How Do You Market When Organic Search Is Dead?
Welcome to the Real Estate Espresso Podcast, your morning shot at what’s new in the world of real estate investing. I’m your host, Victor Menasce. Today, we’re discussing the changing landscape of business, encompassing all sectors, not solely real estate. This is the first part of a two-part series that delves into the interconnection between the online world and the offline world. Although we inhabit the offline world, it often seems like we spend a large portion of our time holding some device.
The first step is to understand the distinction between two terms: marketing and sales. Today’s show focuses on marketing. The show on next Monday will approach sales, an entirely different process. Marketing is about piquing interest. When I want to understand a certain subject that might ultimately transform into a business transaction, I begin by seeking information. Although I’m not ready to make a purchase, I want additional information to become more knowledgeable about what I may want to buy in the future. Marketing targets fulfilling that initial part of the process. Moreover, marketing deals with generating interest, and sales are about producing revenue. Unless it’s a commodity and people actually don’t bother to become informed about the product, sales typically can’t occur without some form of marketing.
I’ll begin by discussing the tacit agreement between content creators and search engines. Here, I’m referencing the work of Matthew Prince from a company called Cloudflare, who recently participated in an interview at an Axios conference in Cannes. A decade ago, search engines would scrape two pages; they formulating their search content by scraping and indexing all internet content, scouring each individual website, as long as the indexing page on that site permitted the page to be searched. In the past, for every two pages a search engine scraped, it would bring a single visitor to your site. This was a decent trade and ratio. You would share your content with Google or Bing, and they would direct traffic your way as a result. This was an implicit contract; there wasn’t any explicit agreement. They would also place adverts alongside your organic links, earning ad revenue as part of this implicit deal. This remained fairly stable over much of the previous decade, although there’s been a slight decrease. Therefore, the Google crawl rate remained fairly consistent over that period, at least until six months ago.
Over the past decade, another 2 billion people have been added to the internet, taking the world from 4 billion people connected to the internet to 6 billion. You might assume that with the addition of all those new users, there’d actually be more visitors. But as we’ve seen, it hasn’t quite worked out that way. Throughout the last decade, bringing in traffic has become more difficult. It seems approximately three times harder. And this aligns with the data.
Until the end of 2024, Google was scraping 6 pages for every visitor it sent your way. So, there’s been a decrease in the 2 to 1 ratio to become 6 to 1. However, over the past six months, Google, accounting for between 58% to 60% of all search traffic, is now scraping 18 pages for every visitor it sends your way. The fact is, people tend to be lazy. Google is retaining more search on its platform, and doesn’t direct you to the content publisher’s site anymore. It summarizes the response to your query in a snippet at the top of the search results. Initially, that snippet would have been built on content from a single site. Today, that snippet comes not just from one site, it’s an AI summary of various webpages that have been scraped from multiple sites. There is no longer a direct correlation between the information given in the search results and the creator of that content. Google is sourcing that content freely from you and I; the content creators, without giving anything back in return visits. This, in some ways, could be seen as breaching that unspoken agreement.
We’ve moved from a 2-1 ratio, to 6-1, and now to 18-1. Now consider the portion of search that’s done exclusively in an AI tool, whether it’s a chat GPT from OpenAI, Meta’s tool, Gemini from Google, or Grok from X. Increasing numbers of people are asking an AI tool a question and not moving past the initial response to interact with anyone or anything outside the AI tool. In the beginning, the results weren’t reliable enough for people to trust just the AI result; however, currently, more and more people are content with the result’s quality and don’t search further. Easy and fast have taken the place of thorough and deep. When you do a search using AI, the tool provides you a link to its reference that typically shows up at the end of each search result. But how many people actually click on that tiny link icon? The icon doesn’t display a whole web address with a blue link. Instead, it’s an anonymous icon with two chain links. Unless you click on the link, you have no idea where the link will take you, and almost no one does.
The ratio of content scraping to site visits has now risen to 1500 to 1. A decade ago, it was 2 to 1, then 6 to 1, became 18 to 1, and now it’s 1500 to 1. The question then arises, who is ready to invest all that time and effort to develop content where you’re getting a 1500 to 1 ratio? Organic search, in my opinion, is completely dead. And in this brave new world, paid advertising is probably going to largely replace organic search. What remains clear is that the AI tools have not yet figured out how to monetize the screen time spent on their platforms with an ad revenue model. This may become a reality at some point in the future, but it doesn’t exist in a significant way currently. In a world where the search engine platforms are no longer directing traffic back to the content creator, what is the content creator’s incentive to continue producing all that free content for the search platforms?
What I’m describing is a monumental shift that has already occurred. I’m not talking about what might happen in the future; it’s already in the rear-view mirror. Some people are in denial about it. Some are attempting to figure out what to do about it, while only a handful have answers ready. As you consider that, have an excellent rest of your day. Go out and make some great things happen, and we’ll chat again tomorrow.
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