Various interpretations of the Beatles’ “Come Together” suggest it was written at a time of tension between the band members to unite them on the path forward. It came to mind after recent stories featured in our Perspective Marketer newsletter showed statistical data that was heavily weighted (literally and figuratively) in favor of traditional Google search vs. GenAI search.
- Search Engine Land: Google Search is 373x bigger than ChatGPT (that only has 0.25% share of search traffic).
- EMARKETER: Google’s share of traditional search referral traffic is 87.3% and “only 20% of US consumers desire a greater use of AI-driven search engines.”
Our review of the data changed the lens from percentage share to actual numbers that revealed deeper meaning and opportunity for Gen AI usage:
- ChatGPT’s 0.25% share of the search market becomes 37.5 million search-like prompts per day.
- The “only” 20% of US consumers becomes 52 million users wanting to do more searches using Gen AI platforms.
Our point is: if we had said a year ago that GenAI would be generating 37.5 million daily searches and is being used by 52 million consumers, very few people would have agreed with that prediction. And we’re not talking about general GenAI use, these numbers are specific to search.
What we did say more than a year ago was that GenAI was evolving very quickly into an alternative search engine. We urged marketers who were already leveraging SEO as a proven ROI strategy to consider implementing a complementary, forward-looking SAIO (Search AI Optimization) strategy.
These new numbers are proof of the GenAI search opportunity and provide an impetus for SEO and SAIO to come together as part of your search marketing initiatives right now.
