AI, and What it Means in Web Search

Written By Neil Boland

Let’s run through it in easy-to-digest bullet points.

  • AI = ‘Artificial Intelligence’. It’s when machines learn to provide information based on existing information, whether it’s fed to them as a human prompt or it already exists online for referencing.

  • AI in web search kicks in when —

  1. A user types a search term into the likes of ChatGPT or Google (Gemini*), etc and

  2. The platforms generate their own answers based on what they see on existing websites.

  • Not a traditional search experience — historically, we’d search for something, and Google and other search engines would rank web pages based on relevance, and users would likely click the highest-ranking link and visit the website.

But AI —

  • Discourages clicks to websites, because the answer to a user’s query is already right there in the search results.

  • AI is more likely to generate its own answer to ‘informational’ intent queries/keywords. Eg, ‘What is’, ‘How do I’, ‘Where is’-type questions.

  • At the time of this writing, Google will likely not serve up an AI-generated result for more ‘transactional’ intent queries, like ‘Nike shoes Dandenong’ etc.

Notice the Google search results for the transactional search for ‘Nike shoes Dandenong’ here.

No AI-generated results from Gemini, just sponsored and Shopping results, and the map pack.

And then the first organically-ranking pages below that. We’re all used to this experience!

*The (Experience) Difference Between Google (Gemini) and ChatGPT

  • ChatGPT — users need to deliberately go to ChatGPT’s website or app to use it.

  • Gemini — for Gemini (owned by Google), users can deliberately go to the Gemini app at https://gemini.google.com/app, but most users just use Google, and the Gemini engine will kick in and provide AI-generated results natively within the Google results page.

Here’s how a ‘What is’ type question comes up in AI-generated search results, in this case, Google Gemini, for ‘what is TAFE?’

Where it says ‘AI Overview’: that’s Gemini doing the work to provide its own answer within the Google search result.

Below the overview (Victorian Government website etc), are the more traditionally-ranking web pages (not AI). In digital marketing, this is where we often talk about SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, the practice of trying to get webpages to rank ‘organically’ in search results. But that’s for another Thought Feed post.

And that is how users are already interacting with AI in their day-to-day search habits, even if some don’t even know it!

Neil Boland