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Gartner Predicts Search Engine Volume Will Drop 25% by 2026, Due To AI Chatbots and Other Virtual Agents 93

Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
Gartner: By 2026, traditional search engine volume will drop 25%, with search marketing losing market share to AI chatbots and other virtual agents, according to Gartner. "Organic and paid search are vital channels for tech marketers seeking to reach awareness and demand generation goals," said Alan Antin, Vice President Analyst at Gartner. "Generative AI (GenAI) solutions are becoming substitute answer engines, replacing user queries that previously may have been executed in traditional search engines. This will force companies to rethink their marketing channels strategy as GenAI becomes more embedded across all aspects of the enterprise."

With GenAI driving down the cost of producing content, there is an impact around activities including keyword strategy and website domain authority scoring. Search engine algorithms will further value the quality of content to offset the sheer amount of AI-generated content, as content utility and quality still reigns supreme for success in organic search results. There will also be a greater emphasis placed on watermarking and other means to authenticate high-value content. Government regulations across the globe are already holding companies accountable as they begin to require the identification of marketing content assets that AI creates. This will likely play a role in how search engines will display such digital content.
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Gartner Predicts Search Engine Volume Will Drop 25% by 2026, Due To AI Chatbots and Other Virtual Agents More

Gartner Predicts Search Engine Volume Will Drop 25% by 2026, Due To AI Chatbots and Other Virtual Agents

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  • I predict 75% chance that Gartner is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)

    by HBI ( 10338492 ) on Monday March 04, 2024 @01:21PM (#64288764)

    I mean literally about anything. I have no idea why people pay them to prognosticate on the future.

    • 75% of the prediction might be wrong, but for Google they can't just say 'Gartner has 75% wrong on the prediction of the complete dismissal of our company.' If a doctor is wrong 75% of the time, but has 25% that it's right, your child would die, would you take the chance?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HBI ( 10338492 )

        I think you are saying Google has to respond to something like this.

        I suggest they are, by diversifying their business and investing in LLMs. It may not be enough - in fact, it probably isn't enough if Gartner is right, but they're at least doing something.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        Google has responded quite a while ago, long before Gartner said this. They have their own LLM, Gartner's statements actually seem to lean heavily on Google's own assessments. I.e. Gartner isn't actually pulling this one out of their ass, but instead more or less repeating what other players in the search field including Google and Microsoft reps have been saying for a while.

        Google's LLM is Bard which is generally considered to be much more prone to hallucinations than ChatGPT and generally less helpful. Th

        • Google has responded quite a while ago, long before Gartner said this. They have their own LLM, Gartner's statements actually seem to lean heavily on Google's own assessments.

          It's also a comment on the continuing enshittification of google's own search engine. Google search hallucinates results all the time, based on what it "thinks" I want, instead of what I typed into the fucking search box. OK, these may not be hallucinations but a sale of my search to the highest advertising bidder, but it's still shit, and less useful than just giving the user the results that they searched for.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

            They have recently announced that they will at least try to clean out some of the "spam and AI results" from your search results.

            I won't hold my breath considering the recent piratewires story on how google ended up in the mess with Gemini.

        • But I know that Google will make the results of their LLM useless for search as they have for their traditional search engine.

          Google results have been increasingly untrustworthy over the last 12 years. The first page is frequently completely useless.

          So I'm hoping for an opensource LLM that isn't corrupted by greed to the point of being worthless.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by taustin ( 171655 )

      Strictly speaking as prognosticators go, 25% accuracy isn't all that bad.

    • Yeah, but they're RIGHT 25% of the time. It's called the Magic Quadrant!
    • Ayup, if Netcraft doesn’t confirm it, then cannot be true.

    • > why people pay them to prognosticate on the future.

      Did you ever notice these types of folks sometimes contradict themselves?

      1. Decide what you want to do.
      2. Pay them for access to a study that agrees.
      3. Execute your plan.
      4. If it fails, blame your reliance on the #1 forecaster.
      4a. If it succeeds take credit.

      That's totally worth $1200 of company money.

    • I mean literally about anything. I have no idea why people pay them to prognosticate on the future.

      The numbers are a bit random (could be 5%, could be 75%), but they're saying the same thing I've been saying for months, that LLMs will meaningfully reduce search engine traffic.

      Of all the tech companies freaking out and making layoffs I think Google is the one that should really be concerned. LLMs are the one thing that can really bite into their search dominance.

  • Here comes AI Product Placement (Score:3, Insightful)

    by NFN_NLN ( 633283 ) on Monday March 04, 2024 @01:26PM (#64288780)

    Businesses will need to train AI to insert product placement into their answers to maintain ad revenue.

    You: What is a detergent?

    ChatGPT: A detergent is a substance or compound used for cleaning. It's typically added to water to help remove dirt, grease, stains, and other impurities from surfaces. Detergents such as Dawn work by reducing the surface tension of water, allowing it to more effectively penetrate and lift away grime. They often contain surfactants, which are molecules that have both hydrophilic (water-attracting) and hydrophobic (water-repelling) properties, enabling them to surround and solubilize oily or greasy substances in water. Detergents are commonly used in household cleaning products such as Tide, Palmolive, and Cascade dishwasher tabs.

  • For some things, perhaps (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RogueWarrior65 ( 678876 ) on Monday March 04, 2024 @02:12PM (#64288914)

    The trouble with search engines now is that the data is getting old. Say you're trying to find a solution to a programming question for a current API version. What you find is stuff that's several years out of date that doesn't actually work now. AI often gives you similar responses. The result looks legit but when you try the code, it's wrong. And if you tell the AI that it's wrong, it gives you a condescending response "You're right, that blah blah function call doesn't exist. Here's another bullsh*t response."

    AI is trained on out-of-date stuff. It doesn't know that it's out of date.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by taustin ( 171655 )

      I have been trying for years to learn Python. There are many tutorials. I have yet to get through lesson 1 without getting errors.

    • That has been a huge issue for years. The worst is when they don't put dates anywhere so I can't tell how old it is. I'm constantly hitting outdated parameter and config options.

      Then there are the people who ask a question then go "I solved it!" without posting the solution. I hope there is a place in purgatory for them at least.

      • Search engines allow you to limit searches to a certain date range. Although some publishers seem to find a way to make their pages look current even though they are stale.

      • Then there are the people who ask a question then go "I solved it!" without posting the solution. I hope there is a place in purgatory for them at least.

        Yes, with a sign saying “I managed to get out by”.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Calydor ( 739835 )

      And yet when you need to find something that happened ten or twenty years ago you have to wade through all the remotely similar things that happened in reverse chronological order until you get to what you were thinking of.

    • The trouble with search engines now is that the data is getting old. Say you're trying to find a solution to a programming question for a current API version. What you find is stuff that's several years out of date that doesn't actually work now. AI often gives you similar responses. The result looks legit but when you try the code, it's wrong. And if you tell the AI that it's wrong, it gives you a condescending response "You're right, that blah blah function call doesn't exist. Here's another bullsh*t response."

      AI is trained on out-of-date stuff. It doesn't know that it's out of date.

      Given the issues you’ve raised regarding search engines alone, I’d say we humans have been trained to accept outdated bullshit responses.

      AI “learned” from that. Marketing called that “Intelligence”. I’d blame them, but they certainly know how well we’re trained to accept outdated bullshit..

  • I can see it (Score:4, Insightful)

    by WoodstockJeff ( 568111 ) on Monday March 04, 2024 @02:13PM (#64288918) Homepage

    As I've been searching lately, AI has been cutting in to my searches. When a search engine decides to throw AI at what I've asked for it, I search on a different search engine; I'm looking for matching WEB PAGES, not some computer's interpretation of what I've asked for.

    I'm old-fashioned. I search for content, not computer guesses at content that might contain what I asked for. Today, I looked for information on a store chain having financial issues. Google decided I was looking for "closest to Chicago", for the Los Angeles-based chain. duckduckgo at least didn't prioritize Chicago store locations over the recently-reported corporate problems.

    That sort of thing will cut my searches by at least 25% going forward, as they increase the bad data. I'm getting too old to deal with the [censored] "help".

    • Agreed. What I want in a search engine is the ability to search for phrases, have "must includes", "must not includes", date ranges, and domain filters. After that it's nice to have them put effort into down ranking SEO crap.

      Google is failing on all fronts. The most carefully constructed query can ignore phrases or exclusions if the algorithm feels like it, and the battle against SEO spam is more or less lost. Then you throw in the ads and remove the censored stuff - don't try looking directly for anyth

    • Re:I can see it (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Hoi Polloi ( 522990 ) on Monday March 04, 2024 @03:05PM (#64289158) Journal

      Plus with AI I *HATE* playing "Guess the right wording". I feel like I'm playing a text adventure from the 1980s. "Pull the knob"? "Push the knob?" "Push the knob on the wall"? wtf!?

      • Plus with AI I *HATE* playing "Guess the right wording". I feel like I'm playing a text adventure from the 1980s. "Pull the knob"? "Push the knob?" "Push the knob on the wall"? wtf!?

        Im not sure if I should laugh at the 80s reference and my childhood memories, or cry on behalf of Progress realizing we call that shit “Intelligence” now.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rastos1 ( 601318 )

      I can see the opposite. Last searches where AI got me better results then keyword search on google:

      • - Who certified Cosmo v9.2 with CombICAO v2.1 ?
      • - If a company makes use of teleconferencing software for meetings, is there anything it has to observe in relation to GDPR?
      • - Can I get information abut when was AWS instance started/stopped in last year?
      • - The SSL certificate has various fields and properties. Such as validity dates, issue, subject, used algorithm etc. What is the name of the property that define

    • What's really pissing me off with search is no longer having pages of results and having the abominable "scroll to see more results" UI crap.

      Previously I would do a search then start looking at about page 4 as that would get you past most of the shitty promoted, irrelevant, results on the first few pages. Nowadays you simply can't get to the actual results you want as you lose the will to live before you can scroll enough results (by which time the browser tab has started creaking too).

      "AI" is just the ret

  • Gartner, McKinsey, et al (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Monday March 04, 2024 @02:42PM (#64289030) Homepage

    You have to love these consulting houses. They sell super-expensive reports that either contain banal generalities, or else they make predictions of the obvious. But the language is pretty and there are lots of buzzwords. CxOs then select what they need from the reports to justify the dumb decisions they want to make anyway.

    Cynical here, because our assigned desks were just rationalized away based on a "future of work" report from some McKinsey. I've hear that it looks "much neater" now. Well, duh, we've gone WFH-to-the-max and most of the desks have literally never been used. Probably not what management intended, but what they got.

    • Predictions of the obvious to some people. But for those who have little to no expertise in an area, the reports represent at least an honest effort at accuracy. You are paying for the report rather than have it be ad-supported and biased. I'm not a huge fan of the analysts for many reasons, but the idea of charging a fee and being impartial has value.

  • The issue right now is that if you ask AI anything, what it gives you might be made up or wrong, so often you have to check some parts in a search engine anyway to get a definitive answer.

    A recent attempt at asking AI how to do something led it to giving me three frameworks that were wholly fictional to use - which I only found out after a lot of googling to try and find where the frameworks AI had mentioned were.

    AI can help amplify other things, not saying it can't be useful, but I'm not sure it will be re

  • The quality of the results I get from searching vs AI are worlds apart. I sometimes go to services like ChatGPT looking for specific technical information and the results I get are usually vague at best "To create a certificate first create your certificate..."

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      "Traditional search" is typing your query into a text box and getting back whatever Google's algorithm thinks matches. That could very well be replaced by an interface where you type in a more natural language query, you still get web page hits, and they're maybe selected a little more intelligently. That last thing may or may not be good for you.

      Chatting with a chatbot is an engaging UI, but it's not a very good one for getting accurate results, and it's certainly not the only way of using AI to seach.

      • "Traditional search" is typing your query into a text box and getting back whatever Google's algorithm thinks matches. That could very well be replaced by an interface where you type in a more natural language query, you still get web page hits, and they're maybe selected a little more intelligently. That last thing may or may not be good for you.

        Considering the enshitification of google search results through many mechanisms including AI based relevancy botting and ad placements it would need to be pretty good to just undo the last 4 years of slide. My guess is it’s just going to lubricate the slope instead of enable any sort of traction toward content we actually want.

        • The signal-to-noise ratio from paid access to ChatGPT4 is very, very good. However is has already clamped down somewhat on directly quoting other sources (even if requested), although it will summarize and link to them. I am also seeing a lot of errors lately, "It seems that my attempts to access specific articles directly related to XYZ have been blocked due to restrictions on the websites I tried to access."

          So, a lot of this depends on what happens in the courts and the marketplace - a lot of money wi

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          That last thing may or may not be good for you.

          Don't hold your breath. Google doesn't think their search is worse now than it was before. Quite the opposite. It's got many more sponsored links now.

  • Won't someone think of the poor marketers?

  • If this does happen, I predict it will be because search engine results will get much worse, prompting people to desperately used an AI Chatbot as a last resort. I already have to go directly search Stackoverflow or even Youtube for what I want because Google's results are next to useless.

  • "AI" bots, like GPT, are the next evolution of search engine, instead of giving one pages of site matches, it gives natural language answers....I do wish ChatGPT and others would footnote their answers and have a bibliography of sources used in the answer.

    • I do wish ChatGPT and others would footnote their answers and have a bibliography of sources used in the answer.

      They literally don't know. It's not how language models work.

      You could have them go through a process to try to figure out if information in their answer is a static factual claim or dynamically generated data and then search a copy of the training data for matches. But then you're just using another search engine.

      • They literally don't know. It's not how language models work.

        That doesn't stop Bing. And the results are exactly what you would expect from an LLM: they definitely look like references from a distance.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )

      I do wish ChatGPT and others would footnote their answers and have a bibliography of sources used in the answer.

      Bing/Copilot does this. I think Google does as well.

  • Money in Motion 101 - Insist, push for, tsunami fear spreading - It's the usual playbook to get you to spend money, companies to buy things, technology replacement, new government regulations, push voting blocks, ...

    Gartner, Blackrock, Vanguard, Fidelity, Wall Street, Lobbyists, Bureacrats, Election Candidates, NTO, non-profits need money to be in motion to survive and justify their jobs.

    If there's a stable IT and computing environment for 20 years, with no big changes needed, Gartner has no strategy consul

  • Predictions are hard... (Score:3)

    by MpVpRb ( 1423381 ) on Monday March 04, 2024 @04:40PM (#64289448)

    ...especially about the future
    I predict that search will evolve
    I hope it gets better, and makes it easier to actually find what I want
    I fear that it will get worse, with a flood of scams and ads
    Whatever happens, I suspect there will be a lot of unexpected surprises

  • I predict AI will replace Gartner (Score:4, Funny)

    by dskoll ( 99328 ) on Monday March 04, 2024 @04:46PM (#64289460) Homepage

    I predict AI will replace Gartner. And unlike most situations in which AI has enshittified things, nobody will notice in this case.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      You don't think there'd be an appreciation for the increase in quality?

    • I predict AI will replace Gartner. And unlike most situations in which AI has enshittified things, nobody will notice in this case.

      How could anyone notice? They use the same principals to come up with the same responses. There is not an ounce of original thought in either.

  • That depends (Score:3)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Monday March 04, 2024 @05:07PM (#64289518)

    The one thing that will determine this is what happens first: AI finally producing reliable results or people dumping AI because it doesn't produce reliable results.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      The results are already reliable enough for most people, for what they search for.

      "Who's that one singer who sings baby got back"
      "what's the best color to pair with green"
      "who's the president"

      Just add in sportball stats and they'll never use a search engine again. Instant curated reality...

    • The one thing that will determine this is what happens first: AI finally producing reliable results or people dumping AI because it doesn't produce reliable results.

      You don't understand what is going on here. Even AGI will not produce 'realiable results'. This current AI absolutely CAN be useful, just not the way people want it to be useful. What that means is you can ask it for patterns and it can give them to you. Is that a useful trick? Yes. Will it give you reliable 'answers'? LOL, no.

  • I'd be really surprised if that's not true already.

    Unless someone's trying to find very precise original sources or technical data, train/plane/bus schedules, or news, or something to buy, search engines have become almost completely useless due to (primarily) ad placement and the enshitification of the Internet due to corporate sites and social media having taken over the majority of information silos. You don't have many free hosting sites anymore, so people just use social media groups to keep track of t

    • >The top 100 questions are similar - a lot of stupid "what time is it", "when is mother's day", and "how many ounces in a cup" type questions

      I often use Google search as a calculator, because it's actually faster than opening the calculator app... especially if you need to include unit conversions.

  • Search engines are already pretty useless, if you're trying to find anything else other than products for sale. Unfortunately.
  • ChatGPT4 is superior to Google in a lot of ways. While I wouldn't quantify it with percentages, the prediction of a threat here seems like a no-brainer.

    Not only do I use Google less, but I'm even more grateful to not have to use online forums.

    With AI you can get a sane, coherent answer to the question you actually asked.
  • Or, it will decline for a brief period of time and then bounce right back when people realize that performing a search is way easier and quicker than dealing with a bot.

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