Welcome to The Pubcast with Jon Loomer!

The Future of Search Due to ChatGPT and AI

Should content marketers be worried about the future of search due to the recent announcements from Google and Bing?

YES!

This is coming from someone who has benefitted from more than 10 million sessions referred organically from Google over the years.

That's more than 15 million page views and more than half of my traffic. This is a big deal for me.

If Bard, Bing, and the future search engines become Answer engines, it's conceivable to think links to external websites will become less of a thing.

Those links add friction. And in many cases, they'll likely be ignored, even if those search engines continue to surface them.

While we don't know exactly how this is going to look (and there are a whole lot of factors involved, including the monetization of those search engines), it's entirely plausible -- if not likely -- to assume that referral traffic is going to drop.

And it could drop significantly.

What are you going to do to prepare for that likelihood? This is something I'm still thinking about.

I don't know that anyone truly knows what we should do. But the last thing you should do is ignore it. This isn't going away.