By Mr. Chandan Sharma, General Manager- Digital Media, Adani Group
The global Gen-AI revolution has, over the past couple of years, positioned AI into a trusted ally for business growth. Interestingly, besides assisting businesses with speedy content creation and optimization, AI today is simultaneously attempting to change the fundamentals of how humans seek and come across content online. Right now, more than ever before, AI has taken the centre-stage in transforming search and discovery of content (be it in the form of text, images, products or anything else) across the ‘webverse’. We may become ignorant for a shorter while but the changes being made by AI is irreversible and inevitable.
Reviewing 2024 Strides: AI Meets Online Content Search
In October last year, OpenAI announced the launch of ChatGPT Search – which was made capable of searching real-time information from the Internet, enabling users to get up-to-date answers to their queries and relevant links just by conversing with it. Thereafter, in December 2024, they made ChatGPT Search available to all ChatGPT users, including free users, marking a pivotal moment in the constantly-evolving future of the web. Earlier in the year, Gartner predicted a 25% decline in traditional search engine (read Google/Bing search) volumes by 2026, owing to growing dominance of AI-powered chatbots, answer engines and virtual agents. Another breakthrough development in the previous year was the entry of Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) aka Google AI Overviews (AIO).
As per a latest BrightEdge report, Google AIO, which has already expanded to over a billion users, is gaining significant traction in recent months while becoming increasingly stable and authoritative. The same report also projects ChatGPT Search is likely to capture 1% share of the online search market by the end of this year, even as Google continues to reign with over 92% market share. For several years now, media companies like Spotify and Netflix have been employing AI to provide smart recommendations and enhance content discovery for their users. Realizing several years ago that the future of search and content discovery will be driven by AI, Google was the pioneer to integrate machine learning (ML) into its algorithms like RankBrain. Today, not just Google, but also Meta, Perplexity, Microsoft and so many other tech giants have reportedly invested heavily in AI technologies towards enhancing user experiences and optimizing content discovery.
How AI is Defining Search Algorithms in 2025, and its Implications
Entering 2025, we’re today evidently standing at the cusp of an era where AI will predominantly steer online search, content discovery and algorithms. But how exactly is AI impacting the evolution of algorithms, which form the backbone of content delivery on the Internet?
With constant advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and ML innovations, AI systems have now become extremely sophisticated, powerful, and capable of processing vast amounts of data in real-time, enabling them to identify user behaviour patterns and trends. They are then using these datasets to refine, personalize and improve the content discovery experience – currently led by Google search. This essentially means that going ahead, in 2025 and beyond, we start getting more and more personalized search results and recommendations, and customized content feeds on Google and social media. It also allows for higher rates of discovery of online content tailored as per our specific interests or preferences.
Advances in NLP and deep learning – both subsets of AI – are facilitating highly accurate semantic understanding for modern search engines, which means that Google is getting adept at understanding the underlying intent and context behind search keywords or phrases. For marketers and brand-builders, this implies that instead of keyword stuffing, modern website/blog content must optimize to match user intent and provide valuable, authentic and high-quality information, as has been also advocated by the E.A.T. (Expertise-Authoritativeness-Trustworthiness) framework of Google.
The Way Forward
AI-based tools and technologies are not only positively shaping our search experience across platforms, but also acting as the driving force behind the growing of AI-powered chatbots, answer engines and voice assistants like Alexa and Siri, thus constantly adding new and convenient dimensions to online content discovery. Given the breakneck speed at which AI is progressing and impacting the online search and content discovery ecosystem, it can seem daunting to catch up. While the endeavour to adapt is the need of the hour for staying ahead of the curve, it isn’t necessarily too complicated – for now, all that businesses should do is to focus on optimizing their content to cater to AI-powered search algorithms, using a balanced mix of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) strategies.
