Having long been the bread and butter of Google, its search function soon became the go-to place for you and me to find the best kinds of bread and butter, with bakers and FMCGs vying, and paying, for the top spot in the results. From sandwiches to spaceships, Google search has been the default page of many an internet browser, and a Delphic oracle for modern life.

With Bard soon entering the chat that is dominating, and writing, headlines as conversational AI enters the mainstream. That being said, Google has a long history of using AI to improve its search results. And Bard is a natural progression to the position zero results—snippets that appear before the primary organic listings. Even today, when you search using questions, Google will show you the answer to the question apart from listing the URLs of relevant pages. Your search for the cricket score, weather, and questions, and the result is out there irrespective of if you are searching using text or voice.

While referring to the above, Vivek Kumar Anand, Director, Business and Innovation, DViO Digital, believes that the one significant difference between the current feature snippet result and the Bard result is that for Bard, there will be no single correct response, and it will source the result from various sources, unlike the snippet, which sources the information from a single best authoritative source for that topic.

“But then how the marketers will use it will be very similar to how marketers leverage position zero, focusing on long-tail conversational keywords,” he says, adding, “Similar marketing activities will be leveraged for the Bard, where the key focus will be to understand the search pattern, conversational keyword, intent and context of the search, and trends to create valuable and meaningful content and get featured in the Bard result.”

Raghav Bagai, co-founder of Sociowash, believes Google has always been superior in its game, and every extension or feature introduced in the past has worked in favor of the advertisers and the users. “Google has enjoyed over 90% of all searches on the internet for the better part of two decades now. With the announcement of Microsoft incorporating ChatGPT within its own search engine Bing, they seemed to have kickstarted the AI wars.”

While this may seem like a knee-jerk reaction by Google to mitigate any threats to its dominance in the space, Alphabet clearly has had AI integration plans of its own in the works, albeit the plans may have gotten accelerated based on the Microsoft announcements.

And while the AI wars have just started, with Microsoft-backed ChatGPT clearly having the first mover advantage, it should be noted in previous arenas, Google has prevailed, with Android having short-circuited the Windows Phone, and Chrome becoming the site on which to check out cruel memes of Internet Explorer.

In fact, according to a collation of reports in global desktop market shares for search engines between 2015 and 2022, as of December 2022, while market leader Google had a share of around 84.08 percent, Bing accounted for nearly nine percent of the global search market.

Tanvi Bosmia, Associate Account Director, Brand Experience, SoCheers, agrees and points out that every internet user’s first go-to action to find an answer to a question is to ‘Google it.’ “With Google announcing the rollout of Bard, the chatbot claims to be able to explain the most complex things in simple terms which are easier for a layman to understand, be it tips for planning a party or getting lunch/dinner ideas based on what's in your fridge,” she says,

It also has an edge over its competitors as it answers questions which are much deeper like about recent events, movies, and more, whereas other platforms’ knowledge is restricted to internet data until 2021. This will also lead to AI-integrated features in Google Search that will give complex information to users in easy-to-consume formats.

“This, in my opinion, could prove to be a great opportunity for advertisers, and have long form content make a comeback which will be completely backwards from the type of things a user searches on the internet. For instance, one of the brands we manage - Croma, has an official blog called Unboxed which is focused on everything you need to know about tech and electronics. If a user is searching for any product with exact specifications, then the AI is likely to pull up data from the blog,” she says.

Similarly, she adds that if a user is searching for exact food recipes, a food brand could have a blog page with all the recipes on their website which also means that they would have to focus their efforts on effective SEO & SEM. “Having said that, there is no way to see who the owner of the content is and considering Google is about searching on the internet, it’ll be great to see Google give credit or lead the user back to the source of the content which in turn will be a plus for better brand attribution for the source.”

With search results becoming more simplified and more naturalistic and conversational, Bard will do the same for Google. Bagai says this creates new and unique opportunities for advertisers, helping them seamlessly reach their audiences in a more natural manner than before. “It will reduce the complexity of a product/service and translate it into an easy-to-understand format thus catering to the larger customer diaspora. We are yet to explore its full potential but are hopeful that it will help in uplifting the identity of each product,” he concludes.

NOTE: This is still a human-generated article.