AI in search, and what we are not changing

On May 10, 2023 Google put an AI-written answer at the top of a search results page in front of a room full of developers. On May 23, at Google Marketing Live, it showed ads whose headlines and images are produced by the same kind of system. Since then the phone has been busy, and the question is always some version of “is this the end of the website”.

It is not, and at the end of May 2023 nobody knows what it is yet, including Google. But the announcements are real and some of them deserve a prompt response. Here is what was actually shown, what it would mean for a local result, and the short list of things we are changing.

What Google actually announced

At I/O Google introduced the Search Generative Experience. The short version: for some searches Google generates a written answer that sits above the usual results, with links to the pages it drew from, plus follow-up questions you can tap to keep the conversation going. As announced, it is an opt-in experiment inside Search Labs, in English, not the default results page for anybody who has not gone looking for it. Google also dropped the waitlist on Bard.

At Marketing Live the theme was the same machinery pointed at advertising. Search campaigns get generative assets, meaning Google writes headlines and descriptions from your landing page and your existing ads. There is a conversational way to build a campaign, where you give Google Ads your website address and it proposes keywords, assets and images. Performance Max gets asset generation as well. Google also said ads keep their own dedicated slots above and below the generated answer.

Meta announced its own AI Sandbox for advertisers earlier in the month, generating background images and text variations. Different platform, same direction of travel.

What an AI answer would change for a local result

Honest answer: less than the headlines suggest, and we will not know the real shape of it for months.

The searches that pay a local business are mostly navigational or transactional. “Dentist near me”, “emergency plumber”, “med spa open Saturday”. Those results are dominated by the map pack, and the map pack is built from your Google Business Profile, your reviews, your proximity and your categories. Nothing announced in May 2023 changes how that is assembled.

What an AI answer does affect is the research question that comes before the booking. “How much does a dental implant cost”, “do I need a permit to move a wall”, “is microneedling worth it”. If Google answers those in a paragraph with three citations, the traffic to a page that answered the same question in nine hundred words goes down. In the accounts we run those pages were never the ones producing calls anyway, but they were the ones producing the traffic charts people like looking at.

So the risk is not that your listing disappears. The risk is that the top of your funnel gets quieter while the bottom stays the same, and you panic at the wrong number.

What we are not changing

• We are not rewriting service pages to sound like they are talking to a machine. Google’s own examples cite ordinary pages that answer a question directly.
• We are not buying anything sold as AI search optimization. Nobody has ranking data on a product that is behind a waitlist.
• We are not pausing content plans. A page that earns a citation in an AI answer has to exist first.
• We are not switching on automatically created assets across every account on the strength of a keynote demo.

The parts worth doing now

A few things do change, and they are cheap.

1. Make the facts about your business unambiguous everywhere. Name, address, phone, hours, services, insurance accepted, financing, parking, which locations do what. A system that writes answers pulls from what it can read clearly. Contradictions between your site, your listing and your directory entries are now a bigger liability than they were.
2. Answer the real questions in plain text on your own pages. Price ranges, what the visit involves, how long it takes, what could go wrong. Short paragraphs, direct first sentence, no preamble. That is the shape of content that gets quoted, and it converts better anyway.
3. Keep the profile complete. Services list, photos from this year, Q&A answered, hours correct on holidays. Whatever Google generates about a local business, it generates from this.
4. Turn generative ad assets on in one account, not all of them. Pick an account where you watch the search terms weekly, enable automatically created assets, and read every asset it writes before you decide it is fine. We have already seen generated headlines that promise services a client does not offer.
5. Watch calls and booked appointments, not sessions. If an AI answer starts absorbing research traffic, sessions fall first and mean nothing. Calls and bookings are the number that tells you whether anything is actually wrong.

What to do this month

• Check your name, address, phone and hours match exactly across your site, your profile and your main directory listings, then fix whatever does not.
• Add or rewrite one page that answers the single question new customers ask on the phone before they book, and lead with the answer.
• Spend twenty minutes in your profile: services, photos, Q&A, holiday hours.
• Enable generative ad assets in one account only, then read what Google writes before it runs.
• Add calls and booked jobs to your monthly one-page record if they are not already the first two lines on it.
• Put a note in the calendar for September 2023 to look at this again, because the experiment will have moved by then.

The businesses that will be fine are the ones that were already clear about what they do, where they do it and what it costs. That has been true since we started in 2015, and a generated paragraph at the top of the page does not change it. If you want help getting ahead of it, that is what our AI search visibility work is for, it sits on top of the same local SEO fundamentals, and the ad side of this belongs in a Google Ads account somebody is reading every week.