One of the consequences of the rise of AI is its disruption to several media formats and ways that we get information. Chief among them is search, whose engagement and primacy were already eroding to a degree, due to alternative outlets among younger generations such as TikTok (more on that in a bit).
Tools like ChatGPT continue to chip away at search’s status as the front door to the web, and the go-to place to find information – everything from recipes to product reviews. This puts Google in a classic innovator’s dilemma – an ironic position given the massive media disruption it has caused in its lifetime.
In any case, the underlying truth is that consumers continue to be presented with non-search engine ways to get information quickly. And they’re biting to a meaningful degree. What does this all mean for media companies, brands, and everyone else that has optimized themselves for search engines?
This was the topic of a presentation at Street Fight Live from Yext VP of Strategic Partnerships, Brooke Henderson. Yext is of course well-versed on this matter as it occupied the search ecosystem for the past 15 years, and is now leaning heavily into AI. It wants to take all of its customers along with it.
Unstoppable Market Force
Stepping back, the fragmenting state of information retrieval, outlined above, was the case 20 years ago. In addition to Google, there were several places where information – such as business details – ended up. We’re talking Internet Yellow Pages, vertical search sites, classifieds sites, hyperlocal sites, and Yelp.
That’s the very fragmentation that inspired Yext’s early business model (after a few pivots from call tracking and other thngs). It stepped in to be the organizational layer that kept business information accurate and updated in all those places. And it offered a single cloud-based entry point to do it.
Google has since de-fragmented everything. That happened as it increasingly brought information into its SERPs and knowledge panels (see: zero-click search). And many of those other fragmented sources of business details – from IYPs to classifieds – have gone away… except for Yelp and a few others.
But fragmentation has crept back in, almost as if it’s an unstoppable market force or law of physics. That brings us back to the present, including everything from ChatGPT to TikTok. The former makes a lot of sense, while the latter continues to surprise us in that GenZ is using it as a local search engine.
“TikTok is [kids’] source of truth,” said Henderson from the Street Fight Live stage. She bases this on both empirical market signals from Yext’s data, as well as anecdotal evidence. “When I say that I Google something, my kids laugh at me,” she said to underscore the visible impact on legacy search.
The Good News
So the question that emerges from all the above is how brands, media companies, and everyone else can be present and optimized for these new fragmented user touchpoints. This is especially relevant for all the entities who have spent the last decade refining their SEO strategies for a pre-GPT world.
In many ways, the concepts are similar to what they’ve always been: make sure that business information is updated in central authoritative sources. Just like Google looks for sources of authority from which to aggregate business data (in addition to business-supplied info in GBP), AI does something similar.
The presentation of the data is different with ChatGPT – essentially rewritten in conversational tones – but the data itself is pulled from the public web. Indeed, that’s what positions Google so well to adapt to AI and compete with ChatGPT… which it’s already doing with Gemini and AI Overviews in search results.
In either case, the sources of information and training data are essentially the web. So though the front gate is changing, algorithms, crawlers, and large language models are drawing from the same well. The good news is that marketers who’ve invested in SEO and listings management can adapt to this new world.
That’s also good news for Yext, as this is exactly what it does. In fact, Yext’s value proposition to marketers – especially multi-location brands with a lot of place data to manage – is amplified in a world where information is fragmented and misinformation (a la hallucinations) are the issue of the day.
