AI is widely used in our modern world now, whether it's for maths, teaching, marketing, content creation or wall to see what sticks, it has certainly become an integral part of our world. But how will that shape the future of SEO?
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My first question is: How many of you use AI on a daily basis? My next question is: How many of you use AI to find out information or to check the legitimacy of things? There is one thing that I have noticed that's changed the way I see the potential of AI. I've noticed that whenever I have a question that I need answered or I want to find something out my immediate response is to Ask my AI Friends.
I'm sure we've all heard the saying "I don't know, I'll Google it!" well my response has become "I don't know, I'll ask my AI friend!", I specifically downloaded edge on my phone so I can have Co-pilot built into it. It's certain to say that AI has made a huge impact on the world, and in just 1 year, we've made amazing progress - some would say scary amounts of progress - but this has led to a question of whether or not AI is the future of our informational network.
AI is certainly a great piece of technology that we've managed to create, and while the "AI" that we know today isn't exactly AI it's a step in the right direction.
One this is for certain and that (especially if you sign in with an account) AI knows about you, whether or not it's from chats is a different thing. Using Copilot as an example when logged it will always replay with a statement followed by my name - now obviously this is because it pulled the data from my account - but that's not all. On several occasions the AI has personalised answers to me based off previous interactions and the more I engage with the AI the more it seems to learn about me and how I like to interact with it.
AI has access to billions of piles of data and when asked a question it filters through all of it and gives you an answer that's personalised and easy to understand. Spend 1 min asking the AI the same question or spend ages scrolling through a blog post on Google to find the answer. It's without a doubt that AI can pull the correct information and then put it in an easy to understand format in a matter of seconds.
Unlike humans AI don't need breaks to recharge or sleep, so they are available 24/7 - unless if their servers get shutdown - and therefore can be used at any time of the day. No matter if your a night owl or an early bird the AI will be available to help you, we're humans and sometimes we get that eurika moment and have to do something right away, AI is there to assist, learn and help you learn no matter the time.
AIs are becoming more adaptable, and when giving them prompts, the more precise you are the more precise their answers become. AI can handle multiple topics being covered inside of one chat, you can even ask it to remember things for later so you can recall it when it's needed or relevant.
One thing a lot of people I know struggle with is having to many ideas and never being able to sort them out or prioritise. Having an AI companion can help you by having a second brain to help organise thoughts and priorities It becomes helpful to be able to bounce ideas and get some feedback then and there.
While AI may be a great step in our technology, there are still some problems that need to be fixed or alleviated.
It's not without saying that AI useses a lot of power, from training new models, running AI models, to having data centers, it's safe to say that without power AI wouldn't exist. AI can use so much electricity that it's global impact on our electricity infrastructure is growing significantly, and can cause some problems down the line.
One thing to say is that some AIs can become bias due to a phenomenon called algorithmic bias. This is when the data that it is fed and trained upon Is bias in some way or another. One example of this was a company trained an Ai to detect when peoples eyes were open but due to not using Aisians inside their data pool the AI become bias and was unable to detect what it was not trained on.
AI get's it's data from all around the world, some are private data sources while others train their data models using public data sometimes data is bad and inaccurate so it's understandable that facts that AI gives can be wrong and that's why they ask you to check everything - just make sure you don't ask chat GPT how many r's are in strawberry.
One main problem we are seeing is that many people are over-relying on AI, specifically generative AI (Chat-GPT, Copilot, Grok). We've seen a major rise in the amount of people who use AIs to just simple have a conversation with "someone" and while it can be okay to ask it to humor you for a little while, but many people are over using them to replace human connection. While using AI is beneficial we should try and not become reliant on AI. AI is a tool not a replacement just yet, and AI shouldn't replace human connection unless we get androids - but I doubt that's happening anytime soon.
Is AI the Future of Search?
While I was using AI the other day to ask it a question I pondered to myself why I didn't "just Google it", and while I was thinking about the reasons why I started to wonder if asking AI for the information is the future of what we call "searching". Think about it, you tell AI the type of project that you want to build and you ask it to help you find some companies that can help you. In a matter of seconds the AI filters through companies on the world wide web and then boom give you a persoanlised answer to how each one can help you and some sort of price range (if you asked it for one).
That was just one example of how AI could renovate the way we use the term "search",another example would be that you ask it a question regarding something, for example you ask it what the difference between a mushroom and a toadstall is. and it comes back with this:
The terms "mushroom" and "toadstool" are often used interchangeably, but they do carry different connotations:
In essence, the key difference lies in perception: "mushroom" is more neutral and scientific, while "toadstool" tends to carry a negative or cautionary tone. However, there's no strict scientific distinction between the two!
The point I'm trying to make is Google search uses keywords to determine how relevant and reliable a webpage is regarding a search term or phrase, but what if we swapped the "keyword-focused" search algorithm for a data driven "AI Search". It may not feel like it but everytime you ask AI a question it searches through it's data or the web and constructs an answer for you. AI could reshape the way that searches are done and change Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)
