The Future Is Here: 4 Predictions for Search in the Next Two Years

2024 was an incredibly transformative year for the search industry. With the integration of artificial intelligence throughout the consumer funnel, search professionals have had to rethink strategies, embracing new tools and preparing for a search ecosystem that’s faster and more personalized than ever. 

At Botify Connect this year, we explored four major predictions for SEO, based on all the developments it has undergone recently. In this post, we’ll dive into each one, offering insights on what the shifts mean for your brand, and how best to prepare.

Prediction 1: Organic search isn’t dying, but keywords are. Long live keywords.

Before you can understand why keywords are likely to fade in importance, you have to understand the new search landscape. Organic search is still thriving, but the way we understand and track keywords is understandably evolving from isolated keyword targeting to focus on broader trends in search behavior.

Consumer behavior is changing

Investments in natural language processing (NLP) and generative AI have paid off, and are fundamentally changing how search works. AI-integrated interfaces allow users to engage with content in a more natural, fluid way — prompting a surge in long-tail, personalized queries. As a result, consumers are increasingly looking for answers in a conversational, context-driven format, where traditional keywords may lose relevance. 

And with more tools and platforms and AI assistants gaining popularity, search has increasingly become more decentralized. Consumers now use multiple, diversified interfaces across different online ecosystems to find and interact with content. Your brand’s content needs to be indexed across these many different platforms in order to be seen.

How AI assistants are contributing to these changes

AI assistants will soon handle a larger portion of searches for consumers. With agentic search, these assistants don’t just provide results — they take actions for users, making decisions and completing tasks based on user preferences. This trend will fuel hyper-personalization, where consumers’ queries grow increasingly complex and tailored to individual needs. While the long tail of search is not a new phenomenon, it may become harder for search professionals to track and focus on specific keywords, because queries will gradually become even more nuanced.

It’s not a post-keyword world yet!

Although the importance of traditional keyword tracking is in decline, don’t rule keywords out completely. Keyword data will still be valuable in predicting consumer intent, as search still boils down to satisfying user intent. The point is that the new era of search is one of conversation, rather than queries comprising strings of target keywords. 

Human interactions with traditional search engines like Google and Bing have already shaped today’s search index and rankings, moving from short queries to longer-form, highly detailed searches. Similarly, consumer queries today will help AI assistants understand future questions. What consumers were searching on Google will be very similar to the prompts they give tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity. But the trend towards conversational search and search decentralization (in which Google is no longer dominant) means rankings will become less important as consumer behavior continues to fracture. 

In the long run, as AI-generated answers (like AI Overviews) are integrated more widely and as consumers continue to diversify the way they search for information, traditional ranking metrics will give way to new ones. Share of voice and brand mentions will soon take precedence over keyword rankings as indicators of brand visibility.

How to prepare for a decreasing emphasis on keywords

Luckily, there are steps your team can take to future-proof your search strategies as keyword tracking inevitably decreases: 

1. Make sure you’re indexed to appear across all relevant platforms. Understand how and where consumers are finding your brand, and make sure you’re optimized for indexation in traditional and AI-integrated search. 
2. Use today’s keyword data to predict what your consumers will be asking ChatGPT tomorrow. What are the questions that continually come up in consumer searches? 
3. Incorporate more metrics to track brand authority, like share of voice and brand mentions. When reporting on brand visibility, track how consumers use your target keyword in prompts across diverse platforms. Does your brand show up? Do competitors show up? Is the information presented factual and up to date? 
4. Focus on ranking highly to make sure you appear in generative responses, like AI Overviews and live retrieval citations in conversational AI answer engines. Answer engines with live retrieval will pull the top-ranked content to refresh responses, so ensure your content is accurate, regularly updated, and properly optimized for AI bots.

Prediction 2: By this time next year, the majority of traffic will be from AI bots.

Human traffic to websites is already in decline, with 25% of traffic predicted to leave traditional search by 2026. Right now the effort is all on the consumer: what to search, what to click, what to read. Soon, there will be a moment when bots will start to handle more of the search and content delivery process more frequently for consumers, making many of those decisions for them, from searching, to consuming 20 links, to summarizing the findings of the query.

Consumers love the efficiency of AI assistants, and as they use these tools more, the results improve. This creates a cycle where consumers become more reliant on AI, leading to even greater usage and engagement. This trend means that the majority of traffic to your website will increasingly be AI bots, not human users.

What does majority AI traffic mean for brands?

Historically, more traffic meant more conversions. But bots don’t count as conversions. AI assistants summarize top-ranking content for users, reducing the need to click through to websites. While this means fewer impressions and clicks, it also presents opportunities. The reduced volume of traffic may be offset by higher-quality, higher-impact interactions that lead to a more informed client base, improved client loyalty, and better customer engagement and conversion long-term.

How to prepare for increasing bot traffic

Knowing that the number of AI bots and the amount of traffic they bring to your site will only increase will understandably raise valid concerns about not only your brand’s search conversions, but also the effect that traffic will have on your site infrastructure. There are a few things you can focus on now to lessen the load down the road: 

1. Develop a nuanced bot governance strategy: Make informed decisions with leadership about which bots to allow and which to block. For example, maybe your brand does not want to allow AI bots focused on gathering content to train large language models (LLMs), but you do want to allow live retrieval bots that surface fresh content for answer engines. With a strategy in place for managing bots at an organizational level, you can decide how to handle some of the costs associated with that traffic. 
2. Track bot behavior through log files to better understand which bots are accessing your content. 
3. Once you identify which bots are a priority for your brand, push your content to those search indexes and AI models using tools like IndexNow and Push to Bing so it can be referenced via live retrieval and can be accurately surfaced in AI-generated content for consumers. 
4. Communicate clearly with leadership about the impact of AI bot traffic on your website metrics.

Prediction 3: Within the next 300 days, we’ll have artificial general intelligence (AGI) — and change in search will accelerate.

While it might not be in the next 300 days precisely, AGI is set to arrive sooner rather than later, and the point is to prepare for it. When it does, it will exponentially accelerate the changes we're seeing in search — completely changing how AI assists consumers in their search journeys, and how SEOs can leverage AI tools.

What is (and isn’t) AGI? 

Hypothetically, AGI will possess human-like cognitive abilities and can perform any intellectual task that an average human can. It will be capable not only of learning, but also reasoning and adapting to new situations. It will not, however, be super-human. Artificial super intelligence (ASI), which theoretically would be more intelligent than even human experts on any given topic, isn’t even on the horizon.   

Therefore, rather than approaching AGI with a doom-and-gloom mindset, search practitioners with deep domain expertise should see it as an opportunity. Brands will be able to use AGI to automate various processes and produce better experiences — both internally for efficiency and externally for consumers. 

What will AGI mean for search?

The leap from current AI models to AGI will unlock new possibilities for search, including intelligent crawlers that can crawl websites in real-time and AI assistants that know consumers so well they’ll provide answers even before users ask. The customer journey will become even more predictive and proactive, with AGI anticipating needs before consumers even articulate them.

How to prepare your brand for AGI

Keep an opportunity mindset. Brands have everything they need today to thrive in an AGI world tomorrow:

• Invest in automation, and leverage AI technology to increase efficiency, speed, and to save on resources. Set foundations for the long term, and be ready for cycles of change that are coming significantly faster by tracking more data more frequently.
• Focus on staying indexed across all platforms and pushing your content to indexes so it can be referenced by AI assistants. Keep focusing on your consumers' intent and journey, and know how and where your brand appears across search platforms.
• Vet and level up your tech stack to ensure it can handle the demands of AGI.

Prediction 4: By 2026, your SEO team will become your GenAI search team.

SEO has always been a part of a bigger umbrella function of marketing and brand awareness. As search is becoming more and more decentralized, opening up to more players and options for consumers, “SEO” will expand to a term beyond search engine optimization to include the wider consumer experience and journey across AI search platforms.

The changing role of SEO professionals

Demand for SEOs won’t disappear. In fact, their work may actually increase. 

The SEO’s job has always been to demystify the black box that is traditional search, and that aspect won’t really change. As search platforms diversify, SEO professionals will need to apply their deep understanding of user intent, brand visibility, and content optimization across a much wider range of channels. The job will evolve from optimizing for traditional search engines to ensuring a seamless experience across all AI interfaces.

But the knowledge needed to succeed at both traditional search SEO and the AI era of search will be very similar. No one yet knows how best to measure or rank in AI search, but SEO professionals have been connecting the dots in a world of uncertainty and ambiguous, proprietary algorithms for years (and as it turns out, with great accuracy). The same strategies of testing and tracking to determine optimization strategies will also help with AI. 

How to prepare your SEO team

What all of this means is that practitioners should lean into their existing technical skills, and brand leaders should be willing to support them:

• Seek and develop an understanding of AI technology within your search organization.
• Keep your technical SEO experts close at hand and well-resourced — they have all the skills and know-how to ensure your site is optimized for both search engines and AI assistants.
• Focus on ranking in top 10 for top- and mid-tail queries, getting distinct content index for the long-tail. 
• Invest in professional development and AI technology education to ensure your SEO team has the skills to work with AI-driven search platforms.

The future of search requires flexibility

The search landscape is undergoing seismic shifts, with AI, decentralization, and the promise of AGI dramatically changing the rules of the game. For search practitioners and leaders, now is the time to adapt. Embrace the changes, prepare your teams, and invest in the technologies that will keep you ahead of the curve. By 2026, the groundwork you lay today will determine how well you thrive in the future of search.