In the beginning, there were many #
In June of 1993, Matthew K. Gray at MIT produced the first known “web robot” with a Perl script engine called World Wide Web Wanderer . Prior to this, outside of scribbled notes, word of mouth or links from other sites there wasn’t a great way to figure out what was on the internet or how to get there.
In many ways, the dawn of search engines represented the true birth of the Internet, or at least the practical Internet which everyone uses today. Yahoo! first published the “Yahoo Directory” in January 1994, which later evolved into Yahoo! Search in 1995. This was followed by early search engines like Altavista, Ask Jeeves, Yandex, Lycos, Maggellan and others.
But it wasn’t until Larry Page and Sergey Brin began work on a search engine called Backrub , which eventually became Google, that the game changed.
Quality Results Win #
The development and patenting of the PageRank algorithm set Google apart from the competition. Prior to their implementation of the algorithm, there had been a mad rush to trick search engines into ranking your page at the top. The techniques of keyword stuffing, and white text on white backgrounds, and others had become the secret magic tonic that an SEO professional could make a living at peddling.
The point of the algorithm is simple… Bring quality results to the top rank, and prevent tricks and underhanded techniques from allowing websites to game the system. The fact that it works is testament in and of its own success. An entire industry, and often corporate division, was built on trying to game the system. But since the advent of Google, the one true way to rank in Google has been one simple technique — produce meaningful, quality webpages.
The algorithm has been modified and updated over time, but the principle alone has made the search engine market rather stagnant and fixed for the last 25 years. Google has been the one and only place to go.
Corporate Website Reviews are about to change #
I have been in countless web review meetings in my career. The questions are always the same:
- How much traffic did we get last month?
- How does that compare year over year?
- Where are we ranking and for what keywords?
- What is our revenue per click?
The recent changes to Google Analytics GA4, are going to help with the upcoming conversations, since they will make tracking year over year stats all that much harder. But the truth is that the already included AI Answer section at the top of search results on Google is already having a profound effect on overall website traffic on the web.
The amount of Zero Click Searches, which are searches that result in zero clicks into other websites, has gone through the roof since the AI driven results blocks have been introduced. Almost 1/3 of all searches are now Zero Click Searches. What does that mean for your site? It likely means, loosely 1/4 to 1/3 less traffic than before. It means that people are getting the answers they are looking for IN the search results, not FROM the search results.
If you are selling product online, the good news for you right now is that users still need to come to your site to transact, and so hopefully the content you produce is still a big part of the find, decide, buy journey. But if you run a wiki, or a Q&A site, the writing is somewhat on the wall that your best traffic days are behind you.
Google’s use of Graph Foundation Models change the paradigm at which Google views the web. Instead of looking at the internet as a bunch of different websites that it should rank and send you to, it considers the internet to be more of a soup; More like a giant interconnected collection of information. It seeks to use AI to first understand all of the information, and then secondly to present you with the information you seek without having to visit the sites themselves.
And what does this mean for the future? It is going to get interesting! The world of SEO/SEM has been somewhat of a smoke and mirrors show. I have implemented many alleged game-changing tricks for SEO which have had little to no actual results in rank or page traffic alone. Companies only know what traffic they are getting today and what traffic they want to get tomorrow. If they meet their goals, SEO teams can take credit. If they miss their goals, SEO teams can point to yet untapped ideas for how to recover. But at the end of the day everything leading up to today has been about getting traffic to the site. The “New Era” suggestions don’t involve high volumes of traffic.
In the future, the suggestion is just to have interwoven quality content. Let’s be honest, that should have been the advice all along, because nothing truly meant more to rank than that. What is changing however is the expected results or outcome.
The new outcome appears to be having your content referenced or mentioned in an AI result. Highly noteworthy is the absence of outcomes involving traffic to your site. Is this truly what businesses want? Just to have their ideas and knowledge lifted from them as a source and placed into an answer given by Google? Doesn’t this just increase Google’s worth and decrease the worth of the business’s website?
How will businesses succeed on the Internet in a post-website era? #
So how does a business continue to thrive in an era where traditional search is replaced by AI answers, and zero-clicks are more frequently given to websites? Two dystopian thoughts come to mind for me.
- First, (and this is the better of the two thoughts) the invention of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) from Anthropic, gives the internet a new protocol which AI Agents can interact with. This has staggeringly strong possibilities for the future, in which companies can supply the internet with MCP services that allow customers to use AI directly to get product information, general information and even purchase with. I know your first thought is that you would never purchase from an AI, but if you’ve been around long enough didn’t you once say the same thing about making a purchase online?
- Second, monetization of AI results. Picture a scenario where you ask an AI driven search engine “How do I fix my garbage disposal?” The AI answers, and then at the tail end of the answer, or heck maybe even at the beginning, it tells you “By the way, I would suggest getting a replacement Garbage Disposal at Home Depot. Use the promo code HD532 to get 20% off right now. Would you like me to add one to your shopping cart now?” This is 100% where AI is heading, and also why so many companies are racing to get market share right now. Once you trust AI for answers, they will turn on the marketing funnel. It’s coming.
Get a Preview #
If you would like to see a little bit of where everything is going in advance (just a taste mind you), then browse over to Google and click the little Science Beaker in the upper right.
