🤖 AI is Reshaping Marketing — And Google Is Accelerating the Shift

AI is shaking the (marketing) world and Google is accelerating the shift! Last week, they had 2 major conferences: Google IO (for developers) and Google Marketing Live (for marketers). While much of the buzz focused on technical updates, the real value lies in understanding the strategic trends that will impact your brand in the months and years to come.

For years, I’ve advised brands to do what’s interesting for their customers while trying to perform in SEO. If you’ve attractive, informative, unique content combined with a desirable brand and a good customer experience on your website (fast, well-structured, well-designed), you will sooner or later win and gain traction. It’s exactly what ChatGPT succeeded in just ~2.5 years!

Google is busy with AI, data collection and serving their mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Their research team invented the Transformer Architecture behind the LLM technology but didn’t released it as OpenAI. You can understand when you know that their Search ads are representing ~57% of their revenues or $175Bn in 2023.

🧠 AI Mode Is the New Operating System

Google’s reaction is speeding up with AI overviews that are now live in Belgium (1 year after USA) and the release of the AI mode (a direct competitor of ChatGPT) based on their Gemini AI model. This will impact the number of queries in Google and ChatGPT. They couldn’t wait as the growth of ChatGPT is exponential (around 80% YoY). It opens many questions as in AI mode (as ChatGPT), the number of answers and the sources are limited:

Impact on the traffic on website especially the ones dependant of organic traffic. News website could be the “fall guy/ dindon de la farce” as they contribute to feeding Google’s algorithms while having less traffic and less revenues from Google. The robots of Google are the same for both “traditional” content indexing and Gemini AI model.
Marketplaces & ecommerce websites could also be heavily impacted especially with shopping agents that could buy the product directly from Google without going through the traditional basket. A practical example of how agents could reinvent the way businesses and consumers are communicating between each others. Is the future only leading to the lowest price?
Comparison websites websites are often already seeing a decline in traffic. It’s only the beginning.
More than ever, we should be curious, find new ideas and critical thinking to avoid the laziness of a unique view from the algorithms.

Many other changes are ahead of us. Search is far from simple links. Welcome in the conversational & transactional world🙂

🧭 What Should Brands Do? Go Back to Strategy

What are the solutions for your brand? Come back to the basic of a good brand/business strategy is your best insurance for the future.

Keep listening closely to your customers to identify needs and fill them with your product/services on top of content that meets their needs where they are and in the format they want (text, video, image, podcast, …)
Develop an intimate relationship with them. CRM is the basis and go further to enchant your customer experience
Invest more in brand awareness to develop your authority and people talking about your brand. LLM will see it and refer your brand
Don’t focus your sole ROI of marketing on traffic as it will most likely decrease with changes in consumer behaviour on top of Google
Campaigns will be more on capturing signals of consumers and less on keywords in the future … invest in your first-party data on top of unique data for your products to develop your competitive advantages.
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What are your thoughts on those changes? Between excitements and cautiousness, future will be full of opportunities and learnings!