Companies like Kayak and Tripadvisor are preparing for a brand new era of search as AI begins to upend the best way people find information online.
From Richard NievaForbes contributor
WWhen Google began In May, the announcement brought some chaos with AI-generated search results: Google’s AI models asked people to make pizza out of glue, eat a stone a day and drink numerous urine to pass a kidney stone.
But for the legions of companies that depend on Google for traffic, the change was troubling for one more reason. Some corporations, like travel booking site Kayak, said the brand new product, called AI Overviews, could stop people from visiting their web sites because they will get all of the answers they need right on the Google homepage.
“For example, they no longer go to Kayak to check flight status,” said Steve Hafner, CEO and co-founder of Kayak Forbes. “They can do that directly in the AI summary.”
This is just a technique the product change is beginning to hurt some businesses that depend on Google Search for traffic. Hafner said the AI-generated results had “a small negative impact on our business,” but declined to supply specific metrics. Kayak responded by bidding more on the primary few sponsored links that appear under the AI overviews. “There are fewer click-outs across the ecosystem,” Hafner said. “That’s why it’s more important than ever to fight for the clicks that are still there.”
Google’s iconic homepage is not only the world’s online answer center. As the most beneficial real estate on the Internet, it’s a cornerstone for thousands and thousands of companies that find customers when people enter travel destinations, plumbing questions or food cravings. AI search results could disrupt this model by answering more people’s questions without them having to click away from Google. Now corporations that depend on those clicks are in search of recent ways to draw users, adjusting their marketing strategies and even teaming up with AI newbies in hopes of dethroning the search giant.
Google didn’t reply to a request for comment.
“It’s like we’re putting our eggs in this basket. Now the basket no longer exists.”
Companies within the travel industry, particularly, already depend on the whims of Google search, and AI summaries have caused them to reevaluate the best way they reach people. For Tripadvisor, the travel review site, this led to further internal testing of its search engine marketing, or search engine marketing, methods, reminiscent of monitoring how content is displayed in another way all over the world – something brands that depend on Google do recurrently to research. how the most recent changes its search algorithm affects their visibility.
Matt Dacey, vice chairman of worldwide marketing at Tripadvisor, said: Forbes The company predicts that more people will use AI search in the subsequent six to 18 months as Google deploys AI overviews for more varieties of searches. “Once that changes in a really meaningful way, I think the actual search results will change to a greater extent,” he said. “And that’s what we’re watching closely right now.”
For now, it’s more of a harbinger of a changing online economy than a direct impact on revenue, at the very least in response to publicly reported numbers. Kayak’s parent company, Booking Holdings, which also owns Booking.com, OpenTable and Priceline, reported a 9% year-over-year revenue increase to $7.9 billion within the third quarter – before and after the launch of AI Overviews. The company doesn’t break out kayak-specific sales. During the identical period, Yelp also saw a 4% increase to over $360 million, while Tripadvisor saw a small decline of lower than a percentage point to around $532 million.
search engine marketing experts told Forbes You have not seen an enormous change in search engine marketing yet. That could possibly be since the move to AI overviews is the natural evolution of changes Google has made over the past decade, moving away from the “10 blue links” that used to look in response to a question. Even before the arrival of AI summaries, chances are you’ll see tables, videos, and maps before you ever get to third-party organic search results. More than a decade ago, the corporate introduced “featured snippets,” which take passages from web sites and present them as definitive answers to questions like methods to clean a forged iron skillet (a small amount of soap is tremendous, says Google) or where a martini was invented (supposedly San Francisco, but disputed). Companies were already fighting to maintain real estate from slowly disappearing in search results. However, it needs to be noted that Google’s AI summaries contain reference links to other web sites.
Like Kayak, Yelp fears that Google is hoarding attention on its homepage as a substitute of sending people to the open web. “Over time, there’s a good chance this will result in less traffic to third-party sites,” said David Segal, vice chairman of public policy at Yelp Forbes.
The problem, Segal argues, will hurt Google in the long run: As the search engine takes content from third parties and outputs it back in the shape of AI results, these corporations could have less incentive to create recent content. Then the general quality of data on the Internet begins to deteriorate and Google may offer users less helpful content, Segal said, which could ultimately result in a decline in Google’s impressive promoting business.
“If it is not brought under control, we really run the risk of Google expanding its monopoly using the same tactics it has used in the past.”
The AI push in search stirs up old antitrust fears, added Yelp general counsel Aaron Schur. “If it’s not brought under control, we really run the risk of Google expanding its monopoly using the same tactics it has used in the past,” he said.
Google has long been within the crosshairs of how search results are presented. When the Justice Department prepared its successful case against Google, it initially included allegations of “self-preference,” or Google’s alleged practice of rating its own services or products above those of competitors reminiscent of Yelp and Tripadvisor. The self-preferential claims were eventually dismissed within the federal case but last 12 months by the European Union’s top court decided against the corporate for similar requirements. Since 2021, each the House and Senate have also cited Google’s alleged self-preferential treatment in introducing bipartisan laws geared toward dominating tech giants.
In August, Yelp sued Google for alleged self-preferential treatment, emboldened by the Justice Department’s victory against Google for other business tactics, reminiscent of its lucrative search distribution deals with Apple and other providers. At the time, Google called Yelp’s lawsuit “baseless.”
“Google’s AI Overviews are a clear response to the increasing threat of ChatGPT, which has overtaken Google in the market,” said Mike Salvaggio, CEO of search engine marketing Brand, a digital consulting firm. The OpenAI service, which doesn’t contain links to citations, is quickly becoming a crucial alternative to traditional search. Both Tripadvisor and Yelp have also announced deals to license their data to a different (albeit very small) competitor, the Nvidia and Jeff Bezos-backed AI search engine Perplexity. Yelp emphasized that its data just isn’t used to coach Perplexity’s algorithms and that search results would supply links back to Yelp. Neither company disclosed the terms of their contracts, nor have they got an identical licensing agreement with Google. (In June, Forbes sent Perplexity a stop and desist letter blames the startup to make use of his reporting without permission.)
Meanwhile, Kayak and other brands have also expanded their use of other customer acquisition methods, including social and influencer marketing; A Kayak sponsored content from last January currently has almost 44 million Views on TikTok. And since Google launched AI Overviews, Kayak has sponsored several more posts, including a video with 18 million views and a handful of others with greater than one million views each.
The idea is to seek out younger users as they modify the best way they discover things online. “When you’re under 25, you’re just starting to develop lifelong behaviors,” said Kayak CEO Hafner. “If you develop the behavior of, ‘I search on TikTok or Instagram and look at influencers,’ or ‘I use ChatGPT as my default search engine,’ those are the people we can compete for.”
Of course, you will not find a way to book flights on TikTok or ChatGPT for now. But corporations still fear that Google referral traffic, a revenue stream that has been crucial to businesses for a long time, is declining, said Nadja Sumter, co-founder of Pepper, a Los Angeles-based creative agency that works with Kayak to develop social networks to create campaigns. “It’s like we’re putting our eggs in that basket,” she said. “Now the basket no longer exists.”
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