A new study from enterprise search marketing firm BrightEdge reveals dramatic changes in the sites displayed by Google’s AI Overviews search feature, and while it maintains its market share in search, the data shows that AI search engine Perplexity is gaining ground at a remarkable rate.
Rapid and dramatic changes in AIO triggers
The words that trigger AI insights are changing at an incredibly fast pace. Some keyword trends in June may have already changed in July.
AI previews were triggered 50% more times for keywords containing the word “best.” But Google may have reversed this behavior because these phrases, when applied to products, don’t appear to trigger AIOs in July.
Other AIO triggers for June 2024:
- The keywords “What is” increased by 20% times
- “How to” queries increased by 15%
- Queries containing the phrase “symptoms of” increased by about 12%
- Queries with the word “treatment” increased by 10%
A BrightEdge spokesperson answered my questions about e-commerce search queries:
“The prevalence of AI in e-commerce is indeed on the rise, with an increase of nearly 20% in e-commerce keywords displaying AI previews since the beginning of July, and a dramatic increase of 62.6% since the last week of June. Alongside this growth, we are seeing a significant increase of 66.67% in product searches containing both the pros and cons of the AI preview. This dual trend indicates not only a more widespread use of AI in e-commerce search results, but also more comprehensive and useful information being provided to consumers via features such as pros/cons modules.”
Google Search and AI Trends
BrightEdge used its proprietary BrightEdge Generative Parser™ (BGP) tool to identify key search trends that are likely to impact digital marketing for the remainder of 2024. BGP is a tool that collects massive amounts of data on search trends and transforms it into actionable insights.
According to their research, each percentage point of search market share is worth $1.2 billion, meaning gains as low as single digits are still incredibly valuable.
Jim Yu, Founder and Executive Chairman of BrightEdge, said:
“There is no doubt that Google’s dominance remains strong and what it does in AI matters to every business and marketer across the planet.
At the same time, new players are laying new foundations as we enter an AI-driven, multi-user search universe. AI is constantly evolving, the most important thing marketers can do now is leverage the precision of the information to monitor, prepare for, and adapt accordingly.
Google remains the primary source of search traffic, generating approximately 92% of organic search referrals. A notable point of the study is that AI competitors in all its forms have yet to make a significant impact as a traffic source, completely debunking speculation that AI competitors will reduce Google’s search traffic.
Massive drop in references on Reddit and Quora
In May 2024, Google took steps to reduce the amount of user-generated content (UGC) served through its AI Overviews search feature. UGC is responsible for many outrageously bad answers that have generated negative press. BrightEdge’s research shows that references to Reddit and Quora from AI Overviews declined to “near zero” by June.
Quora citations from AI Overviews reportedly decreased by 99.69%. Reddit fared slightly better in June with an 85.71% decrease.
The BrightEdge report notes:
“Google favors established, specialized content over user discussions and forums.”
Bing, Perplexity and the Impact of Chatbots
Bing’s market share continues to increase, but only by fractions of a percentage point, from 4.2% to 4.5%. But as they say, better to move forward than to stay stagnant.
Perplexity, on the other hand, is growing at 31% monthly. Percentages can be misleading, though, because 31% of a relatively small number is still a relatively small number. Most publishers don’t talk about all the traffic they get from Perplexity, so they still have a ways to go. Still, a 31% monthly growth rate is a move in the right direction.
Traffic from chatbots isn’t really a reality, so this comparison needs to be put in that perspective. Sending referral traffic to websites isn’t really what chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT are about (at this point). The data shows that Claude and ChatGPT aren’t sending much traffic.
However, OpenAI hides the referrals of the websites it sends traffic to, making it difficult to track them. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the impact of LLM traffic, as ChatGPT uses a rel=noreferrer HTML attribute that hides all traffic coming from ChatGPT to websites. However, using the rel=noreferrer link attribute is not unusual as it is an industry standard for privacy and security.
BrightEdge’s analysis looks at this from a long-term perspective and anticipates that referral traffic from LLMs will become more prevalent and at some point become an important consideration for marketers.
Here is the conclusion BrightEdge reached:
“The total number of LLM recommendations is small and is not expected to have much impact on the industry at this time. However, if this growth continues, BrightEdge predicts it will influence how people search online and how brands go about optimizing for search across search engines.”
Before the iPhone, many scoffed at the idea of the Internet on mobile devices, so BrightEdge’s conclusions about what to expect from LLMs aren’t unreasonable.
AIO trends have already changed in July, highlighting the importance of having up-to-date data to adapt to the ever-changing AIO keyword trends. BrightEdge provides real-time data updated daily so marketers can make more informed decisions.
Understanding AI Trends:
Ten observations on AI previews for June 2024
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