I still see the smart voice assistant in the film ‘Her’ as the perfect search experience. In the film, Joaquin Phoenix plays a man who develops a close relationship with his voice assistant. When I first saw the film, I was amazed at how the assistant not only searched for information, but also suggested actions and carried them out.
It’s easy to associate this with SEO, and dream of a request being made and a response given, without us having to sort through the information ourselves. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re getting there! Thanks to AI, things are moving a bit faster now. Because I don’t see SEO as something that should lead to information, but an answer to a question or a solution to a problem. Search intent, as it’s called, is a ticked box. One less problem. Curiosity satisfied.
Good answers without perfect questions
I tend to think symbolically about work and projects, likening technical abstractions to something concrete. A recurring symbolism is that I want to bury cables, or hide the wires. This means that I want the complicated inner workings to be hidden, and the user experience to be like magic, that things just work without us needing to know why. Like in the film Her.
‘We don’t want to see how the machine works,’ I say, and my fellow programmers look slightly stressed. They like machines and gears, and I just want the perfect end experience. When it comes to search engines, AI has influenced search behaviour in the right direction with suggestions, FAQs, and other solutions that don’t require the perfect query to provide a satisfying answer. Answers emerge without having to process large amounts of information. The cables are being buried more and more.
Quality instead of quantity – not always a cliché
My predictions about SEO 2025:- The crawl budget will become more restrained among search engine providers, as there is more and more content to crawl now that AI is contributing.
- This restraint places demands on websites: more well-optimized content and fewer landing pages are a consequence. Search engines are becoming more selective about what they crawl, in order to save money.
- Optimization needs to be more Bing-friendly (Chat GPT has used this), and names and alt tags on images need to be reviewed.
- The AI-ification of websites continues by creating FAQ pages, which are easy to retrieve information from.
- Voice searches are on the rise, and websites need to adapt for this.
- Markup with Schema that clearly describes objects and content needs to continue.
Will Chat GPT kill Google now?
Google is in a bit of a similar situation to Facebook. A giant sits on its throne, and doomsday prophets see shiny new things that will replace the old. “Now it’s happening”, “No, not now, but now!” and so the years go by. That old boring leader remains on his throne, and spruces himself up when needed.
No, Google won’t fall this time either. There are still very few people who have even used AI yet, and the percentage who use Bing compared to Google is very small. But slowly and surely, Google is also changing, and with it the way we search. We live in exciting times, and I live in tense anticipation of finally experiencing that voice assistant that can clear my inbox, order things and proofread texts via a voice conversation on the way to work.
If you haven’t seen the movie “Her” with Joaquin Phoenix, do it! And if you want to talk SEO or order SEO, contact me.
