After Google: Should SEOs Jump Ship?

There was a pre-search-engine age. It’s laborious to conceive of now, however there was. Even within the early days of engines like google, when Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, and Excite nonetheless competed for the crown, I can bear in mind internet portals. Pages that I’d begin at, within the “computer room” at college, to navigate and discover the online not by looking, however by clicking on organized hyperlinks.

At first, there have been internet portals. The web was with out kind and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.

These have been already the dying throes of a earlier web age. Search engine dominance, and particularly Google dominance, has been the norm for this sort of journey for many years now. It’s all that many SEOs have ever recognized.

However what comes subsequent?

Individuals have talked for a very long time about existential threats to Google’s dominance, and sometimes, implicitly, by extension, search engine marketing. You’ll have heard the claims that Amazon or YouTube at the moment are preferred engines for sure sorts of search, or that Google goes to wrestle in opposition to the distinctive technological benefits of Apple, AI chatbots, the distinctive regional benefits of Baidu, or the distinctive format benefits of TikTok. Or perhaps you’ve even heard that folks prefer to limit their searches solely to Reddit. Even mainstream shops are suggesting that Google search high quality could also be in decline.

This put up shouldn’t be in regards to the well being of Google search as a product, or in regards to the implications of enhancing AI merchandise on your search engine marketing technique proper now. (Though, I do know of at the least one put up for this weblog being written on that subject!) As an alternative, this put up is about which of those threats, if any, really stand an opportunity of unseating Google’s dominance.

In what capability?

To ask what would possibly take Google’s position, we should first ask what position it’s that we’re fascinated about. Google is many issues, and presumably a part of the explanation Google’s doom is so usually predicted is that we’re not all the time speaking in regards to the similar particular issues.

What precisely is it that engines like google as a style, after which Google, have dominated? Maybe we would imply:

• The place you’d begin to discover a internet web page on a website you’ve not but found? For instance, you may not know but what the perfect website is for a given subject.

• The place you’d begin to discover a internet web page on a website you’re already acquainted with? Maybe you’re looking on Google hoping to see a consequence from Reddit, or from Wikipedia.

• The place you’d begin to reply a given query? So perhaps you’d be proud of a non-web consequence so long as it answered your query.

• The place you’d begin to full a activity? So, once more, the perfect reply may not be an online web page in any respect.

The reality is that the current actuality blurs these use circumstances to the purpose of it not being helpful to separate them. However for Google to get replaced by one thing that maintains this shut alignment, it’d must be an in depth peer competitor.

The apparent pretenders

There are two that come to thoughts, as equally resourced firms making an attempt related issues through the same technique (an online index): Bing and Apple.

I don’t wish to be dismissive of Bing, or of the worth of somebody — anybody — else sustaining the same sufficient competitor to maintain Google considerably sincere. Though it’s usually mocked in search engine marketing circles, Bing in actuality shouldn’t be so a few years behind Google at any given level. However, actually, it’s laborious to see the occasions that would result in Bing supplanting Google at its personal recreation. It’s simply too related for folks to make the swap. One risk based mostly on recent news is for Bing to change into much less related, pursuing one of many exact options I’ll cowl beneath – however extra on that after we get to it.

Apple, alternatively, is doing one thing related, however with some distinctive benefits. I have to credit score my former colleague (and 2023 Mozcon speaker) Tom Anthony who has been very prescient round Apple’s strikes on this area, going as far as to backward-engineer Apple search outcomes that weren’t speculated to be publicly accessible. Apple can do issues that Bing can’t, leveraging Apple’s app ecosystem and system integration to offer search outcomes that skip sure steps of a person journey in ways in which Google can not, or is not going to.

The difficulty with Apple as a Google search competitor is apparent, although. The distinctive benefits, as I mentioned, are to do with apps and {hardware}. Apple gadgets are costly — prohibitively so. (This varies by market – within the US, with the bottom worth of a telephone contract being so excessive, iPhones are extra palatable and have a notably increased market share than in Europe, for instance. However, that’s a subject for one more day – both means…). There’s a pretty laborious cap available on the market share of a search engine that’s solely superior on high-end gadgets, and never solely that, however ones from a selected model.

So might Apple take a giant chunk out of Google? Sure, it might already quietly have executed so with varied iOS adjustments pushing the prevalence of Apple’s personal search outcomes. However completely substitute Google? Not possible.

You possibly can say the identical for regional opponents like Baidu, Yandex, or Naver. These might effectively constantly beat out Google in their very own backyards, and even perhaps unfold to close by nations and areas, however it’s laborious to see them beating Google in its personal yard(s).

Revolution, not evolution

So what about opponents that substitute Google by doing one thing completely totally different, to resolve the identical issues? The truth is that a number of the issues we clear up proper now with internet search, will not be really effectively suited to internet search. The truth that one thing like a Google Residence will usually reply your questions by basically studying out a featured snippet is a symptom of Google’s dominance, not a symptom of internet search being effectively suited to that use case. Even Google themselves acknowledge this, and betray that in instruments like Google Translate, clocks, calculators, and so forth, embedded in SERPs. So who would possibly the extra disruptive threats be?

One identify that got here up rather a lot in 2022 is TikTok, and I’d level you to this glorious put up by Lidia Infante on this very weblog. To sum up her argument, TikTok can take market share from Google, however it may possibly’t substitute Google fully. TikTok is simply too specialised (in video format and sure subject areas), and the standard assurance is simply too weak. So, once more, we have now a competitor that chips away at Google with out changing it.

Then in fact, most just lately, SEOs of Twitter have been proper to level out that for a lot of queries, ChatGPT produces higher responses than Google. Take this instance, “excel query for extraction the domain name from a url”:

The ChatGPT consequence above is much extra informative and simple to observe. Nevertheless, like TikTok, this solely works for sure issues. ChatGPT shouldn’t be an online search engine:

So it’s a must to be prepared to desert the premise that your consequence needs to be an online web page. Which, on this context, comes all the way down to: do you belief a solution should you don’t know who wrote it? ChatGPT and related applied sciences have entry to “knowledge” sourced from the online, like Google, however they don’t cite a supply. Certainly, it could be immensely troublesome to hint the supply of their varied claims, a few of which appear fairly… odd.

Just like TikTok, then, that is one thing I’d desire to Google for a selected sort of question. On this explicit case, the sort of question that beforehand took me to StackOverflow. However I’m not going to ask it for mortgage recommendation.

I famous above that Bing is rumored to be integrating ChatGPT with its personal search product. This enlarges the menace to Google in that it makes this know-how extra accessible, however actually, the identical qualms apply – there are numerous, many queries for which this isn’t useful. Even when Bing can hybridize these applied sciences right into a “best of both” of conventional internet search and NLP, effectively – that’s already the highway Google goes down.

The opposite problem with this “ChatAI as search” mannequin is an financial one. Google and Amazon have each already come to the conclusion that the kind of queries requested of their private assistant gadgets are barely, if in any respect, financial to run – due to the restricted monetization alternatives for purely informational queries. Maybe my distinction above, about what we imply by changing Google, could be very related right here – a few of our use circumstances of Google as a search engine are literally only a loss chief for others. As such, maybe this bundling of disparate makes use of is critical.

The King is dea… wait, wait, he’s nonetheless respiratory

Variety of express core search queries powered by engines like google in the US as of January 2022 – through Statista

In the end, these threats look set to chip away at Google, not substitute it. At worst, a broad monopoly might be sliced up and shrunk, and that doesn’t really feel like several nice evil. For SEOs, we should always concentrate on these new engines like google, and these new “search engines”, and of the dangers hooked up to being locked into the Google ecosystem. However don’t overlook the chart above: the unique pie shouldn’t be going wherever. The Google search engine marketing recreation remains to be not a foul recreation to be enjoying.