The search industry is facing a potential shake-up as AI tools like ChatGPT gain traction. While Google still dominates with 83.54% market share, ChatGPT is making waves, capturing an estimated 4.33% of search activity as of October 2024. For a platform just over a year old, that’s a significant milestone.

Unlike traditional search engines, ChatGPT provides conversational, context-aware responses that go beyond simple answers. With 300 million weekly active users and 1 billion daily messages, it’s clear that users are embracing this shift in search behavior. ChatGPT even outpaced Bing’s U.S. website traffic in September 2024, amassing 3 billion visits (SimilarWeb).

Generative AI is also gaining market dominance. ChatGPT leads with 59.2% share of the AI chatbot market, far ahead of Microsoft Copilot (14.4%) and Google Gemini (13.5%). This highlights how generative AI is redefining user expectations for search, prioritizing context-rich, actionable insights over traditional search formats.

However, challenges remain. Current data excludes in-app usage and API calls, meaning ChatGPT’s true market impact may be underestimated. Additionally, treating every prompt as a “search” oversimplifies its use case.

For search marketers, ChatGPT’s rise signals the need to adapt. Optimizing for conversational AI, leveraging AI tools for content creation, and integrating with platforms like ChatGPT are key strategies to stay ahead. As users increasingly value personalized, task-driven assistance, marketers must shift focus from traditional SEO to creating AI-friendly, conversational content.

The search landscape is evolving. While Google remains dominant, ChatGPT’s rapid growth is reshaping what’s possible. The question is no longer if AI will disrupt search—it’s how much. Are you ready to evolve with it?

The magic number If you’re looking for a roadmap for optimization is 58.5%. This is the most informative statistic as it is the percentage of “zero clicks” after Americans perform a search on Google. Only 41.5% click out of the Google page after their search query which is why “Answers Engine Optimization” is so critical.

Google is increasingly providing drop down question and lists to keep users on the page so they don’t click out of the results page and perform another search OR click on one of the questions which displays the answer. This is called ‘Answer Engine Optimization’. See below for an example.

Nearly 10% of organic search clicks on Google are directed towards ‘questions’ displayed in the search results, which link to websites providing relevant answers. Answer Engine Optimization (AOE) refers to optimizing content in a question-and-answer format. Search engines are increasingly incorporating these questions into the snippets shown on search results pages.

For example, a search query of “What’s the best school district santa clara, ca” the below results page appears. As users click a question, new series of more relevant questions appear.

Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) has a more conversational feel to it. Questions appear below answers and the results page is more interactive, feels more intuitive and simulating a human response – which is after all what Artificial Intelligence does.

It’s a given now in Silicon Valley that conversational agents are expected to replace traditional software UIs, creating more human and natural interactions. And that includes the results pages for search engines. Now that might seem like a knock out punch for organic rankings and fulfil Google’s shareholder dreams to monetize the entire page with paid ads yet hold on amigo! We’re not done yet as the lifeblood of Google’s search engine is the functionality of being able to find relevant, third party information.

Google’s Search Generative Experience isn’t working to everyone’s satisfaction as we can see below! So it will take some time for Google and Bing to fully roll out correct versions of thier AI search products. That might take many years.

When Marc Phillips spoke to several hundred retailers recently at a conference, it was obvious that AI was still nascent for most business folks outside of technology, education and information services fields. Not every industry is drinking the Kool Aid of AI outside of Silicon Valley! Sure, AI is transformative yet as one store owner commented ‘AI sure isn’t going to sell products on the showroom floor to my customers’.

Perhaps the best advice is for everyone to use AI in different applications as it’s early days and change is the only constant right now in the AI world.

Programmatic SEO is database driven content that increases the reach and frequency of published web pages on your website in search engines. It’s typically done using specifically written content pages that dynamically change keywords based on either locations or other content variables. Here’s a few examples from clients.

https://www.avasflowers.net/local-florists has thousands of SEO pages programmatically driven via database calls.

https://www.avasflowers.net/colorado,
https://www.avasflowers.net/new-jersey
https://www.avasflowers.net/illinois
> https://www.avasflowers.net/illinois/florist-peoria-il/
> https://www.avasflowers.net/illinois/florist-lake-forest-il/

Our client https://www.greatvaluevacations.com/travel-inspiration converts 1 in every 15 customers.

Another client Cloudstaff.com also has a range of programmatic SEO pages developeed by SearchForeacast:

https://www.cloudstaff.com/find/customer-service-outsourcing/los-angeles-california/
https://www.cloudstaff.com/find/digital-marketing-outsourcing/chicago-illinois/
https://www.cloudstaff.com/find/offshore-developers/san-antonio-texas/

Or should I say, Google took away the goal posts. So frustrating for so many clients. Benchmarking against many simple metrics inside Google Analytics Universal is now GONE.

You can now see Google Analytics 4 has a new metric called “Engagement Rate” which is calculated by engaged sessions divided by sessions. An engage session is a session that lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion event, or has at least 2 pageviews or screenviews. Importantly, the engagement replaces bounce rate in GA4.

Secondly, we need to know what is a good, bad & ugly “engagement rate” and so how are we going to know this… Turns out there’s some data out there from Databox Inc, a US bennchmarking Group which shows the median value of the GA4 Engagement Rate = 56.23%. Go figure what this means as clients we speak to just shake their heads and say WHY!

For many years, SearchForecast has been engaged by venture capital firms here in Silicon Valley to help partners making investments conduct due diligence. Similarly, private equity firms have reached out to us to help them ‘look under the hood’ and find any ‘red flags’ in technology businesses they are looking to acquire. This often involves side bar conversations about tech / marketing and capital requirements for building projected marketing & sales funnels.

Here’s an excerpt of Bert and Marc presenting some findings across real clients that due diligence was undertaken on.

I think so. Here’s how… it starts in September 2016 when Goolge buys venture funded start up called API.AI which provides tools to developers building apps for Google’s virtual assistant. They tweak it and rename it “Dialogflow” and since 2018, it is part of Google Cloud Platform.

Create your own Generative AI agent EASILY

So now Google has just made it so easy to create a Generative AI chatbot in literally just a few clicks using Vertex AI Conversation and Dialogflow. ALl you have to do is connect your webpage or documents to your Dialogflow CX agent and leverage large language models for generating responses from the content, out of the box!

You can also call a large language model to perform specific tasks during a virtual agent conversation or respond to a query contextually, significantly reducing development effort and making virtual agents more conversational.

We did this for a client recently using Vertex AI App Builder and Dialogflow. It then generates a small pieced of Javascript that you can paste into a container and it appears on your website. Remind you of YouTube embed code or Google Analytics, or AdSense. Oh yeah, those products worked out pretty well for Google to scale global distribution amongst publishers. It’s the distribution piece that Open AI / ChatGPT need to play catch up on Google.

I just don’t think they can catch Google, particularly when they start leveraging their $220B revenue per year from Adwords that allows them to give Cloud products like Dialogflow and Vertex AI App Builder away for free! And when they start integrating this all into Google Analytics, Adwords, etc, etc. The network effect Google has is a potential road kill for ChatGPT.

We are fortunate to see an incredible amount of insights into very large retail website sales volumes and what drives their conversions. I’m talking websites for $150+ million annual sales. At that scale, you notice trends and can deduce insights on how Google’s algorithm works.

As we know there is no rule book for optimizing for Google’s organic results yet there’s a lot of best practice. We’ve witnessed first hand how just by changing prices (I should say, reducing prices) for products that already have indexation in Google these product URLs will appear higher in the results pages.

When SearchForecast started optimizing webpages in 2002 in Google, we could see updated URLs with keywords, Title Tag and Description Meta Tags in Google search results pages being re-indexed very quickly. Usually within 2-3 days. The same is now happening with price.

More than that. Google are now creating seller pricing matrix with pricing inside the Knowledge Graph. They aren’t doing it on all products in all industries but we see it appearing often.

Having studied micro-economics at University of Melbourne, I am well aware of the optimal price models. Put simply, Google are now using this type of logic in their organic results. You don’t have to be Einstein to figure out that lower prices or products which change prices more often are going to increase the propensity for a consumer to buy (and hence, click on a link). And that click is what Google want and reward websites with higher organic listings in their search engine results pages.

For many retailers, the best way to get guaranteed results on Google organic rankings is to just load product details manually into the “Product” section of the Google My Business admin panel you can sign into at https://www.google.com/business/

All you need to do is complete this section as per below screenshot. Its must easy than scanning inventory using a Pointy which is Google’s solution which requires you to figure out how to connect through the Pointy box which is a small device that plugs in between the barcode scanner and point-of-sale (POS) system in your store. The second way is through an app that integrates directly with the instore POS system. #Painful.

Good news is retailers do not need an ecommerce store to add products to Google using Pointy or Google My Business pages. With Pointy, as you scan products, Google find an image and description to match the UPC/EAN barcode number and then adds it to Google.

if you’re using Google My Business, be sure to add a UTM to each URL so you can track inside Google Analytics how many users click on the product and come to your website.

Take a look at how Dick’s Sporting Goods retail store network does this to promote Back to School deals… The “Buy” link goes to https://www.dickssportinggoods.com/f/sale?seo=storelocator_bts2023_googlepost