It’s easy to believe that search is Google’s core business—I myself believed that until quite recently. It appears, however, that artificial intelligence may instead be what they are really focused on.
It is certainly true that search is what brings in Google’s revenue; the ads in their search results account for almost all of their income. But if you look at what the broader group (Alphabet) is actually working on, nearly everything seems to have a connection to AI (artificial intelligence). This is true for the search engine as well—RankBrain, Google’s AI for search results, has taken over a large portion of search queries.
Sundar PichAI
Look at other areas such as self-driving cars, image recognition, and translation (take a look at some examples from Google’s new translations—it’s something entirely different from before). AI is present in virtually every project at Google. When Sundar Pichai (Google’s CEO) makes public statements, they very often revolve around AI and Google’s AI-first approach. My personal assessment is that Google is putting all its eggs in the AI basket because it is convinced that this will be the next major revolution. And they are hardly alone. The New York Times writes that Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Baidu (the Chinese search engine) have all entered an AI arms race.
A reflection on marketing in an AI-driven world
If we look solely at SEO, the complexity of the work will almost certainly increase dramatically. A shift toward increasingly complex challenges has already been underway for several years, but an AI—unlike a manually engineered algorithm—can increase the number of influencing factors at enormous speed. You could have different factors for different segments, or even different factors depending on country and time of day.
My guess is that anyone who wants to continue succeeding in the search results over the next 5–10 years (which is, admittedly, very difficult to predict in our industry) will need marketers themselves to move toward AI. Otherwise, it will be difficult to keep up with the pace of change.
