@tjrobertson52

The CEO of Google just told us exactly what the future of search is going to look like. Let's listen and then I'll tell you how this is going to change. SEO, do you see a trajectory in the possible future where AI mode completely replaces the 10 blue links plus AI overview?

Our current plan is AI mode is going to be there as a separate tab for people who really want to experience that. But it's not yet at the level where our main search pages. But as features work, we'll keep migrating it to the main page and so you can view it as a continuum.

AI mode will offer you the bleeding edge experience, but it'll thinks that work will keep overflowing to AI or views in the main main experience. And the idea that AI mode will still take you to the web, to the human created web? Yes, that's gonna be a core design principle for us.

So really, if users decide right, they drive this. Yeah. It's just exciting, a little bit scary that it might change the internet.

Yeah, it's definitely gonna change the internet. I think that pretty much confirms that AI mode is going to be the new default in the future. So how is ranking in AI mode different from ranking in traditional search results?

A lot of SEOs right now are quick to point out that these AI modes are using traditional search engines under the hood. And therefore SEO isn't really changing at all, right? While it is true that these LMs are using search engines, and Google's AI is likely using Google search engine, I think this is actually wishful thinking on the part of a lot of SEOs who just don't want to change their processes.

Is this simplification misses two important distinctions. One is that these LLMs that AI mode is based on, like Gemini, specifically Gemini Deep Research, look at way more pages than traditional search. When you do a search in Google, you get 10 blue links.

Maybe you get a few extra features in there, but it's not uncommon for deep research to look at hundreds of different pages. And while AI mode isn't looking at that many pages just yet, as the prices go down I think it will make sense for them to crawl a lot more pages. We are already seeing a ton of pages rank in AI overviews that don't rank on page one of Google.

And these are typically pages targeting much more specific niche keywords. That brings me to the second distinction. While the underlying search engine might be the same, the searches are much different.

Not only are searches providing two to three times as much context in each search, but AI mode then breaks down your search into many more specific searches. Searches that are way more specific than the average person would ever type into Google. So who wins in this Change anyone creating content that answers very specific questions.

Unlike traditional search, it's not gonna be a winner takes all economy. If you have a strong understanding of your customers and the different paths they take to get to your product or service, if you can think of all the different situations they might be in and the questions they would have at that step of the journey, and create content for each of those steps, answering the exact questions they might have, it suddenly doesn't matter how much brand authority you have or how big you are.

For a lot of these questions, it's likely that you'll be the only person online answering them directly. And as these little search terms with a ton of search volume, it fragmented into larger search terms with very little search volume, the strategy is going to shift from trying to rank for a few big keywords to trying to pick up as many of the scraps as possible. And I'm not just talking about blog posts either.

If you're using these LLMs, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude to do research and answer difficult questions for you, you'll see they're crawling social media, crawling video, they're crawling Reddit. So how do you win in AI mode? Create a system for generating high quality content addressing your customers specific questions.

This is what I'm doing for myself right now. I start with a short form video. I post that to as many platforms as possible.

And Then I repurpose it for social media and blogs and anywhere else I can push the content. It's also what I'm doing for my growing list of clients. If you would like a free audit and to see what I can do for you, please visit TJ Robertson.

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