Digital marketing: Google's AI update has changed everything – what should you do?

Google has pivoted and it's another victory for AI – now search engines will never be the same. In the first of 4 articles, Katrina Bell looks at what this really means for your business.

After its June developers' conference announcement, Google is no longer in the search business and it’s the biggest thing that has happened to your socials, your website, your ranking, your business profile and your SEO in 25 years.

Now you may be wondering, quite rightly, why a search company has jettisoned the one thing it excelled at? The roots of this change go back to 2019 when the then head of ads Prabhakar Raghavan was looking to increase revenue and suggested to his engineers that they turn off the predictive text feature. That’s the one that would show you what you were looking for despite your pudgy thumbs mistyping.

They answered, not unreasonably, that users would absolutely hate that, and they would have to spend longer to find the thing they were looking for.  But, dear reader, this was in the name of ‘increased engagement’ not in increased customer experience. And that relinquishing of Google’s core concept is how we got here.

Google, paranoid that its user base was trickling away to Large Language AI models like Claude and ChatGPT, has finally done away with the 10 blue links in favour of an AI conversation model. Search engines will never be the same. AI is now the default.

Google’s explanation of the ‘agent model’ is that if you were asking how black holes work, it might build you an ‘app’ in real time that has a 3D interactive representation. Or more importantly, if you wanted to buy a black hole, you could do that right from Google Page 1.

Make no mistake, this is not good news for any business.  

Among the new features, there are several areas that will hit companies the most: reviews, search results/ranking, business profiles and website SEO/AEO. Over 4 articles we are going to deep dive into each area exploring how best to handle Google’s new landscape, tactics that will also apply to the other AI models.

However, the most immediate change you will notice as a user is the window. The revamp will allow you to use several formats such as text, images, files and videos to begin a query.

It’s not just that AI will review the top 10 results of a search, multiple agents will interact with some websites in order to take action. That could be booking a flight, or finding quotes for a bathroom tap in showrooms in your area. The scale of this agent action is unclear at the moment, but what is crystal clear, is your website needs to be on that agent’s radar. 

Most websites are still designed for humans to click around – AI agents do not mirror that behaviour, Instead they read HTML, your accessibility tree and even take screenshots to figure out what kind of actions they can take.

The best way to describe it is can you help me rather than can you tell me. Considering somewhere around 80% of what happens on the Internet starts with Google, this Zero interaction could mean it sends you exactly zero traffic. There’s plenty of work to be done.