What happens to content creation if search engines of the future become Answer engines?
This is a question I've been grappling with myself as someone who has benefited significantly from referral traffic from Google over the years.
If search users can get a quick answer to their questions without clicking links to other websites, that will almost certainly result in a drop in organic referral traffic.
And if that drop is massive (maybe not immediately, but eventually), how does that impact your strategy?
If people are finding your website far less often, what happens to the motivation to publish that blog post?
What does this do to how brands create content? Does it result in them participating far more often where their customers are at -- on social media?
And if brands and businesses are creating content on their websites less often, how does that impact the quality and volume of data that feeds the AI that provides answers? This feels like a potentially endless cycle of problems.
I don't have the answers. And we still have no idea what the impact will be of these new search engines. But we need to be prepared for the possibility that a sharp adjustment will be needed.
