Did We Pass Peak AIO? — Whiteboard Friday

We should talk briefly about the elephants in the room. Obviously, a lot of people are looking at Google’s AI Mode and wondering if that’s the future. And that basically looks like the whole SERP being one big AI Overview, right? So a lot of people will be looking at that.

My personal view is that AI Mode is a ChatGPT competitor. I think it’s actually a ChatGPT killer.

It’s for a slightly different use case in terms of what it presents. It’s not necessarily for someone that is looking for web search. And maybe at the moment we use web search for more things than web search is really for.

But I think there is a balance here. I don’t think you’ll see the current AI Mode interface become the only interface, but maybe some hybridization is possible.

Speaking of which, if you look in Search Labs at the moment, and I recommend you do, if you look in Search Labs at the moment, you’ll notice two things.

One is that this trend is far more common in Search Labs. Non-position-one AI Overviews are really common in Search Labs right now.

The other thing is this new feature type called Web Guides. And this will often appear in position three or four or two. And it looks like a cross between a regular SERP and an AI Mode result, and that’s then appearing itself as a search feature. So it’s kind of like a super featured snippet, I guess, except it’s not necessarily in position one.

And those contain some regular organic results, which look like regular organic results as well. So they’re a bit clickier than AI Overviews. But also, often these sort of have huge walls of what I could less generously call AI slop or more generously call helpful text. But yeah, this is maybe the kind of hybrid experience that we’re working towards.

Anyway, I hope you found that interesting. As I say, there’ll be some more data in the links below. Thank you very much.

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