Business owners could benefit from consider the role that visual A.I. search can play in getting customers to their website. Google’s About This Image and Circle to Search and Google Lens features are important examples of this kind of A.I.-powered feature.
The Five Most-Key Takeaways from This Blog Post
- Clearly, tech companies like Google want this to take off, as it is shown in features prominently in advertisements. Notice in this particular ad how the phrases “Circle it.”, “Circle to search.”, “Squiggle it.”, “Highlight it.”, “See it.”, all seem like orders, almost.
- Just speculating here, but perhaps a big reason behind the effort to popularize this feature is that giving Google and other search engines images can give these companies a lot more information about the users. That in turn can benefit the business owners looking to advertise through these search engines to those users.
- Google Lens in particular basically lets the search engine see what the user sees—really, what the user’s phone’s camera sees. But anyways, you can tell a lot about someone from a picture of their living room, can you not?
- According to Google, 1.5 billion people a month use Google Lens to search.
- Looking forward, the growing adoption of A.I.-powered “wearables” like Meta AI glassesfrom collaborations with Ray Ban and Oakley, will make visual search incredibly important for business owners going forward.
The Significance for Business Owners
So, is it underrated and underused? Well, with Google’s claim of over a billion people using Google Lens each month, the suggestion seems to be that perhaps it would be business owners that are underrating and underusing visual search.
As with many technological advances, the idea here is not that visual search will replace text-prompt searches outright. No, the latter will likely still be massively important for online marketing. However, visual search is poised to claim a lot of the territory that text-based search has.
How Does Visual Search Work?
One of the inroads to making visual search work was by recognizing that text is everywhere out in the wild—just think of businesses’ signage—and so computer vision capabilities of interpreting text helps.
However, as visual search progresses, the ability to make searches based on random objects with no text is becoming increasingly central to visual search. The goal is to give users the ability to search for something they may not have the words to describe.
Visual-search A.I. will be able to reference databases of labeled visual content to find similar images, then from there use the search engine to find out more about the object.
Think of it as like search for those “What even is this thing?” moments, where if you had to try to type out a Google search, you would truly be at a loss for words. Whether it is a funky-looking flower or a color shade you do not know the name of, visual search is becoming helpful for those search moments where words fail the searcher.
How Will Business Owners Have to Adjust to Visual Search
Increasing output of visual content is going to be the top priority, here.
That can take the form of posting more and more images on your website of the products that you offer. Even if you already have that, adding more images from different angeles and in different lighting conditions could also be helpful to better the odds of matching with circle-to-search.
For instance, say your business sells all kinds of vaccuums and someone at a friend’s house sees the friend’s vacuum and uses Google Lens to find vacuums like that one. If your business’s website has pictures of that vaccuum or similar vaccuums, then that betters the odds of that searcher being directed to your website to purchase a vaccuum.
Another reason to keep the text-content output is that visual search will often be multimodal, especially with wearables where users can have voice conversations about the uploaded content. And on devices like smartphones and laptops, continuing the search in text to ask questions offers old-fashioned text-based SEO opportunities for business owners to capitalize on.
Make sure that detailed metadata is one the images, and that product descriptions are nicely detailed.
The Last (But Not Least) Key Takeaway from This Blog Post
Business owners should be including more and more visual content on their websites to better the odds of visual searches with A.I. leading to their websites.
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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