The New Browser War

While we know the internet is changing everyday, the way people use it today is evolving more than ever before. For years people would Google to find the answers to their questions, which would then involve the opening and reading of multiple websites and piecing together the different information to have an overall understanding, AI is now getting involved and giving us our answers much faster. Browsers are now becoming AI assistants, we have all noticed that when we google something, we have Gemini AI giving us a summary of the search results. Thus saving us many clicks and time as we no longer have to visit any website but have a quick answer right away! What is even better is that we can ask follow up questions, and receive an answer just as seamlessly without the frustration of searching through different pages. This means that browsers are no longer the search engine, but have become the product used.

What does this mean for businesses? 

Businesses have been obsessed with website analytics, checking which pages are visited and for how long, not to mention page rankings on SEO but all of this is changing faster than ever. What was once the most important, may not help businesses today without changing strategy slightly. With AI summarising pages for us without us ever opening the page, there is significantly less website traffic and less clicks to track. This doesn’t mean our information isn’t reaching users! 

What can we do to stay in the game?

Businesses can become trusted sources AI pulls from. While this sounds easy, it isn’t as straight forward as we’d like, it’s not like buying an ad. Websites need to be structured in a way that AI can use the content in it. Instead of writing keywords, write for answers clearly. When writing content, ask yourself, can this paragraph be copied and pasted as an answer? AI prefers content that is easily extracted (short paragraphs, clear headings, bullet points, tables for comparison etc). Using specific language is also key, for example instead of saying “There are many great tools available…” list those tools directly in the same sentence. 

Technically clean websites are also key. AI pulls from the web similarly to search engines, that means if your website isn’t developed accordingly, or is out of date, you are much less likely to be cited in AI answers. Websites need to have fast loading pages, clean HTML structure, proper heading hierarchy and no blocked content. Instead of thinking “How can my website appear as the first result on Google?”, we need to start thinking “How do I become the best answer to a question?”

Like with anything, this change comes with its own challenges. Most importantly, we lose quite a bit of control over how our content is summarised and portrayed. Key points may be missing emphasis or information taken out of context can be misleading. Unfortunately we do not have any impact on this. Traffic also drops for publishers as users will rely on AI summarisation as opposed to visiting every website even if they may contain significantly more information. 

This is the biggest shift in usage since mobile first, as with all changes, early adopters will come out ahead. Contact us at Swiss Tomato to help you become AI optimised and stay ahead of the game!