Medic<\/a> in 2018 did a lot of good in suppressing potentially dangerous YMYL sites, there are lingering questions of whether Google has too much power to elevate established (“authoritative”) voices and drown out legitimate voices in the minority. <\/p>\nGoogle’s recent missteps with Gemini further illustrated the potential of what might happen if Google’s internal biases have too much influence on the training and testing of its AI. <\/p>\n
When the United States was established, its founders rooted it in classical liberal principles. All humans are created equal. All humans are born with certain rights, including the freedom to speak, assemble and worship as they please. Those on earth who wielded the greatest power were not to infringe on these rights.<\/p>\n
With direct control over the information that 99,000 people a second ask around the world, Google arguably has more power than any government on earth today. The power that whoever wins the AI War will have will be much greater.<\/p>\n
Will the winners of the AI war set their principles on classic liberty (i.e., “I may not approve of what you say but I will defend the right to say it”)? Or, to maintain “order,” will they do what so many totalitarian regimes have done in world history by suppressing voices that don’t agree with them, especially those who challenge their power?<\/p>\n
Just as it took courage for America’s founders to do what they did – and 250 years later, we are still enjoying the blessings of liberty that they put in place – it will take courage for the winner of the AI war to do the same – or for another DMOZ or Firefox to arise to challenge them.<\/p>\n
Home<\/h3>\n I’ll end with the same bold prediction I started the last article with. <\/p>\n
Traditional search is going the way of TV, newspaper and radio advertising. At one time, those were the dominant advertising media. They’re still relevant today, but they have a small fraction of the influence they once had.<\/p>\n
What will the “new search” look like? It’ll be people asking their robot for an opinion and the robot giving them the best possible answer. No clicks, no SERPs, no ads.<\/p>\n
Oh, AI companies will try to inject ads into their answer, but you’ll drop that AI faster than you drop your friend, who takes every conversation to try to sell you into their latest MLM venture.<\/p>\n
How do you compete in this new world? How do you survive and thrive as a brand in a world where all searches are zero click, all SERPs are a single result and people won’t be able to skip or block your ads because there won’t be ads to skip or block? <\/p>\n
The ultimate solution is to go back to 1993, the year before Yahoo was founded. <\/p>\n
Build your brand.<\/strong><\/p>\nSearch engines like Google were always just supposed to be a way to get customers into your door. From there, it was really up to you to win them over to your brand and earn their loyalty so the next time they search, they’ll bypass Google and go directly to you. <\/p>\n
In online marketing terms, if you look at your website traffic and see that your direct traffic is growing, you’re in good shape. But if your direct traffic has been shrinking while your traffic from other channels is growing, you’re in trouble. <\/p>\n
In 1993, businesses grew by building great products, taking care of their customers and relying mostly on word-of-mouth to promote their brands. <\/p>\n
In 2024, the most successful businesses still do it this way. <\/p>\n
When I asked ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini where the best place to buy books is, they all mentioned Amazon. Why? Because they’d look foolish if they said anything else.<\/p>\n
Amazon didn’t pay the AI models to mention them, and the latter didn’t arbitrarily decide to promote Amazon. These AI models looked around them and saw that more people buy books from Amazon than anywhere else and that people generally have good things to say about their experience.<\/p>\n
There is one thing that will always be more powerful than AI, and that’s free and independent human thought. <\/p>\n
If you want to be known as the best widget company, your job is not to convince AI or even Google that you’re the best. Your job is to convince your customers. Like any other expert, AI’s opinion will be questioned if it capriciously contradicts public opinion.<\/p>\n
In fairness to Google, every bit of SEO advice they’ve ever given was always about building your brand, from title tag optimization<\/a> to Core Web Vitals<\/a> to building links to E-E-A-T. These are all things you should have always been doing as a brand, not for Google’s sake but for your customers. <\/p>\nAssuming that the winner of the AI wars has a good brain, a good heart and courage, we’ll be back home to a place where building your brand is back to being the most important ranking factor – which it always was.<\/p>\n
Dig deeper: Modern SEO: Packaging your brand and marketing for Google<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n \nContributing authors are invited to create content for Search Engine Land and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the search community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff<\/a> and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. The opinions they express are their own.<\/em><\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the traditional search box becomes obsolete and the vast majority of searches shift to the extreme long tail, SEO will invariably evolve in the future. It’s actually not such a bold prediction if you have been in the search space for a while. Data has shown time and time again that searchers don’t want […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":314,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[18],"class_list":{"0":"post-314","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-seo","8":"tag-seo"},"yoast_head":"\n
Navigating the AI wars: Winning SEO strategies for brands - SEO<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n