Since the launch of ChatGPT at the end of November 2022, many intellectual professions have wondered about the consequences of this software, capable of creating stunning texts in response to a request. But this week, the successive announcement of the integration of this kind of “conversational robot” on the search engines of Google and Microsoft (Bing) gives rise to a new concern.
Media and website publishers fear seeing a drop in the number of visits received, in particular on Google, which, with 91% of the search engine market share, represents a major part of their traffic. They also already care about the copyright of their content potentially used by artificial intelligence. “Publishers have reason to be very worried,” says Marc Feuillée, Managing Director of Groupe Figaro.
This reminds us that news articles receive clicks when Internet users type topical questions into Google, such as “What will change with the pension reform? ” ” If the chatbots on engines are becoming widespread, it will inevitably be an earthquake”, also thinks Emmanuel Parody, secretary general of Le Geste, a union of 140 digital media and services, where this question is to be debated in February.
question of hierarchy
The question goes beyond the media. “Is SEO dead? », wondered in recent days on Twitter certain specialists in this discipline, which consists in optimizing the referencing of content on search engines. Publishers fear that their links will appear lower on the results pages, or even on the second screen, when the first positions of the first screen are the most popular. They also fear that the answers provided by the robots will make clicking unnecessary.
“With AI [intelligence artificielle]it will be even more complicated to generate link openings (…) since the chatbot will be able to give a summary”, deciphers Samuel Lauliac, SEO consultant at Eskimoz, quoted by the daily The echoes Thursday, February 9. Concretely, Google imagines that its robot, called “Bard”, will respond to Internet users who are looking for example “What constellations are easy to observe in the sky? » Or “Is it easier to learn the piano or the guitar? », etc
According to the first images shared on Monday, the response text would occupy a dozen lines on a mobile screen and would be followed, below, by a few links with photos. On Bing, Microsoft’s engine, ChatGPT will respond in a column to the right of the classic search results page. But a “chat” tab will leave all the space for conversation with the robot, whose answers will be accompanied by a few very short links.
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