575: Google Search Is Collapsing — Do This Now Or Lose All Your Traffic

Tab 1 575: Google Search Is Collapsing — Do This Now Or Lose All Your Traffic Steve Chou: Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all of the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, I explore how AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, along with recent legal challenges to Google's monopoly, are transforming the future of search and SEO. You'll learn how these changes impact your website traffic and discover actionable strategies to stay ahead in this shifting digital landscape. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that tickets are now on sale for Seller Summit 2025 over at sellersummit.com. The Seller Summit is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. Unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level advice, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. I personally hate large events, so the seller summit is always small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we've sold out every single year for the past eight years. If you are an e-commerce entrepreneur making more than $250,000 or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller's Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 6th to May 8th. Right now, this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. So head on over to SellersSummit.com and grab your ticket. Now onto the show. Welcome to The My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. There's a lot of big questions facing the SEO industry right now. Is artificial intelligence going to make SEO obsolete? Will the Google monopoly ruling kill search traffic from Google? More importantly, will Google even matter anymore once all is said and done? In this episode, I'm going to answer all of these questions the best that I can. I'm not a fortune teller, but based on the data that I've gathered, these are my best predictions as to what will happen. Let's start with AI first. Probably the biggest question on everyone's mind is will AI steal search traffic from your website? Well, there are two ways that that could happen. One, people could stop using Google altogether and rely on platforms like ChatGPT, Claude.ai, or Perplexity for their searches. Now based on my own behavior, I don't really use Google Search much at all anymore and almost all my queries begin now from ChatGPT slash SearchGPT. But is that true for the rest of the world? I know that I'm not the norm, so let's take a look at the data. According to StatCounter, Google is still the clear leader across the traditional search engines with roughly a 90.4% search market share. But what about AI tools like ChatGPT, SearchGPT, and Perplexity? How much of a dent are these new tools eating away at Google's market share? Now the problem with data from sites like StatsCounter is that they only account for searches from traditional search engines like Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo. And there's very little information out there about the effects of AI and services like Perplexity. However, using publicly available data, we can do some rough calculations to see the impact they can potentially have on Google Search. Let's start with ChatGPT. According to OpenAI, just last week, ChatGPT now has more than 300 million weekly active users sending 1 billion queries per day. Now by comparison, Google gets roughly 8.5 billion queries per day. This means that ChatGPT already gets around 11.7% of the queries as Google does. But keep in mind that ChatGPT is used for many things outside of searching for information like writing assistance, creating code, translating text, etc. So the actual impact of Google's market share is likely significantly less. However, ChatGPT use is growing like gangbusters. According to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, they've grown 50% in just the last three months and the growth seems to be accelerating, especially since the release of SearchGPT, which came out on October 31st. Rather than having to click on individual links with traditional search engines to find information, SearchGPT does an excellent job of fully answering the search query. Plus, SearchGPT also prominently links to its sources, which is great news for website owners. So far, the biggest issue facing AI has been accuracy and hallucinations, where it simply makes things up that aren't true. As a result, data has shown that people actually do click on the website links to verify the data for accuracy. When I was doing research for this video, I probably clicked on a third of the links on the SearchGPT right-hand panel. So in the event that SearchGPT takes off, website owners will still see traffic. Plus, if SearchGPT continues to provide accurate data along with supporting links to back up their answers, it will definitely pose a threat to Google going forward. But as it stands right now, ChatGPT isn't a devastating blow to Google just yet, but things could change very quickly. By the way, if you're interested in learning how to start a profitable online store and get free traffic from search, make sure you sign up for my free 6-day eCommerce mini course below. It's 100% free and I guarantee you'll learn a lot. Let's talk about Perplexity next. If you've never heard of Perplexity, it's basically the original SearchGPT. Using the power of AI, Perplexity delivers concise answers and combines the functionality of a search engine with the interactive nature of AI chatbots. Similar to SearchGPT, they provide links to websites as well. However, the links are not nearly as prominent. As of June of 2024, Perplexity has over 75 million monthly visitors across desktop and web, growing by approximately 20% each month. According to TechCrunch, Perplexity says it's now serving 100 million search queries per week. Divide that by 7 and we're looking at around 14.28 million searches per day. Meanwhile, Google gets roughly 8.5 billion requests every day. So this means that Perplexity only gets 0.16% of the searches that Google does. So I think it's safe to say that at least right now, Perplexity is not that much of a threat to Google. But overall, it's true that both ChatGPT and Perplexity have grown a lot and already have hundreds of millions of active monthly users. But as it stands right this second, their market share still pales in comparison to Google Search and doesn't have any noticeable impact on Google's market share just yet. But what about Google's own AI efforts? If you've done any searches in Google recently, you've probably seen Google's AI overviews in the search results. These AI overviews were first released in May of 2023 as part of Google's Search Generative Experience. And the goal was to give searchers a complete answer to their search query without having to click on a bunch of links. So basically, Google started doing what Perplexity and SearchGPT already does. Now, I remember when AI overviews first came out, SEO started panicking because they were worried that the AI overviews would reduce the number of clicks to websites and lower overall traffic. As of now, these AI overviews appear for about 7% of the search queries and about 17% of e-commerce search queries. And this is down from 25% back in May of this year. Now remember how I said that links to websites and the AI search results actually get clicked because people want to verify the facts from AI? Well, here's some data to back that up. According to Siege Media, the introduction of Google AI overviews actually resulted in a 4.43% increase in search clicks. And for e-commerce websites in particular, there was a 3.2% increase in search traffic. So once again, this is great news because it means traffic to websites should not be affected significantly by AI search. While the sites ranking on page 1 might get slightly less clicks, this is offset by the number of additional clicks to the sites cited in the AI overviews. So overall, I'm not too worried about my website traffic. Based on the data, AI overviews, SearchGPT, and Perplexity probably won't steal clicks and search traffic to my site because people aren't blindly relying on the answers from AI. Let's switch gears now and talk about the recent Google monopoly ruling. On August 5th of 2024, a federal judge ruled that Google had acted illegally to maintain its online monopoly in search. And basically, the ruling states that Google abused its search business monopoly by paying billions of dollars to third-party platforms like Apple, Samsung, and Firefox to be the default search engine. For example, in 2022 alone, Google paid $20 billion to Apple to be Safari's default search engine. Now, the ruling doesn't contain any remedies or consequences just yet. And some speculate that Google won't face any penalties until around 2027. And if Google appeals the outcome, it's possible that any remedies or penalties won't take place until the end of the decade. So while it's still too early to tell how this ruling will impact Google, there have been a number of scenarios that have been discussed in the news. One, the DOJ is considering measures to break up Google's business units, including Chrome and Android, to address this dominance in search and advertising. And two, Google would no longer be able to pay third parties to be the default search engine. Now, if either of these two things happen, Google could easily lose 50% of their search market share overnight. So how will this ruling potentially affect the traffic to your website? Well, in my opinion, nothing drastic will happen because the overall search traffic volume has not been decreasing year over year. In 2019, Google reported 1.2 trillion global searches. And today, Google now gets 3.1 trillion searches. So basically, the number of searches continues to rise every single year. So whether Google maintains their 90% market share, or if competitors like Bing, Perplexity, or SearchGPT start to gain traction, the searches are still going to be there. Now it might take more work to try to rank for all the different search engines, but so far, I've noticed something interesting. The webpage citations in SearchGPT are often the same as those appearing on the front page of Google. So this suggests that AI-driven search engines might be piggybacking on Google's ranking algorithms, using them as a foundation for their own search results. The other thing to consider is that even if Google isn't the default search engine for Chrome or Apple devices, it's still an established brand that it's possible that the majority of users could stick to their habits and continue using Google anyways. My mom hasn't even heard of ChatGPT or Perplexity yet, and it will take some time for the general public to catch up. So given all this information, what should you as a website owner be doing to increase your search traffic? Well, one of the biggest downsides of AI is it has made content creation super easy and convenient. And as a result, people started pumping out millions of AI-generated websites, and Google's search algorithm couldn't keep up with all the spam. Since Google didn't know how to handle it, they went all out and basically crushed any website that wasn't linked to a legit business or a strong brand. So what does that mean for the future SEO? If you're starting a standalone blog from scratch as your only platform, chances are you're never going to rank in search. These days, the only websites getting traffic are those with authors who demonstrate expertise, authority, and trust. On top of that, the most traffic is going to sites tied to legit businesses like e-commerce stores and service providers. But for those of you who want to start a standalone affiliate marketing website today, forget about it. It will never get any traffic. So here's your game plan. If you want to get search traffic, you'll also have to gain notoriety by building up a social media following as well. If you want to get traffic to your online store, you also need to be gathering two types of reviews. Google business reviews are reviews provided by customers on your Google business profile. If you don't have a profile, then create one right now. These reviews are visible on Google Search and Google Maps when people search for a business. Not only do they influence a business's online reputation, but they can significantly affect search rankings and customer decisions. Google Customer Reviews, on the other hand, allows businesses to collect feedback from their customers about their shopping experience. Note, Google Customer Reviews is different from Google Business Reviews, and it's all very confusing. Google Customer Reviews provides a way for customers to rate and review their experience after buying from your website. These collected reviews contribute to a business's seller rating, which is displayed in Google Ads, shopping ads, and sometimes in organic search results. No matter who owns Search Market Share going forward, they are likely to derive a portion of the rankings and information from Google, so SEO will always be important. Hope you enjoyed this episode. If you put all of your eggs into Google's basket, you should be worried. It's time to diversify. For more information and resources, go to mywifequitherjob.com slash episode 575. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small, intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go to SellersSummit.com. And if you're interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to MyWifeQuitHerJob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email and I'll send the course right away via email. Tab 2