just last week at Google I O A major conference where they talk about the future of search and Google as a company they unleash something that could be completely devastating to a multi-trillion dollar industry hey Google bard how much is free search engine traffic Worth to businesses each year the value of Google search free results to businesses each year is estimated to be worth trillions of dollars so essentially you're telling me that when people Google something like how long to boil eggs these searches are worth trillions of dollars each and every year yeah exactly in fact every 10 seconds over a million people search something on Google that's over 8.5 billion searches each and every day but how does this make money and more importantly how does Google generative AI threaten this entire business model and all the people who rely on back when I was a kid before the internet if we wanted to find a local company we had to turn to this giant yellow book called The Yellow Pages if we wanted to find a plumber order a pizza or even find a local store and call them to ask if they had something in stock we had to use this giant book and this book was responsible for generating trillions of dollars in business for all kinds of companies all over the United States only very few people today remember getting these books on their doorstep which is why I had to use a ream of paper because I couldn't find an actual Yellow Pages and many of these companies that relied on these phone books to get business were terrified because their way of life was being threatened and over the years Google became a complete Monopoly where people were relying on the search results from Google each and every day as a way of life in fact as you can see here Google gets an estimated 83 billion visitors a month and the average person is staying over 10 minutes and 39 seconds on the Google Website and the amount of money Google has made from this little search venture has been estimated at over a trillion dollars and this led to the rise of many businesses and people working from home and websites utilizing Google's search traffic to build a business and eventually make a living in fact this little company over here amazon.com was built with Google free search traffic back when they started Amazon found that millions and millions of people were looking up different book titles each and every day which is why they started as a book company and utilizing Google's free search traffic they built an Empire estimated to be worth trillions of dollars all on the back of free Google searches and it's not just Amazon millions and millions of businesses rely on Google search each and every day and now with Google's generative AI there's a huge threat to this business model as we can see here Google generative AI AI is trying to compete with Bing Bing has already introduced chat GPT into their search engine instead of just being a search engine you can see here that I'm actually interacting with a robot and this AI robot is scraping the internet to find answers based on well whatever I ask it so instead of searching something like bankruptcy and getting the top results what's happening is AI is now taking over if I search for something like bankruptcy we can see that it's going to go through and scrape the web for answers related to my search term and we can see here it's putting the different sites that it used as references but why is this important as I mentioned earlier just like the phone book all these companies that are ranking at the top of Google are relying on this traffic to run their business but now with Google generative AI they're having robots scrape the content and give us a little tiny Link at the bottom and incorporating AI into a search engine is going to completely change the way we think interact and buy things from popular websites so wait a minute you're telling me that Google went out there and built an entire business on the information provided from websites promising them free traffic from people who search for this information yep okay and now they're using robots to take that information and keep you on their website wait a minute so all these people built websites around free Google search traffic by providing content which is what Google said it wanted and now they're saying forget all that hard work forget the money your business makes we have generative AI it's actually kind of scary and very few people are paying attention to what is about to happen but this is something I've seen many times before back when I was 23 years old and I had a brand new search engine company that was making lots of money this is a company that I built to essentially feed my family back when I started I didn't have any skills I didn't go to college I was pretty much broke but I had three miles to feed so I started this company ranked on Google and started getting traffic overnight this led to making as much as 10 20 even even thirty thousand dollars a month in profit from these Google rankings I would simply provide some information get the ranking and get paid only in 2004 something interesting happened my family moved to Northern California I bought my first house at the age of 24 and all of a sudden Google came out with what at the time was known as the Florida update the Florida update was going out there to try to provide better search results to people searching because back then a lot of people were able to game the system and get traffic and promote things that were let's just say less than ethical and because my search engine method was popular and was copied by lots of people the footprint on my website was used by many of these people trying to Buck the system and Google just basically threw the baby out with the bath water my sites and all that money I was making included and imagine being 24 years old you just bought a brand new house and all of a sudden your daily income goes from thousand dollars a day down to less than a hundred which didn't even cover the mortgage on the new house I bought so I know the effects of Google updates and changes all too well and to understand what AI is about to do to many people's livelihoods businesses thought processes and dare I say way of life we need to travel back in time about nine years to the Year 2014.
This was the year Google introduced featured Snippets and a featured snippet is quite simply when you go search for something in Google and they show you a snippet of a result so that you don't actually have to visit the website that gave you the result in the first place if I was to search for winter storm warning I can see that Google gives me a snippet from Wikipedia and these Snippets are the closest thing that we could find to generative AI so now we need to see if these Snippets actually resulted in a loss of web traffic for these websites according to the research Wikipedia lost over 21 of their traffic due to these featured Snippets because why would I visit this page when I can see a snippet right on the front page of Google the balance which is a personal finance website lost an estimated 10 percent of its traffic due to these Snippets Investopedia lost five percent and and on and on we go imagine waking up one day and 20 of the way you make your living is gone maybe that's why all these companies that rely on Google search traffic are starting to go bankrupt or shutting their doors completely because if I do a search here in semrush for Wikipedia we can see that over 18 million of the keywords they rank for actually have these featured Snippets and that website traffic is estimated to be worth 113 million dollars weight a month and as Google continues to experiment with Bard and generative AI we're going to see this multi-trillion Dollar business get a major shake up but how can you prepare well if you're a website and you rely on SEO it's important to stay on top of the trends and look at the keywords that are actually being affected by this generative Ai and so far I'm seeing that many of the keywords are how to keywords or quick reference keywords but that can all change at the drop of a hat and if you want to stay on top of all these changes make sure you smash a like button subscribe and tune in every Wednesday for our live stream about what's happening in the world of online marketing
