ALPHABET CEO Sundar Pichai will announce this week the end of Google as we know it. He will evolve it from a link-based search engine to Mode AI, a new model powered by Gemini’s conversational artificial intelligence. SEO isn’t dying; the internet is.
ALPHABET CEO Sundar Pichai will presumably host the farewell to Google Search as we know it.
SEO will shift from positioning links to positioning brand authority in generative conversations.
Everything points to what will happen at the Google I/O developer event on March 20, where the Mountain View company will outline the new features it will launch in this turbulent 2025.
Everything indicates that AI Mode will overlap AI Overviews in Google Search.
Among the new features expected would be AI Mode, which is nothing more than a conversational module or chatbot that is much more evolved than what AI Overviews currently is.
In recent days, we’ve seen this module, previously announced by Google, being deployed as a priority tab in mobile phone navigation, and subtly as a button next to the search box on desktop.
These tests are being viewed by registered Search Lab users in different countries and randomly as an A/B test to determine user satisfaction.
Mode AI will bury Google as a link search engine
If ALPHABET decides to announce Mode AI as the default module for Google Search, we will end up seeing the end of Google as we knew it.
Basically, if AI Overviews now summarizes responses to Internet users’ queries, creating a zero-click effect, this new chatgpt on top of the old Google will end up further destroying traffic from its search engine to digital media and content creators.
Google’s new interface would be a chatbot, not a list of blue links, with Gemini, its own AI, under the hood that extends to all corners of the technology: Search, Gmail, YouTube, AdSense, etc.
Not in vain, sneaking Gemini so brutally into the core of searches is nothing more than the culmination of a gradual sequence that Pichai’s team was executing with Bert, Mum, Google Lens, Circle and the rest of the technology that has been training its algorithms.
The boom in ChatGPT and other AIs only seems to have accelerated a roadmap that Google had planned for a longer timeframe and that, now, with OpenAI, Microsoft, etc. as challengers, it has had to push forward at the expense of what was once the open internet.
Not in vain, with Mode AI as the royal crown of old Google, we would be moving towards an SEO strategy that will have to mutate from the web positioning of links, via indexing, towards mere brand visibility tactics (brand SEO) to be in the conversations that the big G has with its users.
The new SEO will be to rank citations, not links.
It’s no joke, then, for digital media audiences and content creators, how the shift from click to chat is going to be a big deal.
Because we are moving from an internet of hyperlinks (referred traffic) to an internet of conversations (brand authority), closer to social networks without links ( INSTAGRAM or TikTok ) than to a search engine.
Google AI Overviews now cites links, turning what was once a fight for SERPs, position 1 to 10, into a nostalgic past.
Media outlets are discovering in their metrics dashboards the decline in traffic from Google Search, which is now just a residual citation from those links selected by AI Overviews.
From SEO where you get clicked, to SEO where you get cited
All of this will go down the drain and audiences will plummet to unprecedented levels when Google decides to roll out AI Mode, and users interact with Google the way many already do with ChatGPT: “Hey, Chat, tell me…”
The media, therefore, will only be left with becoming a conversational authority, a tiny footnote in the book called Mode AI, with the mere desire that, as in TikTok, visibility jumps to visits: from click to appointment.
We will know all this this Tuesday, at the Google I/O event.
What is Google I/O?
Google I/O is Google’s annual developer conference, where ALPHABET CEO Sundar Pichai and the rest of his executives announce AI developments for Gemini, YouTube, Google Search, and more.
And we’re not just talking about Google. This is an event that will change the internet as we know it today, as a space for open content.
