I met a friend for lunch in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter the other day.

He was coming from London, we’ve already “done” the city centre on a previous rendezvous and fancied going somewhere new.

Trouble was, despite being an honorary Brummie, I had next to no knowledge of the best places to eat and drink on that side of town, so I hopped onto Google, typing in ‘best pubs in Jewellery Quarter’ as my starter for 10.

A chaotic search results page greeted me – a smattering of Google Business Places, some paid ads, big directories like DesignMyNight and opentable, and of course, thousands of organic search results.

After a few minutes of clicking here and there, I was still none the wiser about where on earth we should go to graze.

So I hopped on ChatGPT, and tried a different approach:

“Can you find me a few options for a coffee and a couple of pubs that serve good food near the Jewellery Quarter tram stop please?”

These results were very different.

Rather than hundreds of pages of information all vying for my attention, I got the exact result I wanted: a slimmed down, curated list of a few highly rated coffee spots, each with pros and cons, and the same for the pubs, all presented in an easy-to-consume comparison table, with cost estimates, directions and a few other useful bits of information.

You can guess what I’ll do next time I need to do a similar search.

I’m not alone either – adoption of AI tools for search is going at serious pace, and the research suggests that a third of the people who’ve used a chatbot for search now use that method instead of Google.

The times they are a-changing – 29% of the UK population are already actively using generative AI, and worldwide, ChatGPT is already handling over a billion queries a day.

Yes, that’s not as many as Google’s 9 billion, but hitting the ‘big billi’* only took ChatGPT two years versus Google’s 13.

*Yes, I’m aware that ‘big billi’ isn’t really a thing.  Maybe it’ll become one.

Now, there’s a long way to go and a lot of development still to come, and we don’t yet know for sure how deep or wide AI adoption is going to be, so don’t worry, this isn’t one of these alarmist ‘You need to get on AI today or your business will die tomorrow’ type pieces.

But my Jewellery Quarter jaunt and the data on consumer behaviour does illustrate the fact that Google’s monopoly is over – a significant number of people are now using alternative methods to get to the same result that Google once delivered them.

It might not be Google’s “Yellow Pages” moment – they are working on AI too after all – but it’s certainly a time of disruption, and if your business relies on Google to get customers, then it’s not a time to stick your head in the sand and hope for the best.

Instead, it’s a time to be alive and awake, not just to the risk, but the opportunities too.

If you’re yet to get on the AI tools and have a go, now is definitely the moment to do exactly that.

Understand how they work, do some searches in your industry and see what the lay of the land is.

Maybe you’ll be pleasantly surprised, maybe you’ll realise you’ve got a lot of work to do.

Search has already changed, and it’ll change even more over the next few months and years with the arrival of “agentic” AI tools that’ll work away on tasks until they complete them, without your involvement.

Our trials on ChatGPT’s Operator reveal jaw dropping tech that’s still just a little too buggy, but it won’t be long before a chatbot won’t just pull me up a list of highly rated cafes and pubs but will also reliably book tables and ask for special requests on my behalf, all without my involvement.

To be honest, it sounds a little scary, and I’m not sure I particularly want that, but that IS the direction of travel, and if you’re in a business that relies on being found (which is almost all of us in one way or another), you’d be crazy to ignore what’s going on.

Whether you see AI as friend or foe, it’s wise to remember the adage that it’s best to keep your friends close and your enemies closer – shutting your eyes and hoping for the best isn’t going to cut it.

The good news?  Generative AI still relies on the same thing that Google’s algorithm has done for the last 20 years: content, content and more content.

I won’t pretend it’s as simple as just whacking some content online and watching the leads flood in, but equally, zero content equals zero chance of you showing for any search, whether a traditional Google one, or one using a chatbot.

So, whatever this new world looks like, it’s pretty much a given that content will still be king.

Content that answers your prospects’ questions, adds value to them and informs them about your area of expertise.

There are (and will continue to be) more and less effective ways to present that content, but if you’re teetering on the edge of this new world and wondering where to start?

Just start.

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