It’s a wrap as far as Google’s annual I/O conference is concerned and the theme across their innovations is none other than Artificial Intelligence.
NB: This is an article from Milestone
Of course, the anticipation around this year’s conference was how the search engine giant is integrating Generative AI with its search user experience and that will be our focus here as well.
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We’ll walk through the big changes that lie ahead as announced at Google I/O, and what your business needs to keep an eye out for.
Google I/O 2023 Updates:
- Search Generative Experience (SGE)
In development by Search Labs, Google has branded the project ‘Supercharging Search with generative AI’. Using LLMs (Large Language Models) specifically MUM and their recent PaLM 2 with Generative AI, Google is bringing multi-search (text with images & videos) to the forefront of the user experience on search.
- Helpful Content with ‘Perspectives’
With Perspectives, Google is going to deliver expert opinions or user feedback that will be sourced from conversations on popular forums and from channels such as YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, etc.
- Vertical Experiences
Whether it’s dining, local searches, or shopping, a single prompt will offer a range of personalized result types for users to make a faster buying decision. Using Google’s Shopping Graph, you will see a description of the product, key details such as product images and videos, availability, delivery time, reviews from other shoppers, etc.
- Sponsored Tag for Paid Advertisements
To offer transparency to their end users when clicking on a link, Google has confirmed that they are going to have clear and distinguishable Ad spaces across the page which will be marked by the ‘Sponsored’ tag.
Search Generative Experience impact and how your business needs to adapt
We’re going to be calling out the key changes your business needs to be ready for – to adapt and drive its visibility on search:
BARD and Google Lens Integration: Visual Search is gaining prominence
Quoting Wall Street Journal, Google is now making the search experience “visual, snackable, personal, and human,”. Not only are you going to see image and video rich results along with generative AI answers, but with BARD and Google Lens integration, you can now use images as part of your prompts/queries. That’s right, ask a question/prompt using images!
Action: Optimizing your images for visual search is imperative to grab SERP visibility. In short, follow Google’s image SEO best practices as elucidated by Google’s John Muller. Ensure quality and safe search, include descriptive titles, captions, filenames, and text for your images. Optimize images for page speed and add schema or structured data to drive entity recognition. Most importantly, treat your images as entities (no duplicate images across locations and channels) for them to be recognized effectively in Google’s Knowledge Graph.
