As AI-driven chatbot usage continues to grow, it will create a dilemma that will need to be addressed. The dilemma is that the data AI uses to power its responses comes from content across the Internet. A major reason that content was created was to drive organic search traffic through search engines. One of the best aspects of the current content situation is that it created a mutually beneficial arrangement where people created content to drive organic traffic via search engines which made search engine results better. Search engine algorithms also rewarded higher quality content with better search positions, pushing content creators to write more meaningful content. With chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard that loop has been severed because the results are generated within the chatbot interface with no links back to the content that was used to generate the response. Futhermore, even for results that generate a business name, it isn’t clear how to optimize your content to show up in the chatbot results.
What does this mean for content creators?
As chatbot usage continues to grow, there will be less incentive to create new articles because new content will generate less organic search traffic. Fewer articles will mean lower-quality results for the chatbots, diminishing their effectiveness.
Chatbots are still very new, so the impact on search engine traffic has not been significant yet and the interfaces are continuing to evolve, but this dilemma will need to be addressed in order for the chatbots to be continually fed with high-quality content.
How can chatbots address this dilemma?
- Provide links back to the articles that were used to source the AI-generated response
- Develop clear guidelines on how to optimize for AI
These steps will help maintain the content generation loop, but will not completely address the issue. One of the benefits of using a chabot is that they summarize data in a way that is meaningful enough that you get the information you need without having to search further which means less traffic to the sites that created the content initially.
It will be interesting to see how this situation evolves.
Recent Comments