Online advertising and SEO after SGE: the upcoming Google era

We've been talking non-stop about Artificial Intelligence for months now. Pretty much everyone informed agrees that we're about to experience a paradigm shift in many aspects, and that AI will have a profound impact on eCommerce.

However, the truth is that everything still has an experimental feel to it. Or it did... because Google has worked its heart out, through Bard, is starting to show what the near future offers for online marketing.

Welcome to SGE.

It's interesting to become familiar with this concept. SGE stands for Search Generative Experience

As you can see, we're moving from the concept of a "search engine" to a "search experience." It refers to a trend that has been going on for much longer than Artificial Intelligence: the experiential shift that affects every aspect of marketing.

But it also incorporates one of the buzzwords. This is a generative experience in the sense that it goes beyond simply displaying indexed and categorized content so that we reactively search for the one that aligns with our search intent expressed through keywords.

Now we interact with Google through a language model for dialogue applications called LaMDA, such as Bard. It processes information from its database, combines it with indexed content, and provides us with a response based on that.

And indeed, all of this is integrated into the Google search engine, much like what we can already see with Bing and ChatGPT.

This didn't come out of nowhere; it actually stems from the application of different updates that now make more sense. We're talking about Google Bert or Google MUM, for example. In the day-to-day short-term focus of SEO, they may have gone almost unnoticed due to their limited immediate impact. However, they were laying the groundwork for a more complex, richer, and smarter interaction.

In summary, SGE is a way to interact with Google that is:

As they mentioned and demonstrated during Google I/O, it's important to note that SGE will continue to draw from your content—the content that Google has been asking you to make relevant, deep, and authoritative for years. In other words, web pages and blogs still hold value.

In fact, this experience gives much more visibility to the sources it uses to generate answers compared to other competitors like ChatGPT, which are highly opaque.

Visually, it appears below the search bar and the direct links to Shopping, images, etc. It's a box with a greenish background that displays the detailed response, highlights the sources on the side, and provides a series of suggested questions to keep the conversation.

As you can see in this real screenshot, search results are not completely eliminated; they simply shift down the scroll line. This, combined with the fact that your content—including product listings—can potentially be part of the AI-generated answers, creates a more integrated experience.

Google itself considers these answers to any question work as a "snapshot": an instant overview of information that allows us to continue the conversation naturally without having to rephrase the question. We can delve deeper without interruption, pulling on the thread of the conversation.

There are things we know and others we can intuit. Regarding SEM, they have been quite clear. During the conference, they specifically mentioned PPC campaigns, making it clear that they will be present within SGE, displaying sponsored content appropriately labeled as "ads."

However, they did not go into detail about the available formats or how they will work, but it's likely that they will be targeted based on interests or audience signals, similar to Display and Max Performance campaigns.

Of course when it comes to SEO, they haven't been as transparent, but it's evident that we'll need to work and test many things to determine the ranking factors.

Organic positioning in SGE is going to be much more challenging since positions are limited. However, in my opinion and based on how Google applies AI, it's not accurate to say that there's only one opportunity per search, as we have witnessed: a single answer can incorporate multiple references.