AI is ushering in a new era of client buying behavior. Is your firm ready?
For the last 15 years, Google has been the central node on the world’s information network. Google search has been the most frequent and influential participant in a client’s buying experience. And it’s all about to change.
Google Search: A Look Back
When Google began receiving widespread adoption in the late 2000’s it enabled clients to do something they’d never been able to do before — easily find answers to virtually any problem with a few strokes of their keyboard.
It’s easy to dismiss this now. But at the time it moved much of our research from the basement of a library, assisted by an expert librarian, to our fingertips, self-directed on a desktop computer.
We learned how to scan that list of hypertext links, assess their quality, dive in and out of the results to learn, explore and discover possible answers to our problems.
Over time we learned, as marketers, that the results that returned on page one got most of the traffic and the very first result got the lion share of that. So, we developed content and SEO tactics to try and achieve that.
Eventually people learned to search more complex strings of information, thoughts, and questions.
The net effect of Google cannot be understated. Google:
- Has been the greatest connector of problems and solutions ever assembled in the history of humankind.
- Enabled firms to make their knowledge and expertise findable and accessible to anyone in the world.
- Enabled buyers to find sellers in a totally new way. Previously a buyer might have accessed an association’s directory, an industry list or sought the advice of a peer. Now they could actively search for a firm of any type, anywhere and largely find it in the list of search results. And, they did all those things.
Google didn’t just introduce a new buying behavior. It introduced a new mindset. The best firm to solve your problem could be the one recommended by a friend (based on a personal experience) or listed by a publication. Or it could be the ones that ranked at the top of a few different search queries (based on an algorithm).
The Content Explosion
Of course, Google didn’t exist in a vacuum. Over this same time period, we witnessed the birth of a wide range of free, easy to use, and widely available self-publishing tools (e.g. WordPress and YouTube).
Suddenly our ability to publish our thinking wasn’t constrained by the cost of printing and distribution. Nor was it filtered by an editorial gatekeeper.
This spawned an explosion in new thinking, new IP, and new content the likes of which the world’s never seen.
Over time, scanning that list of hyperlinks has been feeling increasingly daunting. (It doesn’t help that search, based on the traditional algorithm, seems to be getting worse.)
Google has evolved to make things easier — they introduced Answer Boxes and Featured Snippets to provide quick answers to straightforward questions and Knowledge Panels that summarize people, places, organizations, or things.
But search results were still based largely on the same set of information – a combination of the actual content on a webpage and the meta data explaining what the page is about paired with other signals of content quality (domains linking to the page, time users spend on page, etc.).
Example of a Featured Snippet:
The user experience has remained a heavy “lean-in” one … as a user you’re searching, scanning, exploring, reading, assessing, clicking in, backing out, clicking in again, reading more, watching, thinking, etc.
It’s a lot of work to sift through all the noise.
AI is enabling the next generation of search
Over the last 18 months we’ve lived through the rapid explosion of AI investments. While AI is being deployed to solve all types of problems, one of the most clear applications is to help us sift through all the information noise.
Despite the first half of the article headline, search is not dead. The way we search is just changing. The tools we’re using might change. And marketers will need to adapt.
Tools, built on large language models and generative AI, like Perplexity, Gemini, and Bing are providing a different, more robust type of search experience.
They’re functioning more like a digital assistant that can answer a complete question, draw from a variety of sources, interpret what comes back, provide a summary answer, and make “seemingly” thoughtful suggestions on where and how to go deeper.
In short, search is shifting from a “lean-in” active experience ….
- A string of words typed into a keyboard or voiced into a smart phone…
- That yielded a discrete result….
- Which requires a lot of scanning, exploring, digging and assessing to find an answer
And search is shifting to a “lean-back” passive experience ….
- Question posed to a digital assistant …
- Summarized answer that points to a variety of sources for the searcher to explore that could include things like …
- “Real-time,” high-level summaries of a firm and its capabilities based on a variety of quickly accessible sources
- Comparison of a firm with its peers based on a variety of sources
- Analysis of a company’s strategic priorities based on its earnings calls and other public sources
- A conversation thread that remembers what you’ve asked and builds on your prior queries
Marketers: What to Do Now
To be clear, there’s no cause for alarm. Google still retains an 85-90% share of global search. So, if your firm relies heavily on inbound traffic and inquiries from organic traffic or search engine marketing (“SEM”) ads, don’t fret. That traffic is not going to whither overnight.
But client behavior is already changing. One of our consulting firm clients just got back from a two-week assignment in Africa last week. The client found them via a Chat GPT query in Spring 2023.
And some people are adopting tools like Perplexity as their go to search engine.
To be clear, we can’t afford to ignore this shift. An AI digital assistant, like Perplexity, stands to save clients a lot of time. Clients will increasingly use tools like it to research solutions to their problems, identify firms to short list for projects, and vet possible service providers.
As an example, I created this short video to demonstrate how different clients might search for a Salesforce partner based on their industry and geography. Notice how the results change based on the edits I make to the query:
Start a conversation in your marketing and leadership teams about what you need to be doing now to be successful in a reality where tools like Perplexity and Gemini dominate global search activity:
- Select one of these AI tools and make it your first stop for your own research activities
- Test search queries your clients might try to find solutions to the problems you solve
- Test search queries your clients might try to find firms like yours
- Take note of where the tool is sourcing its information
- Build a plan for getting your thinking published and available in those locations
