lot of the common environmental, ethical, and cultural concerns about AI-powered anything. Obviously, those concerns exist here, too. 

One thing that stands out to me, however, is that AI search means there will be another algorithmic barrier sitting between us and the information we actually want to see. 

In traditional search, Google’s algorithm would attempt to rank links by relevance, but it was ultimately up to us to determine which of those pages actually had the answer we were seeking. The goal of AI search is to remove that effort, and that means it imposes tighter control over what we see.

Google’s algorithm has been a heavily-guarded company secret for years, and that’s not likely to change. If you’ve ever complained about social media algorithms throttling your content, or never showing you posts from people you actually want to hear from, you may start seeing similar issues with AI search sooner than you think.