There’s too much junk
generated at the top of searches—and AI isn’t helping. Focus first on
developing your own organic content, for both the web and offline.
EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V
AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1
FEB 4, 2025
I continue to be amazed by the number
of smart entrepreneurs and new business owners, as well as plenty of people
who’ve been in business for decades, who are so clueless about how they spend
their advertising and marketing dollars. These are people who work their butts
off, who think that they’re watching every penny of expense in their
businesses, and who understand how critical every dollar saved and wisely spent
can be to their continued survival in these very tough times.
But I swear they’d jump out of the
nearest window if they understood even the most basic mechanics and economics
of today’s ad tech world — and how badly they are being served by their own
people, who are advising them on their ad spends. In a world where machines are
increasingly doing the searching, and it’s becoming harder and harder to game
the algos, paid search is simply not the way to go, even if it’s easy, quick
and common. Instead, you’ve got to be creating, positioning and successfully
exposing organic content if you want to be authentic and
remain attractive to the latest algorithms.
Entrepreneurs May Be Their Own Worst
Enemy
Part of the problem, of course, is
that so many of these operators suffer from the classic entrepreneur’s disease.
They think that they’re smart enough to direct and handle these matters and
make the critical buying and placement decisions themselves. Another concern is
that they’re lemmings in this area and perfectly happy to do what everyone else
is doing and pray for the best. Truthfully, even if they really had the time to
focus on this stuff and even if it was an efficient use of their own scarce time
(as opposed to having it done by knowledgeable professionals), what they’re
still missing is how dramatically and radically the game has been altered in
the last few years. They think that they understand the situation; what they
don’t understand is that the situation has changed.
Businesses that are still relying on
sponsored results and other paid ads need to recognize that that boat sailed a
while ago. Only a tiny percentage of searchers click through on any paid ad
placements. Better than 90% of prospective buyers now click through on organic
search results.
Consumers Have No Patience With
Machine-Generated Responses
It’s important to know that the target
audiences that businesses are trying to address aren’t standing still and that
they’re more than a little cautious about AI-driven results. The demands,
desires and requirements of today’s users are changing — and they’re becoming
more particular and choosier in terms of what kind of results they’re looking
for. Simply stated, they’re not interested in or engaging with
machine-generated responses or summaries that are so high-level and generic
that they basically fail to answer any searcher’s specific question.
As a result, most people – regardless
of their degree of sophistication – have already learned to jump past the
clutter, garbage, and verbiage at the top of the search pile and scroll down to
the good stuff. It doesn’t do any good to be shouting your messages and
spending a ton of money on them if no one is engaging with them and if the few
folks who stuck around aren’t really listening. The smartest anglers fish where
the fish are most likely to be, not where they’ve always fished, not where the fish
used to be, and not where there’s a crowd of other flustered fishermen.
Can Google Keep Its Advantage?
Google still owns more than 90% of the
search market and basically runs the game. The new AI-first search engines
like ChatGPT, Copilot and Perplexity are basically peanuts, while Google’s
latest Gemini 2.0 release has taken major steps forward,
especially in terms of accessing and delivering multi-modal results.
In the same way that Tesla will
forever be advantaged by the data it has captured over the years from millions
of drivers, Google will always have a Knowledge Graph edge
in capturing and employing historical search results. And the company now
also has direct searchable access to YouTube’s vast world of content – written,
audio, and video, even without transcripts. This allows for some amazing and
speedy turnarounds, deep, rich results, and gives Google an even further
competitive advantage and substantial differentiation. That’s good news for
Google, but these continued tech advances make it even more challenging for
business owners to keep track of and keep up with what choices are best for
their businesses.
Because Google and the rest of the
techies keep moving the goal posts, smart operators need to be careful not to
jump too far ahead of their own target customers, whether Google likes it or
not. Google’s latest offerings, AI Overviews, are
AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of search results pages. I can
tell you that the initial results from serious searchers who’ve been watched,
measured, and surveyed is that these vague, vanilla summaries are just as easy
to skip as all the rest of the sponsored material. They’re no more trusted or
instructive than the paid stuff.
Google is trying to improve the
outputs and the credibility of these pro forma packets by shifting its own
internal processes to first interrogate authoritative material from established
institutions and organizations in verticals like medicine and tech. But they
need to improve their substantive value quickly, and also get the word out to
the marketplace, or risk having millions more consumers reject this entire
effort.
The bottom line is that because the
technology and the ground keep shifting around so quickly in the ad tech space,
the best idea for most businesses is to take it slow. Be wary, because there
will continue to be dozens of new vendors pitching you varieties of exciting
stories and unproven approaches. Instead, invest in your own web and offline
presence, and create your own valuable, informative and palatable organic
content. Let the serious buyers beat a path to your door. It’s better to invest
in making your business better than to spend money chasing someone else’s pipe
dreams.
