A new study by enterprise search marketing company BrightEdge reveals dramatic changes in sites surfaced through Google’s AI Overviews search feature, and while it retains search market share, the data shows that AI search engine Perplexity is gaining ground at a remarkable rate.
Fast and dramatic changes to AIO triggers
The words that trigger AI Overviews are changing at an incredibly fast pace. Some keyword trends in June may have already changed in July.
AI reviews are triggered 50% more times for keywords with the word “best” in them. But Google may have reversed this behavior because these phrases, when applied to products, don’t seem to trigger AIOs in July.
Other AIO triggers for June 2024:
- “What is” keywords increased by 20% more times
- How-to queries increased by 15%
- Queries with the phrase “symptoms of” increased by about 12%
- Queries with the word “treatment” increased by 10%
A BrightEdge spokesperson answered my questions about e-commerce search queries:
“The prevalence of AI in e-commerce is really picking up, with a nearly 20% increase in e-commerce keywords showing AI reviews since the start of July, and a dramatic 62.6% increase compared to the last week of June. Along with this growth, we see a significant 66.67% increase in searches for products that contain AI review pros and cons. This dual trend shows not only the more widespread use of AI in e-commerce search results, but also more comprehensive and useful information provided to users through features such as the Pros and Cons modules.”
Google Search and AI Trends
BrightEdge uses its proprietary BrightEdge Generative Parser™ (BGP) tool to identify key search trends that may impact digital marketing through the end of 2024. BGP is a tool that collects vast amounts of data on search trends and turns them into into actionable insights.
Their research estimates that each percentage point of demand market share represents $1.2 billion, meaning gains of just one digit are still incredibly valuable.
Jim Yu, founder and executive chairman of BrightEdge noted:
“There’s no doubt that Google’s dominance remains strong and what it’s doing in AI matters to every business and marketer across the planet.
At the same time, new players are breaking new ground as we enter an AI-driven universe with multiple quests. AI is constantly advancing, so the most important thing marketers can do now is use the precision of the insights to monitor, prepare for changes and adapt accordingly.
Google continues to be the most dominant source of search traffic, driving approximately 92% of organic search referrals. A notable point from the research data is that AI competitors in all their forms have yet to make a significant impact as a source of traffic, completely debunking speculation that AI competitors will reduce Google’s search traffic.
Huge drop in referred users on Reddit and Quora
Back in May 2024 Google. Of interest to search marketers, Google has continued to reduce the amount of user-generated content (UGC) that is displayed through the search feature with AI Overviews. UGC is responsible for many of the outrageously bad responses that generate negative press. BrightEdge research shows that Reddit and Quora referrals from AI Overviews dropped to “almost zero” in the month of June.
Quora citations from AI Overviews have reportedly dropped by 99.69%. Reddit did marginally better in June with an 85.71% decrease
The BrightEdge report notes:
“Google prioritizes established, expert content over user discussions and forums.”
Bing, Perplexity and Chatbot Impact
Bing’s market share continued to increase, but only by fractions of a percentage point, rising from 4.2% to 4.5%. But as they say, it’s better to move forward than to stand still.
Perplexity on the other hand grew at a monthly rate of 31%. However, percentages can be misleading because 31% of a relatively small number is still a relatively small number. Most publishers don’t talk about all the traffic they get from Perplexity, so they still have a ways to go. However, a monthly growth rate of 31% is a move in the right direction.
Chatbot traffic isn’t really a thing, so this comparison needs to be put in that perspective. Sending referral traffic to websites is not really the purpose of chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT (at this point). The data shows that both Claude and ChatGPT are not sending much traffic.
However, OpenAI hides referrals from the websites it sends traffic to, making it difficult to track. Therefore fully understanding the impact of LLM traffic as ChatGPT uses HTML attribute rel=noreferrer which hides all traffic originating from ChatGPT to websites. However, using the rel=noreferrer link attribute is not uncommon as it is an industry standard for privacy and security.
BrightEdge’s analysis takes a long-term view of this and predicts that LLM referral traffic will become more prevalent and at some point become a significant consideration for marketers.
This is the conclusion reached by BrightEdge:
“The total number of referrals from LLMs is small and is expected to have little impact on the industry at present. However, if this incremental growth continues, BrightEdge predicts it will impact where people search online and how brands approach optimization for different engines.”
Before the iPhone existed, many scoffed at the idea of mobile internet. So BrightEdge’s conclusions about what to expect from the LLM are not unreasonable.
AIO trends have already changed in July, showing the importance of having fresh data to adapt to rapidly changing AIO keyword trends. BrightEdge provides real-time data, updated daily, so marketers can make better-informed decisions.
Understand trends in AI review:
Ten observations on AI reviews for June 2024
Featured image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com
