Will AI Replace Google, and What Happens to SEO and Google Ads?
Today I went into my analytics to see if I'm already getting traffic from AI tools. I was happy to see that the answer was yes.
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Three Things You Need
1) 👆 You need a dashboard like mine
2)👆Your website must get traffic from AI tools like the dashboard shows
3)👆You need to see how your websites AI traffic is growing over time
What will change?
And what will not change
In an uncertain future, even the people developing AI do not know what will happen. However, a useful way to think about it is Jeff Bezos’ question of not what will change, but what will not change.
In his example, the answer was: that people will not want higher prices and slower delivery. No matter what happens. So if everything changes but Amazon delivers faster and cheaper, they will probably do okay.
For businesses and marketers
People will want to buy products and services. Businesses want customers to find them and will use paid and unpaid marketing strategies to achieve that.
The AI search engine Perplexity recently updated that it's experimenting with ads. If I had to guess, I'd say they will do a similar thing to Google and Meta. A tool where you can assess the volume of searches. A conversion tracking pixel and a conversion tracking API. And a dashboard for creating ads and measuring ad performance.
A solid strategy is to combine both and re-use the same content for both paid ads and organic content.
SEO / CPC Marketing Strategy for an Uncertain AI Future
Marketing Strategy Example
If you are a psychotherapist, for example, create landing pages and blog posts about topics like “anxiety” and “couples therapy” in the city you operate in.
Run paid ads targeting keywords like anxiety. and use these landing and blog posts as the destination for your paid Google ads.
Use Google Search Console to see how high you are ranking organically for classic search for keywords like “anxiety therapist New York” for this organic content.
Make (or pay me to make one for you) an analytics report where you can see how much traffic and conversions these pages targeting specific intent and keywords (like anxiety treatment in NYC) are getting and where they are coming from Good report should answer questions like:
How many visitors are we getting for our blog post about couples therapy in Manhattan?
How many visitors and conversions from Google Ads?
Ratio of Organic VS Paid Search?
How many visitors and conversions came from ChatGPT?
How many visitors and conversions came from perplexity AI search?
What’s the ratio of classic search versus AI traffic? How is it changing?
Ask AI and See Where You Stand Now
The following step is going to be a little painful for a lot of companies. Kind of like going to the dentist, but you have to do it.
Ask AI tools to recommend companies in your niche and see what they suggest.
Implement Analytics & Conversion Tracking First
Get AI on your side
Google, ads, search engines, Instagram and Facebook are still very much alive. So, the first thing you gotta do is make sure their AI’s works for you not against you.
Implement Analytics
Before you start testing different marketing strategies for classic platforms and the latest AI tools, make sure to have proper analytics and conversion tracking in place. Without measuring, you have no idea which efforts are working and which ones are a waste of time and money.
Make sure to measure not only clicks, impressions and page views, but also the actual conversions like purchase, form submit, lead, add to cart, etc.
Need help?
If you'd like to know where your traffic is coming from, how well your content and ads perform, if you are making money or wasting money, —get in touch.
We can share thoughts on strategy that'll set you apart from competition in the AI future. As well as making sure AI works for you not against you.