(This column originally appeared in Forbes)
A couple of years ago I attended an excellent conference in Seattle by a well known firm that provides online search and marketing tools. They had a lineup of top notch speakers who are experts in digital marketing from the largest corporations, brands and agencies in the country. The theme was Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how to drive the most clicks to a website, ecommerce store or content page.
The conference was basically all about Google. Why? Because, even in 2025, Google controls 90 percent of search in the world. To get found you need to please the Google Gods. So what advice did the greatest and smartest people in the online marketing world have for conquering Google search? They all pretty much said the same thing: “beats me.”
No one knows. That’s because Google’s search algorithm is a secret more closely guarded than the recipe for Coke or U.S. nuclear launch codes. Everyone there was trying to figure out what Google was going to do next, where Google may change its algorithm and how these changes would affect traffic to their site.
AI is now changing that. AI is already starting to save small business owners like me from Google’s monopoly on search. And it’s doing so in three ways.
More Options
For starters it’s giving our potential customers more choices to find us. Yes, studies show that Google still dominates search. But already you can see ChatGPT and others like it begin to make headway.
So far, even if ChatGPT’s 1 billion messages per day were search-related, its total share of the search market would be less than 1 percent. Google saw approximately 373 times as many searches as ChatGPT in 2024 and Google searches actually grew in 2024 compared to 2023.
But things are changing. Gartner predicts that by 2026, traditional search volume will drop by about 25 percent, with AI chatbots and virtual agents capturing a growing share of user attention and behavior Others project that AI-powered searches will grow annually by up to 35 percent starting in 2025, reaching an estimated 14 percent of search market share by 2028, with Google declining modestly to about an 86 percent share. I’m betting that decline will be more pronounced. But regardless it’s heading in the right direction.
I’ve tried Google AdWords and for a small business like mine it’s useless. My company sells customer relationship management software and the big players in this industry already have search results locked up. They spend more money than me. They buy up all the good keywords. People searching for products I sell won’t find me unless they click through to page 8 of their search results and no one does that. Of course, that doesn’t stop Google — the fox guarding the henhouse — from drawing down on my ad budget with their dubious claims of “impressions” and clicks. How can I even verify this? I can’t. They have the monopoly.
AI is solving this problem. As other chatbots take away search market share from Google I’ll be offered more ways for customers to find me. I predict that many small businesses — equally frustrated with the Google monopoly — will gravitate to these chatbots. ChatGPT and Perplexity have already announced their own browsers to compete with Chrome and collect data. Good for them. More competition means more choices and less costs for small businesses like mine.
Less Clicks, Better Clicks
Most have noticed that Google has introduced an “AI View” into their results where search answers are summarized. Some believe that this will result in fewer clicks on links to websites and they’re right. Smart marketing people, like Jason Rose — senior vice president of digital sales and marketing at HR firm Paychex believes that this will have greater benefits for small businesses like mine.
“People are reading the AI summary and kind of getting what they need and moving off,” he said. “But it’s not all doom and gloom because these visitors actually convert at a much higher rate.”
To date SEO has been all about getting visitors to your website. Websites are ranked based on their traffic. But how genuine is this traffic? In 2023, bots made up 49.60 percent of internet activity, almost catching up to human traffic, which was at 50.40 percent. Meanwhile we’re paying Google to send this nonsense to us. AI is fixing this too. It is changing the way people use the web for research, be it academia or shopping.
Rose is right. By reading an AI overview a visitor who clicks through to a website has given some thought to their action and is therefore a more qualified prospect, a better visitor. Google and others will likely charge more for this. I’ll pay. It’s worth it.
Content Creation Opportunities
To be included in an AI overview your content has to be relevant and useful. Unfortunately, a great deal of today’s content isn’t. At the Seattle conference I attended some of the sessions talked about SEO tricks and games you can play with content (keyword stuffing, hidden links, showing different content to search engines than what is shown to users) to get noticed by Google. AI will help to stop this. As it gets smarter it will be better able to root out this nonsense so that it’s displaying the best answers possible.
Which means that the best content will be included in AI overviews and the websites with the best answers will have a better chance of being found. No games. No tricks. Just good, valuable content. And not content generated by AI because AI will be able to figure that out too.
This will be an opportunity for quality content providers — writers, bloggers, creators, etc. — to step up their game and prove their value. The best ones will rise to the top, unburdened by the crawlers and spiders, that held them down. People worry that AI will replace content providers. It’s actually the opposite. It’s creating more opportunities for them.
“AI is reading the same content that the human would have and building summaries based off of that,” Rose said. “So again, you need great content. Content is still king.”
All of this is happening now. But we’re still early days. Google is still Google. ChatGPT and other chatbots are infants in the search world and still hallucinate too much. But you can easily see the future. And the future is a world where, thanks to AI, Google no longer monopolizes search. For a small business owner like me, that world can’t come soon enough.
