Impact of AI on Your Marketing Plan: “Search Engine Optimization” becomes “Query Optimization”

John Walker

July 26, 2024

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5 min read

Artificial Intelligence is already impacting the marketing world dramatically. And here’s one big change that’s happening now.

“Search Engine Optimization” Should Now be Called “Query Optimization”

The words “search engine optimization” describe a marketing strategy that makes your website prominent on the most important Internet portal- Google. But wait a minute! What if Google isn’t the most important portal to the internet anymore? What then?

That’s where we’re headed. Google is losing its dominance as the main way to access the web because now there are AI tools that give even better answers and don’t require scrolling through lists of links. There’s ChatGPT, Bing’s Copilot, and Google’s own Gemini. And Google, the search engine, is starting to lose users. That’s never happened before.

What does this mean for marketers? It means that optimizing websites for Google will still be important but it will become just part of a wider strategy to gain brand visibility online, a strategy that must include optimizing for AI searches. In other words, there are now two ways to gain online visibility with potential customers entering question online. There’s the old way- optimizing for the Google algorithm which is what traditional SEO is. And now there is a new way- optimizing for AI which is an entirely different thing because AI runs on “large language models” not indexed website pages.

So now every brand needs to determine what adjustments to make to their marketing plan to right-size their SEO investment for this new marketing environment. But there’s one big challenge- it’s that we don’t yet know how to optimize online content to consistently and cost effectively appear in AI searches. We need to learn how to do this. This is new.

Back to the vocabulary to describe this new environment. I suggest that we stop calling this marketing practice “search engine optimization. ” I suggest we call this marketing strategy “query optimization”, a name that encompasses all types of online queries including AI searches. Are you with me?

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