Answer Engine Optimisation
Is this what comes next?
SEO has long been the core strategy to effectively market online and fortify a gateway between businesses and their target audiences.
Effective SEO strategies have developed alongside Google’s Search Engine algorithm, to adequately capture the factors Google identifies as quality markers. As we left Web 1 and headed into Web 2, Google’s algorithm became more advanced, and in response, SEO strategies became more complex and refined. In this way, SEO has remained adaptive — staying relevant and fundamental in driving traffic and conversions.
As we enter Web 3, which many people believe we are, the way things work will evolve further, but what this change looks like, no one really knows.
How Will A.I. Impact Search Engines?
Even prior to ChatGPT’s extraordinary debut just a few months ago, the shift towards answer engines had already begun.
What Is An Answer Engine?
Simply put, search engines give search results to match your query. Answer engines give the answer to your query. For example, “What is the weather report for today?” will generate search results that prompt you to click the link to visit a page;
Bureau of Meteorology - Forecast for Today.
An Answer Engine skips this step to provide the answer;
23 C | 73 F , light showers. Precipitation: 60% | Humidity: 75% | Wind: 19 km/h
As you’re likely to have noticed, Google is already doing this. Since 2015, Google pulled away from being an information engine to becoming a knowledge engine – one that is populated by constantly updating information. Essentially the difference between the yellow pages and an infinite, dynamic encyclopedia. Part of this journey has been developing the ability to give users answers to their questions, without the hassle of sending them on a journey through search results.
Google’s People Also Ask (PAA) is a rich snippet feature that provides users with additional questions related to their original query, providing quick answers to those questions since 2015. This assists users who are not completely confident that they are asking the right question, and more notably, is directly answering questions with concise text on the Search Engine Results Page itself, without users needing to click and trawl through results. In 2020, nearly 50% of 2.5 million queries were via the People Also Ask feature.
ChatGPT makes this process even more efficient – albeit not perfectly, and this is where Answer Engine Optimisation comes in.
Google has long been the dominating search engine, but now Bing (who owns the rights to 75% of Open AI’s profits until it pays back a $13 billion investment), has made it clear that the battle for supremacy wasn’t ever over, it was just on pause. Bing has less than a tenth of Google’s marketshare, but after ChatGPT’s launch, downloads for the app rose eight fold, while Google’s dropped by 2%, and in February, Bing traffic growth outperformed Google. It’s clear Bing has calculated designs to compete in the space in a meaningful way.
If ChatGPT’s efficiency and Google’s long-running pivot to become a knowledge engine with highly personalised and direct answers to queries is anything to go by, content will have to be optimised for multiple search algorithms identifying varying quality markers.
How Will A.I. Affect SEO Trends?
To future-proof content for A.I., businesses need to optimise their current SEO content for answer engines, by ensuring it incorporates concise and factual responses to commonly asked questions. This means having a robust, clear understanding of your customer and their changing needs, investing in high quality, long form content that incorporates answer engine functionality, and monitoring these results to identify the emerging trends of new tech.
It’s a brave new world out there – always has been.
