Organic Search is changing. New players like Perplexity, Bing AI, you.com are combining Generative AI and traditional search to give users better answers to their queries in a much shorter time.
Over the last decade, Google has been the king of Organic Search. So much so, that most of our blog traffic, ~ 98% comes from Google, day after day. The last 2% comes from a variety of other sources like Yandex, Bing, DuckDuckGo etc. This paradigm, however, is about to be disrupted with Search Generative Experiences.
What is an SGE?
An SGE is a new type of search experience that uses Generative AI to answer queries within a single paragraph. This is an evolution of the traditional search engine, which gives you a list of the 10 most relevant web pages where the answer might be. It has the potential to really disrupt how we search for answers on the Internet.
Microsoft's Bard for example (below), shows a summarized answer before the typical 10 search results AND also on the right side. All the answers are tagged with sources to indicate where the information is coming from.
The user can also ask "follow-ups" to the original query. This helps to continue and expand upon the original search with the context being intact. For example, in the above conversation, I could follow by asking: "Give me examples of #2" or "How can good startups avoid these pitfalls?"
How do SGEs work?
Generative Search Experience (GSE) is applying Generative AI to summarize search results into a single answer. They all work a little bit differently but overall they take the most relevant webpages that answer a user's query and summarize it into a single answer. Very importantly, GSEs are based on Large Language Models. They do not generate answers, only summarize from existing sources.
What are the advantages of using SGE vs. Traditional Search
- Personalization: By combining your user behaviour, personal information, and your browsing style, SGEs can serve much more personalized answers to you.
- Fast answers: Since SGEs summarize all the search results into a single answer, you save a ton of time not having to sift through web pages.
- Nuanced queries: You can be much more nuanced in your searches with SGEs. Instead of just saying - "saas tips", you can go even more in-depth with "What are the top tips a pre-seed SaaS startup should know?".
Examples of SGE platforms
There are several different SGEs that are up and coming up right now. Here's our top 7:
Next Steps
Hopefully, this gives you some context into the upcoming age of Search Generative Experiences or SGEs. This shift has the potential to disrupt the massive Organic Search and SEO industry as a whole.
