Liz Reid, the head of Google Search, spoke with Reed Albergotti of Semafor, on Google's push towards AI Search. The interview was conducted weeks ago at Google I/O but was just published this week. It is worth a read but I wanted to highlight the SEO comments and ads comments in that article.
As you know, Google announced AI Mode as the future of Google Search at I/O. So this comes off that news.
I should note, this was also covered on Search Engine Land in these two articles:
- Google Search Chief Liz Reid on ads, AI, and the future of search, by Anu Adegbola
- Google’s Liz Reid: It isn’t AI or search; it’s AI in search by Danny Goodwin
There is this section on SEO:
Q: SEO is a whole industry now. Are you finding people doing that for the AI answers? Are they trying to game the system? And how do you contend with that?A: People are always trying to game systems. Forget the internet. There was locksmith spam in the white pages before there was the internet. Where there are financial incentives, people will try and do that. But that’s been an area of focus for search, and a place where we’ve built expertise for years. SEO is neither a strictly bad or good word. It’s a great thing to make sure your content is findable and it’s not indexed, and it’s understandable. But you can have great SEO, and then you can have [people] trying to gain the system and spam. That’s something we’re going to be ever vigilant on because it’s a cat-and-mouse game. But we’ve been able to keep spam under 1% for years because we just stay very focused on it.
Then these two Q&As on Ads:
Q: What does ad revenue look like in the AI mode versus the blue links? Is it going to be less revenue?A: We’re about to start rolling out ads in AI mode. At this point, we don’t know. I think it will look different over time. The modes are different. The types of ads that we did in image search were different from the types of ads we did on main web search. We don’t think we should just show ads no matter what. We should show them when they’re high quality and relevant. And the need for commercial information continues, whether it’s an AI mode or main search. If you’re searching for where to go eat or what clothing to buy, you’re going to be involved in choice, and that’s an opportunity for ads. If people get more specific about what they want, they do more follow ups, they get more specific in the original query, then they’re sharing more of the intent, which means our ability to come up with ads that are of higher relevance and higher quality goes up.
It’s certainly something to work through, but there really is an opportunity. What we’ll see with AI mode is that we see that people are already issuing queries that are 2x to 3x longer than they do on main search, which means we can do better targeted, higher quality ads.
Q: What are the ideas that people throw around for alternatives to the ad model? Maybe there’s some other way to keep the product free and still make money in the AI world that’s not possible today?A: I don’t think we know exactly where agentic is going to go, and I think agentic potentially opens up the space for different ways to think about monetization. Traditionally, the way Google has often done this is, first, build something that really has high user value, and then figure out what feels like a natural way to monetize it. That’s what we’ll see in the coming years as the products evolve themselves. There will be more exploration. But I think we forget how much people actually want to choose. To the extent that people are going to continue to choose among commercial things, there continue to be opportunities for ads. There’s both new opportunities, and I don’t think it means ads are about to fall apart.
People at Google like to think about almost everything. When I first came to Google, there was this thing about the tether to the moon. That’s not my solution. That is like just drawing. It’s fun to brainstorm. We’ll see how it goes.
The whole interview is worth a read but at least those two sections, should get your attention.
Forum discussion at X.
