It looks like Google isn’t ready to give up its crown yet, or at least to risk losing part of its monopoly on online search.
Only a few weeks after ChatGPT opened to the public, which according to some slightly overexcited journalists was supposed to spell the end of Google, the Californian giant has hit back and announced its own conversational agent, called Bard.
Even if the name is anything but appealing (really, Bard?), its sheer power already has users dreaming. Since Bard isn’t yet available to the public, we can only imagine, or even speculate about, the impact it will have on online search, and on SEO of course.
While we wait for Bard’s public launch, here is what we know so far about how it works, along with some food for thought.
What is Google Bard?
Bard is an experimental conversational artificial intelligence (AI) agent, powered by LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). You may remember that Google announced LaMDA in 2021; the technology sits at the centre of every AI advance in the language and conversation capabilities of the company’s products.
Simply put, Bard aims to build an intelligent conversation module directly into Google, through a search on a topic or a question.
Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses.
This second excerpt is especially interesting for understanding how Google hopes to become a learning platform with Bard:
Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity, helping you to explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old, or learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills.
Of course, what Google’s big boss doesn’t mention is that Bard was rushed to completion after ChatGPT’s highly publicised launch, which was financed in part by Microsoft.
One advantage of Bard over ChatGPT, according to several early reports, will be its ability to draw on recent events to formulate an answer, while ChatGPT, in its current form, relies on a database that goes back to 2021.
What does Bard look like?
Google shared two visual examples of how Bard will be integrated into search results. You can clearly see the long answer generated by a user’s question:
This gives us a good idea of the fairly large place Bard could take in search results. Note too that Bard will probably replace rich snippets, at least in the hierarchy of search results.
We can also imagine Bard being available right from Google’s homepage, next to the famous “I’m feeling lucky” button.
Is Bard available to the public?
No. In the announcement, Mr. Pichai says Bard is currently being tested with “trusted” users (trustee users), and should be available to the public in the coming weeks.
These users, chosen at random to test Bard, come from various regions of the world, so we’re not talking about Google’s usual quality raters, whose job is to evaluate the quality of Google’s search results.
What will the impact be on online search?
There’s no doubt the impact will be huge. To try to understand it, we need to look at where Google and its results stand today.
In its early days, Google was a “pure” search engine, returning about ten search results in response to a query. Google Ads appeared and gradually took up more and more space over time, but Google remained a search engine, rewarding its partners (websites) by sending them traffic from the search results.
For the past few years, Google has become a destination in its own right, with the goal of presenting the best answer directly in the results, so the searcher doesn’t have to click a link.
Just look at the many features now built into search results: answer boxes, recipes and delivery menus, sports scores, weather conditions, plane tickets and travel plans, maths calculations, and much more.
Google gives users what they want: fast answers, with no need to click a search result and read a 1,500-word page, often weighed down by lots of ads.
These easy-answer searches mainly affect queries that can be answered simply, which means many websites have seen their organic traffic gradually decline as users settle for the answers Google provides.
Now, with Bard’s imminent arrival, we have reached another level in keeping visitors inside Google’s ecosystem: it will be possible to send very complex queries to the Bard conversational agent, and so go much deeper into a topic, and who knows, without ever having to visit an organic result.
Which brings us to the elephant in the room.
What will the impact be on websites?
I can understand why website owners are nervous, especially those whose business model relies on content. Will Bard siphon off these sites’ potential organic traffic by giving users a tailored answer that saves them from visiting the site?
After all, the risk is very high that users will consume the information Bard provides. Even if the answer doesn’t satisfy the user, they can always ask a second, more precise question, which removes the need to visit a reference site.
The greatest irony is that these content sites unwittingly helped train Bard, since it was developed partly thanks to the content of those very sites.
So the big question is whether Google will include reference links in Bard’s answers.
If links are included, this could be a visibility opportunity for websites, for example by inviting the searcher to read an article related to the answer. If no references are included, the impact could be negative, with click potential reduced almost to zero, since Bard will already have covered the essentials of the topic and the searcher won’t need to visit another link.
From the screenshots, it’s hard to tell whether reference links will be provided, although the “check it” button in the second image might contain an additional link. Rich answers to a Google query usually contain reference links, so we can only hope this trend will continue with Bard.
In my opinion, attribution of Bard’s answers is an essential question Google will have to answer quickly; I find it very hard to imagine website owners sitting quietly on the sidelines while their content is used as answers in Bard, with no benefit in return.
What will the impact be on SEO?
Once again, SEO specialists will have to adapt. Brand strength will obviously become even more important, but we’ll have to see about the other factors, especially whether reference links will be provided.
It’s clear that quality content will once again be rewarded, because it will be the only way to gain visibility in Bard’s results, whether attribution comes or not.
I also believe the basic principles stay the same: help Google understand the nature of your content with quality tags and structured data, and earn quality links from reference sites to increase your chances of being cited as an additional resource.
If I can venture a prediction, the same optimisation factors used for rich answers will be the likely foundation for appearing in Bard:
- Use a question-and-answer format in your content.
- Write simply and concisely, avoiding long-winded phrasing.
- Use bullet lists to make your content easier to read and understand.
- Use structured data on your content as often as possible.
It can also be very useful to know Google’s official position on AI-generated content, as we’ll see in the next point.
What is Google’s official position on AI-assisted content?
It’s almost comical to see Google’s 180-degree turn on content written with the help of artificial intelligence.
When content generation tools started to become popular, Google was quick to denounce, or even ban, content written by any AI tool:
At first, Google’s guidelines on this were very clear, as you can see in the official webmaster guidelines:
Now the famous rule on automatically generated content has suddenly been relaxed: Google says you can use an AI tool for your content, as long as the intent isn’t to manipulate search engines.
This means Google allows AI-generated content, as long as that content is judged to be of good quality and created first and foremost for users.
In fact, Google published an article this week setting out its official position on AI-generated content.
Beyond the usual refrain of creating high-quality content for users rather than robots, we learn that Google will use the E-E-A-T concept to judge an article’s quality.
This means SEO specialists will not only have to get familiar with the sometimes fuzzy concepts of E-E-A-T, but master them, if they want to survive in this era of intelligent search results.
I encourage you to read the full article, especially the questions and answers at the end.
And what about Google Ads in all this?
It’s impossible to believe Google hasn’t thought about integrating its ads with Bard in some way.
Will conversations with Bard contain ads before, during or after the discussion? How do you keep Bard’s integrity while preserving the search engine’s business model, without compromising the impartiality of the answers?
There’s no way Bard can be allowed to hurt Google Ads, the company’s cash cow. If users no longer need to click an organic link, the concept could be just as dangerous for ad links.
In closing
There’s no doubt Bard’s launch will be followed very closely by everyone involved in online search, SEO specialists and website owners included.
Yet despite the apprehension and nervousness we feel in the face of the unknown, I still believe these are very exciting times for the SEO industry, and that we simply need to adapt and keep advising our clients on the opportunities search engines offer.