Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I think we're all still trying to figure it out. I was at Google IO last week or the week before. As soon as I saw the search result with the big box of AI, answers at the top, having done this for so long, I immediately knew the impact that I think is about to come. I've seen this play out in travel where Google acquired ITA and did flight search and hotel search. Generally, it's great for users and great for Google and the search engines, but makes it a little bit difficult for the publishers and the sites that are adding value to the ecosystem through being ranked in search results. So what we're about to see is basically Google, what they showed was a big box on top of the search results that answers the query directly. So if you think about that, that means that there's a lot of queries right now that users are clicking through down on the organic links and getting their answer there, which will be answered directly in the search result. We've seen this play out over the last five to 10 years where more and more answers are being shown at the top. Every time something changes, entire industries are disrupted or are changed. And I think that's going to happen again. So there's different types of keywords. There's transactional ones like e-commerce keywords with purchase intent. There's navigational ones where you're trying to get somewhere. And there's informational keywords, which is, "I have a question. I'm looking for an answer." It's pretty broad. It's a big area. I think that last category of keywords is particularly at risk. So if anybody listening to this is currently getting traffic on those, you should start thinking about what does that mean when things start changing. And I think the changes will be... We'll probably start seeing things shift to paid. You have to pay for that free traffic. The second one is there may just be a case where those keywords just don't get many clicks anymore. You might drop down to a very small number of clicks, if at all, because questions will get answered directly in the search results. So it's a big shift. We have to see how things land, but that's, I think over the next 12 to 24 months, if history repeats itself, we'll see that channel change. We've seen this play out in all the different channels. They kind of evolve generally. You can't blame the companies are doing what they have to do. ChatGPT is now 50% of my daily searches and not Google. So I think Google has to react and this is what we'll see. So from a growth perspective, definitely something to start to think about. Super fascinating. I think about my newsletter and now Google suck it all up and just tell you all the answers. Great. Good news for me. [inaudible 00:54:34].…

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