Search engines may become essential in keeping legitimate websites visible as the internet becomes overrun with machine-generated nonsense.
There’s a new search engine on the scene. ChatGPT Search says it will allow users to “ask a question in a more natural, conversational way, and ChatGPT can choose to respond with information from the web. Go deeper with follow-up questions, and ChatGPT will consider the full context of your chat to get a better answer for you.” In other words, for a lot of queries, users will get full answers – not links – and won’t need to visit our websites: the ones from where the search engine has grabbed the information in the first place.
Google has been dipping its toes in the water with this for years, of course, and is also scaling up its equivalent offering. The objections from many website owners have long since been dismissed.
Those of us running websites to support our business should not be hurt too badly, unlike sites dependent on advertising. I guess the eventual destination will see users asking a series of questions on the search engine which will funnel them down to the same information they would have got by spending time on our website. I’m imagining a future where a prospect prompts the search engine with: “I need a blue widget for high speed sprocket processing. Provide me with the relevant catalogues and data sheets from some UK suppliers, along with their contact details”. And boom, there’s the information requested.
We won’t need to do anything different to appear on these lists other than maintaining the SEO and accessibility of our websites. However, expect to see more search engine demands for more structured data to make their job easier.
It might even be that search engines become essential in keeping legitimate websites visible as the internet becomes overrun with machine-generated nonsense, an increasingly likely possibility.