The feature goes by the name of The Daily Listen, and will serve as like a short news summary of sorts based on your personalized news feed.
The Five Most-Key Takeaways from This Blog Post
- This serves as yet another example of how generative A.I. is completely transforming our relationship to the search experience.
- Podcasts are already massively popular, and so this feature could potentially be a hit among many searchers.
- Packaging information into a readily consumable audio format will help nudge us closer into the era of generative search. Generative search will involve search engine results pages (S.E.R.P.’s) that are multimedia.
- The Daily Listen leverages search data to determine what new items a given searcher may find most listen-worthy. A five-minute summary of those news articles will be the end product.
- Whether there are marketing opportunities for business owners within these podcasts (e.g., through audio ads) has yet to be seen.
Search and Discover
As most people in S.E.O.—and just internet users in general—know, algorithms are constantly shaping the content that we see pop up in our feeds.
And across platforms as well, one gets the sense.
Also relevant is that the algorithm’s curation and ordering of the feed’s content is based on the very data that we give the algorithm in the form of engagement. Clicks and search queries and the like.
So, a feedback loop is inherent to our online feeds, you see. Content is offered to us based on the content that we previously interacted with, and our interactions with this new content will shape the next batch of content that appears on our feed.
So what is worth pointing out here is that A.I. is not doing something new by selecting content for searchers to give a personalized (and the gambit is that “personalized” is always more stimulating and attention-getting) selection of content.
What is new is that generative A.I. is able to create from scratch media objects (here, five-minute audio podcasts) that you would previously need human labor to create. And create these in fairly short order.
The other aspect of this changing search experience is the broader trend of using A.I. to make search feel much more like a service than a tool.
The New Search Experience: More Service, Less Searching
Let us consider the basic function of The Daily Listen, which is that it allows searchers to delegate the selection of the most-key points of a variety of articles to include in a podcast that is roughly five minutes.
That in itself is well worth unpacking for an understanding of how the search experience is changing for everyone.
The trend, basically, is that in the interest of convenience and time-efficiency, searchers can have a machine decide for them what among the content in their feed is relevant and salient.
So, searchers will spend less time searching through their feeds for what interests them, on the gamble that the A.I. does a good-enough job at predicting what is interesting or important to know.
The Relevance for Business Owners
To return to Key Takeaways bullet-point number five, it is unknown to the writer of this blog post (at the time of this post’s writing) whether these A.I. podcasts will offer things like ad spots for businesses.
However, the idea of search engines feeling more and more like a service than a tool is relevant for business owners.
That is because the searching for products will, for many searchers, be delegated to A.I. as well.
So, instead of sifting through product reviews and information about companies’ services, the A.I. will do that for searchers, and offer the result.
That, in turn, means that A.I. in search engines could be an effective tool for leading searchers to purchases, as they will get information upfront and practically immediately about a potential purchase.
The Last (But Not Least) Key Takeaway from This Blog Post
Search engines are changing through A.I., and for business owners, this means that searchers will be playing a much-more passive role in their own searching for products and services.
That, in turn, will make search engines an even-stronger facilitator of consumerism, which could pay off big time for many businesses.
Other Great GO AI Blog Posts
GO AI the blog offers a combination of information about, analysis of, and editorializing on A.I. technologies of interest to business owners, with especial focus on the impact this tech will have on commerce as a whole.
On a usual week, there are multiple GO AI blog posts going out. Here are some notable recent articles:
- For Businesses and Other Organizations, What Makes a Successful Chatbot?
- IBM Watson vs. ChatGPT vs. Gemini: How Will Each Affect Search Engines?
- Using A.I. to Find Resources for Business Owners
- How Would Restricting Open-Source A.I. Affect Business Owners?
- The EU’s A.I. Act Has Become Law: The Implications for Business Owners (Especially American)
In addition to our GO AI blog, we also have a blog that offers important updates in the world of search engine optimization (SEO), with blog posts like “Google Ends Its Plan to End Third-Party Cookies”.
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