We’ve had the pleasure of searching for topics on Google Search for more than 20 years. With so many articles on the internet, it’s helped us find the top answers to our questions. Or has it? ChatGPT has entered the arena, providing better solutions and posing the question: Will we live in a world where Google Search no longer exists?
Before we delve into why ChatGPT is such a threat to the search engine, let’s discuss the current state of Google Search. Less than a decade ago, content creators were cheating the algorithm system, flooding articles with keywords just to rank well on searches. You had terrible phrases and abnormal headings, just so the article could place first on the search list.
Google has apparently been trying to fix this problem, but I don’t believe they have. While there have been massive core updates, they mainly pertain to product placements and reviews. Also, they mainly serve those organizations that pay them well. Today, searches on the engine as still, if not more, pathetic than they were before.
Don’t get me wrong; you’ll still find what you’re looking for, amid ads, featured snippets, company details, and other small windows. Those with high domain authorities dominate the first page results, no matter how bad the article is.
I experienced this myself personally last year, which is when I lost even more faith in SEO and Google searches. One of the new sites I manage is called Bonsai Alchemist. We’ve been building it up for more than a year now, but that’s beside the point.
There was one specific article (I can’t remember the name) where I wrote a long post on how to care for a specific bonsai tree. It had everything you ever needed to know to make sure that tree survived. To this day, when I search for the specific search team, you see the worst results appear. The top one is only about 300 words, not addressing the topic at all, just telling you what the tree is. That tree would die if you relied on that article.
Why are those results at the top? They are either paid-for ads or Google gives them a high-domain ranking for some odd reason from the past.
What does this have to do with ChatGPT and the future of Google Search? Well, ChatGPT is already showing its superiority in terms of supplying answers quickly. How reliable they are is another question, but at least you have a ready solution. Also, it helps us develop outlines and ideas for content, which is something Google Search doesn’t do well at all. Well, at least not without the right plug-ins.
Here’s a quick experiment I ran for the purpose of this article. I asked both ChatGPT and Google Search “How to care for a japanese maple bonsai tree”. Here are the results presented side by side:
Now just looking at Google’s featured snippet that tells you only about watering, that’s not good enough. Of course, you can go through several of the listed articles, trying to work out which are common facts you can use. Or, you can just use ChatGPT; that’s already done that for you. Of course, my monster article on the Japanese Maple bonsai tree might be a massive read, which is where ChatGPT's solution wins again. Not everyone wants an essay; a quick guide like the above might be enough.
Sure, ChatGPT results aren’t 100% perfect, but the example above is just one way of showing that one day we might live in a world without Google Search. It already has competition from Bing’s new AI system. Who knows; maybe the so-called SEO will be replaced by techniques for getting your information and products recognized by ChatGPT and other AI systems.
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