@tjrobertson52

Google just announced a huge change to how search is gonna work. Let's talk about how this will affect SEO and how businesses get found online. The change is called personal intelligence.

It actually came to Gemini about a week ago, but now it's coming to Google's AI mode. Essentially, whenever you perform a search, Google will look through all the data they have on you. They'll look through your emails, your workspace files, your browsing history.

They'll find any data that's relevant to that search to personalize the results to you. Now that sounds like a huge privacy violation. Don't worry, it's opt in only.

You have to allow Google to do this and you might be thinking who would hand over all that data to Google? But of course Google already has that data and I think when people see the results, they're gonna be happy too. Google has already said they won't be using your data to train their AI systems and while some people won't be willing to trust them, I think it's inevitable that this is going to affect the search results in a big way for a lot of users and you might be thinking, yeah, but it's only AI mode.

This isn't gonna affect the main search results page but I actually think very soon AI mode will be the main search results page. Google has made it very clear that that is their intention. I've been saying this will happen by the end of 2026.

But seeing how hard Google has been pushing AI mode just in the last few weeks, I think it's probably coming sooner based on early demos and reviews. I think personal intelligence could be the thing that makes AI mode more useful than traditional search, even with the all too frequent hallucinations. So what does this mean for s E O and businesses that are trying to be found on Google?

We'll have to wait and see how quickly personalisation is adopted but I think it's clear that results are getting more and more personalised. I think the biggest impact this has on traditional SEO is things like keyword research and rank tracking are becoming even less relevant than they already were. It continues to make less and less sense to try to rank for specific search terms.

Most effective method for increasing your visibility online in the future is just to understand how these large language models work. How do they structure their search queries? What kind of websites do they trust?

And what kind of content do they most often cite in their recommendations? This is what we track and pay attention to for all of our clients and understanding this allows you to influence or replace those sources of information that the large language models are using to determine if they recommend you or your competitors. SEO is not dead, but it's changing faster than ever and with those changes come big opportunities.

It's like the early days of s E O. All over again.