Before Larry Page and Sergei Brin rolled up their garage door for the first time, ready to launch Google, with its tight-fitting logo font and awkward, noughties energy, nobody thought to search like they do now.

Imagine having to go through a university degree without Google.

I’m serious, just imagine it.

Awful, right?

But believe it or not, there are some brave souls among us who used to have to lug books on their back, like a camel with a library card, searching for their erudite oasis somewhere in the depths of page 372.

Now the reason this is important is because GPT-style searches will be the same. Not only are you going to access new information, but the way you find it will change.

This means your SEO will have to update to meet it.

The natural inclination is to fire-fight the incoming LLM (large language model) changes that are set to flood in. You’re worried about making sure your pages still rank and it makes sense.

However, what can be a weakness will often also be a strength.

Did you know you can automate a technical SEO audit of your website in just seconds? Or better still can read a blog like this and tell you exactly how to populate your metadata.

Imagine being able to drop the drudgery of getting your page optimised properly and being able to whip it up in an instant. Fantastic, right?

There’s so much potential, so grab those tools and use them to your advantage. You’ll be amazed at what they can do. And if you’re not sure where to start- there are plenty of content creators sharing exactly how!

But there’s more…

We’re so used to asking a direct question for a direct answer. A to B makes sense.

But a conversational style search is rolling in. That means more talking as like you and I would, and asking your questions in stages.

It opens up huge opportunities but our issue is that you (and every marketing team on the planet) has structured your SEO around an index model, rather than a conversational one.

But that’s changing. Google just released their new Bard AI and every big player is implementing their changes too. Soon, your customers will be searching far more conversationally and in incremental stages. Less people will land on your website, because their answers will be in the actual search itself.

So rather than trying to game your SEO, focussing on being as human as possible will probably be the way to go. If less people land through search engines, you’ll need to maximise the ones who do. A structural shift to focus on UI and Copywriting is going to be huge to keep them engaged. Don’t let them down.

If people are using chatbots to find answers to their questions, they won’t just stop needing your website for information. They’re also not going to benefit from Ads on SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) too.

So whilst you might personally find it a lot easier to get the exact detail of your next recipe without having to read an excruciating life-story about hummus, you need to be mindful that your business could be vulnerable too.

Consider exactly how much Ad traffic you could afford to lose and think of ways to diversify. You might need to shift to strategies like Demand-Gen. Focussing on offering genuine value to users first, to cultivate a relationship that trickles into commercial success.

These big shifts are inevitable. If you follow the trail of money left by tech giants, they are voting with their cash on GPT searches being the next big thing.

Yes, it’s a big shift to implement over the next few years, but there’s huge opportunities to get ahead of your competition and cement yourself in the new era of search.

If you could go back to the early days of Google and get that first-mover advantage, you would. So what’s stopping you now?