The Only Safe Bet in the Face of Internet Uncertainty

Translated from the original Spanish article.

Well, life's funny, isn't it? Turbulence is coming, but every time of change can be as tough as it is exciting.

This whole AI explosion is an emotional rollercoaster. With so many stimuli, so much information and so many ups and downs, it really pays to stand still, step back and focus on identifying the stable elements that can help us set our course.

First, I want to look at the landscape from the point of view of websites and the flow of online traffic:

1. 01For years, the vast majority of websites have served, much as Encarta once did, as information products.
2. 02That role has helped them attract an audience by providing value. So companies have invested in it and used it as an inbound strategy to gain visibility and as a source of traffic (though not always qualified, and not always effective).

Google, the benevolent giant, has had the whole pie to itself, comfortably and without a worry. It has been able to devote itself to offering almost-free products to everyone (think Google Search, Gmail, Drive, Chrome, its office suite and so on).

It can afford all of this mainly thanks to an almost inexhaustible source of revenue: the ads on its search engine.

Now, however, another player with the power to transform things has just appeared. AI, with ChatGPT (and now Bing) leading the charge, is bursting in with a new way of discovering and consuming information. Not just information, in fact, but knowledge. And that knowledge is already of higher quality than most of the shallow content you find when searching on Google. 2026 update: Bing's chat was renamed Microsoft Copilot in November 2023.

This new kind of AI assistant will almost certainly take an ever-larger share of all those informational searches.

What might happen if, say, 20% (?) of informational search traffic shifted to AI assistants?

The benevolent giant is going to get a stomach ache. That much is certain. But it would also call into question the value of the informational role that digital products (websites) have played and, watch out, it could seriously shake the whole web of sites and businesses that depend heavily on organic traffic.

A few questions come to mind:

• Should digital products focus on offering value and content that isn't informational?
• How will the flow of online traffic evolve?
• How, and how much, will SEO change? What's the plan?
• Is there a safe bet amid all this uncertainty?

Well, let's humbly try to answer them all.

Digital products (websites)

I sense that opinion content, more personal and human, is going to become more relevant than descriptive, purely informational content. That was already the trend.

But then Google, with users' informational searches, would stop being the shop window. Fine, it may stop being that shop window, but there will always be others. At the end of the day, value is value. And, like water, it ends up finding its way to where it belongs.

There are plenty of other ways to attract traffic to a website. Our digital products will also have to offer a more complete experience for users to actually use them. And that's a good thing.

SEO

When it comes to SEO, I believe the main focus should be on transactional searches. Those are the searches that AI suggestions will struggle to replace. Our buying behaviour has never been strictly rational, and it never will be.

Transactional searches are the ones that have always delivered the most tangible, monetisable return for brands.

We now have assistants that help us generate information and content for those transactional pages. Research, design, visual communication and copywriting all become stronger in key positions.

On the more technical side of SEO, the architecture of transactional pages and internal linking will become two even more important pillars of product design.

We'll also see how the value of paid search develops. Will bidding for this transactional traffic become even fiercer? Everything has a limit. You need to tread carefully and make sure you can convert that traffic into customers with good returns. As always, but perhaps even more so now.

The safe bet amid uncertainty

And now, yes, this is my biggest bet.

For some time now, one factor has been the most important in attracting and retaining online traffic. And very little is said about it. In fact, the only person I've heard talk about it is my dear Romuald Fons.

That factor is the brand.

You see, in most of the projects we've worked on, the brand and its related brand terms are what bring in the most traffic, and the best-quality traffic, from Google.

Brand traffic has no competition. The CTR is (naturally) huge, and user retention and activity on the site are generally far higher than for any other traffic source.

Here's something not many people know: brand had been becoming one of Google's main ranking factors. Because having a strong or well-known brand has many implications:

Google has increasingly been ranking sites based, among other things, on how engaging their content is to users. That engagement doesn't always reflect the quality of the content, because if your brand is strong, users will trust that information more. They'll consume it more willingly, interact more with the page and be less inclined to look for alternatives.

Think about it: if you run an informational search on Google and a New York Times article appears among a bunch of unknown outlets, which one will you click? Will you read it with more interest? Will you trust it more?

That gives Google enough signals to rank it first, interpreting it as the best content for users, even if it isn't necessarily so.

It must be wonderful doing SEO for the New York Times.

Now picture another scenario: you're looking for a financial product, a personal loan. Among the options you find is BBVA; you don't recognise any of the others.

The same thing would happen. And we've been able to see this first-hand with clients who have a strong brand in their sector. The influence is enormous.

But it also matters for AI when we ask about brands or products. Wherever they draw their information from, Nike would have to be doing something very wrong not to come up as a suggestion for running shoes.

It does so because of its brand, not necessarily because it makes the best shoes. AI can't (yet) lace up a pair of trainers and go for a run to check.

I put it to the test

I don't want to reveal who it is, but I asked ChatGPT for a recommendation related to the sector and line of business of one of our clients, which has a strong, well-known brand.

The "creature" listed their brand second. And our client isn't the one with the best rankings and visibility on Google (yet :) ).

CONCLUSION

I've heard and read countless definitions of what a brand is. But, for practical purposes, I'll go with this one:

"Marketing is what people think of you before they buy from you; brand is what they think afterwards."

Either way, whoever wants to find you, finds you. That's the greatest value of all.

Work on your brand, through your product, your marketing and your customer experience. You'll grow the traffic that reaches your website because people are looking for you. And nothing delivers a better return than that.