Transcript for Cutting Through podcast Episode 5

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Jonathan   Welcome to episode five of Cutting Through, the podcast for corporate digital communicators. I'm Jonathan Holt, Head of Strategic Insights at Bowen Craggs. And today on the podcast, Seek and You Shall Find, or not, as the case may be, how people search for things on the internet is changing fast with big implications for the kinds of information and channels digital communicators need to be focusing on if you want to, well, cut through and be in the conversation. New AI tools are the big disruptor here, and later on we'll give you our take on some pioneering AI-powered searches that have started to crop up on corporate websites. But there are other factors and habits that are driving the evolution of search, too. Stick around as we see what insights we can find for you in this episode of Cutting Through.

Joining me again in the virtual podcasting studio are Georgia Barrett, Vice President, USA, and Scott Payton, CEO. Hello to you both. Let's start with the big picture and what's going on outside the corporate digital channels. Google is still the undisputed leader in search globally. And therefore, I think we can assume still the dominant force in most companies, organic referrals.

But Google's share has dropped noticeably in the past year or so. Do we have any figures on just how much and which platforms are edging in?

Scott   Yes, Jonathan. Hi, Jonathan. We do have some facts and figures and I've been doing some research on the Internet. So, Google searches looking at the UK, Google's market share weakened last year in 2024 with user reach dropping from 86 percent to 83 percent. And that's according to that's solid data from Ofcom. Ofcom is the UK's communications industry regulator. So, it's dropping a bit in the UK. Looking globally, there's a lot of data that seems to vary dramatically. That doesn't seem to be any kind of consistent, widely reliable or widely relied upon data on global market share for search. But broadly speaking, Google's market share is around 83%. 

The second most popular search platform for search in in around the world is apparently it's YouTube, which is nearly 7 % of global share of search. That is for number three is ChatGPT. This data is kind of looking at around four, just over 4 % of global share of searches owned by ChatGPT. But here's the really interesting thing, is, and the interesting thing is the rapid growth of use of ChatGPT for search. So according to the Chief Operating Officer of OpenAI in an interview he did with CNBC in February 2025, ChatGPT has 400 million weekly users as of February this year.

And that is and what's really interesting is that is up a third. That's up 33 percent since December 2024 So in two months, ChatGPT's weekly user levels have increased by a third and they've grown 300 percent since November 2023. So there's no doubt that ChatGPT use is rising rapidly. But Google currently remains the dominant force.

Jonathan   And where does Bing sit in all of that? I thought I had seen some stats that showed Bing not exactly edging in on Google, but possibly taking as much as 8 or 10 % of share. I'm not sure where I saw that or exactly what territories or whatever. But certainly, Bing seems to be on the rise suddenly after Microsoft not really having much of a stake in the search game for quite a while.

Scott   I did see some data showing that there was a bit of a rise while market share, some data shows that globally, in many markets, not just the UK, Google's market share slipped a bit in 2024. There was some evidence that Bing grew a little bit. But again, it is not a meteoric rise. And there are some indicators that the growth of Bing is related to the fact that it's being integrated with Chat GPT.

Jonathan   Well, what are you both hearing from clients about the new search preferences? Is ChatGPT or any of other upstart or rising platforms starting to show up in people's referrals? 

Georgia  ChatGPT really is starting to show up in client corporate website referrals. So, for one of our clients, ChatGPT is the second biggest referrer to the corporate website. So, it's definitely starting to have an impact in the web analytics. And I think it raises a kind of bigger existential question about search and websites and the role of websites and the future of websites. Because on the one hand, it's really good that ChatGPT is directing people to the corporate website because that's the place where there is really deep detailed information it's not just a synthesised overview like you'll get in ChatGPT it's where the rich verifiable information that the mothership of truth lives. 

But then, at the same time we have seen data that shows that 60 % of Google searches ended without a click in 2024. So that means people aren't always, you know, they see the answer in the AI overview, be that Google, Perplexity, ChatGPT, whichever tool, and then not following through to the corporate website. So, food for thought about is this the end of the corporate website? I don't think so. For one, corporate websites are what is feeding the AI. But yeah, it'd be interesting to get your thoughts on that.

Scott   Yeah, I have ,I think I don't… I don't think it is going to lead to the end of the corporate website at all. And I think certainly what we're seeing now is, as you say, it's increasing the importance of the website in terms of feeding the beast of the likes of ChatGPT. What's really interesting, I think, is going to be is going what's going to be really interesting looking ahead is how corporate websites evolve and change. 

And I suspect that the role of the corporate website will increasingly become the place where people go to get rich information that above and beyond the synthesised answers about the company that are provided directly by Google and by ChatGPT. I think it's going to be corporate websites will become increasingly almost broadcast channels or rich audio visually rich repositories or sources of information like videos or testimonials that provide deep, narrative, qualitative information about the company above and beyond the answer to the questions that ChatGPT or Google are delivering directly. But that's my kind of crystal ball.

Georgia   Yeah, I actually asked ChatGPT this question because I thought it'd be good to get its viewpoint. I asked it, will websites become obsolete? And it said, probably not, but they might evolve. And it said, while AI tools like ChatGPT and Google AI overviews provide quick synthesised answers, they still rely on original sources, websites, research papers, expert content to generate this information.  

So, if websites disappeared, AI wouldn't have fresh, high-quality content to learn from. So, if you're a corporate digital communications manager thinking: is my website obsolete? The answer is no. It's more important than ever.

Scott  I do think editorial content is going to be more and more important than ever, as I say, video content, kind of stories, video stories, rich stories about visual content, too, is going to becoming increasingly important. 

It reminds me a lot of the debate that the media industry had with the initial rise of the Web and when Google launched kind of Google News. there was a view that, well, if people just get the news from in a listing from Google, then CNN's game over. The BBC, it's game over. And it wasn't. But what we did see was the publishers evolving and adapting the kind of content they do provide to ensure that they that BBC.com or CNN.com continue to be destinations, attractive destinations above and beyond Google News, and I think it's going to be a similar thing this time around with AI.

Jonathan   And even right now corporate websites do more than just deliver information. They might be interactive features, an in-depth look into the history timeline, something that, an attempt to create an experience that will be memorable and enjoyable. So, it'll be interesting to see if this drives more of that and what the lay of the land is there. But I think we'll talk about a little bit later on that they're probably, we're probably coming into a period where corporate search, AI integrations on corporate sites will at least try to give these external tools a run for their money. And so, I'm particularly excited to come to that topic a little later on. But for right now, I wanted to ask you about some of the competitors to ChatGPT that seem to be coming along. 

Deepseek got a lot of press when it was released, the Chinese tool that famously now a much smaller footprint and is a lot less expensive evidently to produce and run than ChatGPT but also, I think with some lesser functionalities. Have either of you tried these alternatives Deepseek, Perplexity or any of the others and if so, what were your impressions?

Scott   I've been having a lovely time this week preparing for this podcast by playing around with Deepseek and Perplexity and all sorts of other chatbots. And I asked Deepseek and Perplexity who is Bowen Craggs? And as a little test, and they both knew who Bowen Craggs was. But I have to say in this case, Perplexity gave a much more rounded and informative and informed answer than DeepSeek. But what I think more interestingly, there's definitely if you look at if you play with ChatGPT and then you go to deep seek and then you go to perplexity and some other generative AI chatbots. What we're very much you can very much see is a clear standardisation evolving in terms of user experience with all AI chatbots. 

So, things like the answer kind of streams, it kind of types out almost, like, in real time and they're definitely kind of emulating each other in terms of the user experience. And this in my view is definitely a good thing because it makes them more makes all of them more familiar and therefore easier to use for everyone. It's the same the kind of we advise with website navigation. Don't mess around... Don't be wacky with navigation. Don't innovate with navigation.

But it's quite good. It's interesting to see how there's definitely a common interface evolving or user experience evolving across all the big chatbots.

Georgia   Yeah, and think it's interesting that all of them are similar and they're similar in this way that is very different from the way people would search for information before these tools came about very recently. And I think it's important to point out that these AI, generative AI search tools are fundamentally changing the way we search for information. And it's just as simple as that conversational shift. You can speak to something like ChatGPT as though it's a person, either using text or your voice and you can ask it these very long-winded conversational questions that if you were to put that into Google just a couple of years ago Google would have no idea what you're talking about and it's very personalised. 

Jonathan   It's surprising to me at this early stage in all this that the competing tools are so similar because you would think they would be trying to outdo each other with innovations and fresh options that would differentiate.  

On the other hand, I totally agree that even on Google AI Overview, once you get used to using those, it's hard to imagine going back to just having the standard Google searches. I personally, whenever I do a search and all I get is those standard results, I'm a little bit disappointed, frankly. It just kind of suggests that I'm to have to work a lot harder to get whatever I need.  

But would you liken this, as I think I do, to the early stages of the internet itself. I mean, isn't it likely that these companies are going to continue? We'll try to find some ways to differentiate from each other and therefore that if we're looking five, ten years into the future, the state of AI search may be something very different from what we're witnessing right now.

Scott   I mean, think there's two sides to it. On the one hand, I think there is a race to provide the most reliable and comprehensive kind of search tool between, I think Google won last time because it was just the quickest and most reliable and most comprehensive way of getting information. Just beat them on that simple, single important thing. 

But looking at services like ChatGPT, they're not just search tools because you can use ChatGPT make me a picture of a cat wearing a cowboy hat and it will make you a picture of a cat wearing a cowboy hat. So, we do search and that's just so much more. So, I suspect there's going to be competition around in terms of the extra services too. But I think there's going to be a core competition. I think that's what spooked Wall Street when DeepSeek came around.  

But that's, it was, it was just the core the core service was in terms of providing answers to questions was, you know, it surprised everybody by how competitive Deepseek was in that specific, in doing that specific job. But yeah, I think I do remember thinking back to Netscape and Friends… Netscape was the dominant web browser, I think, and now is just a little footnotes in history. And Friends Reunited and MySpace were precursors to Facebook, which had huge valuations and had a lot of traction and now they are footnotes in history. 

If we jump ahead 10 years, the dominant companies in the world of at Generative AI and AI Search today might not be around and might be new ones, the changes, the ground they're breaking is lasting.

Georgia   Well, it was only in October 2024, it was very recently that ChatGPT started to even search the web. And I think we forget just how quickly things are moving. because prior to that, was only, it had been trained on information that was available before 2024. And then, then it got access to the web, which opened the gates. 

Jonathan    And when we did the first episode of our podcast, I think that we recorded it in August 2024, I was kind of criticising ChatGPT for not knowing about the latest news. But now that's changed. It's evolving all the time. 

One of the prominent news headlines about ChatGPT in those early-stage days was about hallucinations, that it was telling people to eat rocks and so forth. Some people may be wondering, do these tools still hallucinate and have either of you encountered that in your use of AI tools recently?

Scott   My experience with ChatGPT, which is the AI search tool or chatbot that I use, most familiar with, I haven't experienced any downright, outright hallucinations, but it is sometimes just a little bit wrong. And it reminded me a bit like a bit of a like an overconfident job interview candidate who hasn't quite done as much research as they should have about your company. And they're trying to style it out with overconfidence. So, I think that's my kind of sense that it hasn't asked suggested I eat rocks or glue cheese to a pizza to stop the cheese from falling off. But it's just been a little bit wrong.  

Georgia   Yeah, I think I've had a similar experience and I have noticed, which I think is a common observation, that some of their AI tools are not very good at maths. And if you ask it quite basic conversion questions, it doesn't always get the answer right, so you have to double check. And I think there's still a level of the trust isn't quite there. 

So, lots of people use AI to help plan a trip or a holiday. And I think it's really useful as an inspiration point but we're not quite at that point where you would take those recommendations and just fully go with it without verifying that the hotel it recommends actually exists that kind of thing. And there was an article recently about asking ChatGPT to, like, plan this amazing trip to New York and it recommended a matinee, Friday matinee Broadway show, but there was no Friday matinee – that kind of thing. So it's still… or, I don't know, it'll tell you to, like, go from the Empire State Building to the Statue of Liberty in a single morning which is not doable. There's a few things that aren't accurate yet but it's good as a starting point.

Scott   I'm a terrible control freak and I don't even like other people, other humans, kind of organising my holiday or even business ships for me. So, the idea of kind of asking an AI tool to book holiday for me kind of fills me with horror. But it's interesting to see how as a kind of first draft, I think like so much of generative AI as a first draft, as a first draft of an itinerary, as a first bit of research about what flights are available. It's great. Even for a control freak like me.

Jonathan   So, Georgia, you recently hosted a webinar for Bowen Craggs subscribers where some search experts from the agency Exposure Ninja shared their tips and thinking around the state of search right now. I was just thinking that this was the second webinar that they have come on for subscribers in a couple of years. And I remember from the first one some expressions of not disbelief, but wondering whether Google had moved a bit too quickly and adding its AI overviews to Google's results. And of course, we know that since then, Google has rolled that out globally and they're becoming pervasive. I didn't hear that same sentiment in this session. So that's maybe an indication of just how quickly this is becoming better done in everyday practice. But what were your key takeaways from that conversation, Georgia?

Georgia   So, for me, the key takeaway is we actually do have the power to influence AI tools. So, you can think as a corporate digital communications expert that maybe you're powerless in the face of these tools, but actually you can put things on your website that will be picked up by the tools. And then what is even more interesting and relevant is that those very same things that feed the AI algorithms are exactly the things that humans and real people want to see from companies as well. It's things like communicating transparently, being authentic, telling real human stories, providing evidence for all of your claims, particularly data and statistics. Those are way more likely to be picked up by AI search tools than just text, that kind of thing. Having a detailed corporate website that includes lots of data about what your company is doing about climate change, for example. will make it more likely that your content is picked up in an AI overview and it will also be beneficial to a customer who has questions about what your company is doing. So, I think that was really good to see. Even stuff like press coverage and third-party accreditations and external validations, these are all ranked very highly by AI search tools and again by human visitors and stakeholders and its important trust signals.  

So, I think it's kind of pushing us towards an internet and a website that is even more authentic and authenticated and verified. So, I think it's a good trend, yeah. 

Jonathan   It's also changing the rules a bit for what corporate digital communicators need to be thinking about if they want to have their content be as visible as possible in search. 

During the webinar, you asked Tim and Charlie from Exposure Ninja to explain what trust signals corporate digital communicators should focus on if they want their information to surface, you know, and be prominent in these AI searches. So, let's hear some of what Tim had to say. 

Tim Cameron Kitchen from The state of search Bowen Craggs Club webinar  
If you don't own the narrative, somebody else will.

Most search engines have a concept of authoritativeness and Google has a, you know, this concept of authoritativeness, which basically means who is the ultimate authority on Unilever? Well, it is Unilever, right? So, if that information is on the Unilever website, Google in particular will typically prioritise that source of information against, you know, a third-party site.

So, but if Unilever doesn't have that information on the website, Google or the chatbot thing still needs to give an answer to that question. And if it still wants to give a source of that information, so it has to go somewhere else. So, this really is absolutely about owning the topics that maybe you don't want to talk about, but if people are going to be searching for them, they're either going to find your version of it or they're going to find someone else's. 

Jonathan   It strikes me that Tim is picking up on the point that we made in previous podcasts there about the importance of going where you don't want to go.  

Scott   Well, totally agree with Tim and it's absolutely something that we've been advising clients, tackling contentious issues head on and in the language that their critics use is something that makes good sense.

It's good practice for a corporate website above and beyond its role in maximising AI search visibility. But I would just simply say that where we are at the moment in 2025. There are more contentious issues than ever before. And there's a lot of contentiousness and there's a lot of polarisation in the world. So, again, you need to really expand. It's not simply… It's not good enough to just kind of say, we have, you know, we set up our positions or an A to Z of our positions on all social environmental issues two years ago. So, we'll just let that lie because it's important for companies to really continue to monitor what are contentious, what's, where is their debate? Where is their debate and disagreements about what your company is doing and its role in the world in society and ensure that you comprehensively address all of those issues, not just the kind of the standard ones that you might have felt was a good enough list a couple of years ago. for all AI search makes tackling contentious issues head on the website more important. But so does the state of the world right now.

Georgia   Yeah, it's like the choice has been taken out of your hands a bit because if you're not involved in the conversation then other people will be so kind of staying silent is less of an option. 

Jonathan   And Georgia, you asked Exposure Ninja about the role of natural language. And here's what Charlie had to say about that.  

Charlie Marchant, from The state of search Bowen Craggs Club webinar 
I think when we're talking about natural language, we're not talking about the way that we speak, because actually our speech can be quite unclear. And when AI is pulling through information, and I'm specifically thinking about the AI overviews, but it's also relevant for any of the GenAI engines that can actually run searches on being in Google, et cetera. Is there looking for patterns, they understand patterns and data. 

And so very clear and specific language is gonna improve the discoverability in AI driven search results because the AI can quickly understand and read it.

And things like the technical side as well, like the schema that you have marking up your pages and explaining what they're about, and that links into the FAQs as well makes it really easy for AI to understand. Whereas if you write something in quite a convoluted way, which I know is not the aim of anyone in corporate comms anyway, it makes it harder for AI to understand too. So, using natural language in a way that's really clear is definitely helpful for that. FAQ sections, in general, quite helpful as long as you're not creating like, you know, the encyclopaedia of FAQs for your website. But if you're actually addressing questions that you definitely know, get asked and related questions as well, any type of sort of keyword research that you might do within your company or an agency might do for you will be able to give those kinds of questions that get asked and the sort of number of people asking them. Addressing things like that where they can be in FAQs is a really good thing to do. Marking them up as well with schema so that AI knows, okay, these are FAQs.

And then, actually having like authoritative sources, citations that reinforce that credibility really helps with that as well. And then if it doesn't find that, if you have weak answers to those FAQs, it will search elsewhere for it as well. Maybe the other thing worth adding is, like, the other things we can do to influence, is that increasingly AI search is integrating not just text, but images and videos.

So, for example, in another search I ran on ChatCPT, there was a, it was also one about microplastics of a different brand that I won't name. And it got absolutely dominated by video from Greenpeace as the main result from ChatGPT where that business hadn't actually owned the conversation. And that's probably exactly what you don't want to happen. But if you yourselves are able to use videos and images as well as text to explain whatever specific issue it is that you're addressing, you might also see that coming through in certain kinds of GenAI searches. So multimedia is great as well.

Jonathan   We should mention that Bowen Craggs subscribers have on-demand access to the entirety of that webinar as a replay and can find it in the “Event resources” tab on the Bowen Craggs Hub. One thing that jumped out from me in that conversation was the role that video transcripts have in AI search optimisation. And the point was made that YouTube now offers automatically generated transcripts on all of its videos, which means that they're much easier for these sorts of tools to pick up. And this might come as surprise to a lot of people. 

More transcripts are also good for accessibility. you know, if communicators can do this, then it seems like a real win-win. But of course, it can also be time consuming, at least if done in the old way. Have you, either of you seen live examples of rampant transcript uses on corporate websites up to date.

Scott   We mentioned accessibility, good accessibility, Jonathan, and Shell takes accessible, good accessibility on its corporate website very seriously. And it does, as part of that effort, it does have very prominent transcripts on its videos, on its site. And they're prominent in terms of their availability. They're in, underneath the videos, they're sort of expanding panels where you can directly view the transcript, which also has some sort of audio description — not just sort of subtitles or closed captions. So, it will say a person looks to the audience or that kind of thing, too. So, they're comprehensive in all ways. But I think one thing it's important you mention that YouTube provides auto generated transcripts, but it is important to and AI itself, artificial intelligence is making those automated transcripts better than they were before. 

But for now, for the time being, it's still important to run these auto transcripts by a human copy editor, not only to avoid kind of errors and typos, but we do know some companies where they've let an auto transcript generator has really got the word wrong in a very unfortunate way. So run it by a copy, run it by a human. But absolutely use transcripts and look at the transcripts on Shell. 

Jonathan   Let's take a short break and when we come back, we'll talk about how on-site search on the corporate website is changing and take a look at some of the pioneering AI integrations that starting to pop up on those sites. 

[interlude]

Jonathan   If you're new to Bowen Craggs, you might be wondering Bowen Who? In a nutshell, we help large companies measure and get better at online corporate communications, whether it's websites or social media channels. And we do it through benchmarking, consulting, and visitor research. We also have a global knowledge sharing network with both in-person and online events to help corporate digital communicators all over the world connect with each other and the information they need most.   

The digital corner of corporate communications is specialised, but it doesn't have to be lonely. If you'd like to know more about us or get our take on the biggest challenges in corporate digital communications right now, look us up. We're at bowencraggs.com. 

[back to the main conversation]

Jonathan   So, a lot of on-site search tools on corporate websites today just really aren't very good. It's interesting that in the corporate digital communications index, there isn't really a very strong correlation between companies that are in the overall top 10 of the index and companies that rank well for on-site search. Or to put that another way, a lot of the companies that are really, really good in almost every area are really not very good when it comes to the onsite search engine. Does onsite search matter? And why do you think so many of these tools seem to be so distinctly unhelpful? 

Scott   Yes, on-site search does matter. And I totally agree that most the internal search tools on most corporate websites are not very good at all. It's often better to use Google to find specific information on a corporate website than to use the site's internal search. In terms of why this is, I suspect that the main reason why many are so bad is the same reason why so many job search and application tools on corporate websites are so crude and are sort of slow to catch up with trends like mobile web use. It's because the underlying functionality of many internal search tools on court websites is baked into outdated technology platforms, which are being hopelessly outclassed by the power of Google's core search services. So, I think they're really kind of internal search.

Improving internal search on a corporate website is not a quick fix and I think many corporate sites internal search tools are hobbled by legacy technology platforms. Similar thing with job search tools.

Jonathan   And there seems to be a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy embedded within that, people don't use search on corporate websites because they don't think it's going to be very good. I've been told by one corporate digital manager that their use of search among their visitors is very, low, possibly even 3 % but you have to wonder you know is the case of “if you build it, they will come”. What do the visitor surveys that Bowen Craggs runs on companies websites tell us about how visitors think about on-site search?

Scott   Well, I've looked at many hundreds of these comments over the years, I suppose, and so many negative website visitor survey responses are along the lines of “I came to your website looking for to find out about this thing and I couldn't find out about the thing so, I'm really angry.” So, if your on-site search and your navigation, and you… and your content, all aspects of your site can quickly help people to find what they're looking for, then you will make your audiences happy. And if visitors come to the site looking for something and they can't find it, they'll be really cross. And that does, our research shows, can actually make substantive damage to you, to you, to your company's reputation and to metrics like NPS Net Promoter Score. So, yeah, on-site search can really if it's good, can really kind of have a really quite a deep, deeper, meaningfully positive impact, not just on the user experience, but on your company's reputation. 

And I think that's essentially the key to Google's huge dominance and success in the last 20 years. It's become a phrase, isn't it? If you want to find out about something, you Google it. I guess now you might ChatGPT it, which isn't as snappy. So, we need to think of what's the AI search equivalent of Googling something.

Jonathan   I think it depends on whether ChatGPT really retains its dominance as well. If we get to the point where whichever company has taken over that space has been turned into a verb, I think that's how we'll know that the future is here.

Scott   Yeah, definitely. I'd like to give a shout out to the on-site search tool on one corporate website, which I looked at quite recently. there's a technology company called OnSemi and their website onsemi.com. If you search for something using their search tool, it's just really, really fast, super quick, which is very satisfying. And I think that's going to be that sort of just that sort of slick and polished user experience is really important and quite rare.

Jonathan   It strikes me that this notion that, if people want to search for something, they'll just use Google or now ChatGPT. That doesn't totally add up in my head because if they were going to just use Google, that's what they would have done in the first place. 

But there are a lot of cases, presumably, where people have come to a site they're expecting to be able to find something using navigation, they can't because the navigation isn't as good as it should be or it's not using the language that they're expecting it to or whatever. And so, what's the natural thing for them to do? It doesn't seem to me that the natural thing would be for them to then go to Google because they're already on your site. The natural thing would be to use whatever tools you're providing for them to be able to find what they need. 

Georgia   Yeah, there's some data on that from the surveys. So, some of the visitor surveys that we run show that there is still a strong preference for visitors to use the navigation, as you said, to find the information. So that is 50 % of visitors will tend to do the navigation as the first port of call. But then if they can't find anything, then they might turn to the internal search. And then the data also shows that there's about 15 % of visitors and this is quite like generalised anonymised data, but 17 % of people turn to the internal search straight away instead of the navigation. So, I think there's an opportunity here that shows if the internal search gets better, then maybe more people will use it immediately.

Jonathan   Well, as people get used to this, immediacy of AI searches, these clunky and not super-efficient on-site searches that are really more common at the moment on corporate websites, will just seem even more out of sync with what people are used to. And so, visitors will presumably start to expect a more AI-like search experience.

Indeed, an actually AI-empowered search experience on the corporate site. The sheer number of sponsored results on a search that I did on Google for AI search on corporate websites from companies trying to cash in on this presumably imminent bonanza, at least they must think so, of selling AI tools and to be you know Integrated into the corporate site suggests that there's something big happening here  

I clicked on a number of the links that pop up as sponsored links on that Google search and a lot of them lead through to companies that are providing chat bots, AI powered in one way or another, which can be integrated into the site. 

But that seems to me to be potentially a middle ground. Chatbots have been around for a while. Some of them not AI powered, some of them sort of AI powered, some of them now presumably very much AI powered. And they sit typically above as a sort of added tool. What role do you think they have now and into the foreseeable future in the search mix on corporate sites?

Georgia   Yeah, so again, our visitor survey data shows that people are interested in AI powered features on corporate websites. Like, there is an appetite for that. I think the best thing would be, as you say, to have it all integrated. But I think there are some very successful examples out there of AI powered chatbots that are kind of their own thing. They're not part of the internal search and they have a very specific purpose.

So, one example of that comes from Mondelēz. They have their ESG chatbot and it is not a generative AI chatbot, but it is an AI chatbot. So, the difference there is that there's no risk of hallucination or it's not generating.  

It's been trained specifically on ESG reports from the company over the years and the main benefit it brings to visitors is that it synthesises complex information into a format that is a lot easier to digest. You can ask it very specific questions; it will find you information. It's kind of like a search and retrieve thing as opposed to anything else. So, I think there is room for that. I think that adds a lot of value to the search experience. 

There's something exciting starting to percolate in, which is companies that are taking more of a Google AI overview-inspired approach where it's right there in the search results if you try to search for something on their site. 

This seems pretty rare at the moment. There are some pioneers in the corporate space and three of them specifically that we've identified. One of them is Siemens and Scott, I know you've taken Siemens AI search tool for a whirl. What did you think? 

Scott   I had to play with it this week. It's a search, a search on siemens.com Siemens global website and it's, it worked well on the test search that I did. It's intuitive. It's clear. I typed in CEO and it gave a great summary of who the CEO of Siemens is. I typed in climate change and separately I typed in jobs, Siemens jobs. And in each case, it came up with clear, relevant information and also related links for all of these tests. 

But importantly, the search tool also provides more traditional search results underneath the AI answer. So, visitors get the best of both worlds. They get the new world of AI search, the convenience and the conciseness and the immediacy of that, as well as having traditional search underneath.  

And also, as I mentioned earlier, it does emulate that kind of the look and feel and the user experience of ChatGPT and Deepseek and Perplexity. So, Siemens is wisely giving an AI search experience on its on its website of the kind that people are becoming used to elsewhere in the online world.

Well, so the second company is Aramco, the Saudi Arabian Energy Company. And their AI search integration is a little bit different from Siemens, Georgia. I believe you've had a close look at it. Any thoughts?

Georgia   Yeah, so Aramco is one of these early adopters of an integrated AI-powered internal search. They've called it Ask Alia and it's really good at quickly finding and summarising information and I think that just shows the benefit of having an AI-generated search is that instead of just pulling up a list of pages, you're giving your visitors a synthesised overview of what is in lots of different pages and it also explores different Aramco sites, so customer business sites as well as the corporate site. So, it's really bringing information from a wide range of sources into one place and into an overview that is succinct and easy to understand in bullet points. So, we did some tests along the lines of what did Aramco say about climate change in 2018 for example and you can see that this sort of thing would save someone like a journalist hours of time. 

So instead of crawling through all of the press releases from 2018, it'll give you a summary of what they all say. And then it also provides the sources for the information so you can then follow up and explore it, take the research into your own hands. 

Jonathan   And so that raises the question of how we use these tools and how habits will evolve. So, I think you have to have an expectation that the tool can synthesise information to give it the right prompts, that it can do that before you even think to do it. If, for example, a tool like that can reach into videos and tell you what someone says in one or multiple videos, then that's an immense time saver. 

Well, there was a third corporate example of on-site AI-generated summaries within the on-site search. And that is, in some ways, unsurprisingly, Nvidia, a company that has made its fortune by helping to provide all of the chips that make AI possible. How does Nvidia’s tool compare to what Siemens and Aramco are doing?

Scott   Similar look and feel and usability. It also, like Siemens, it provides traditional search results below the AI answer. I have one criticism with Nvidia's current approach to generative AI search on its site, which is in the answer that it provides. It provides little numbered, little like one, two, three, four footnote links that lead to the sources of the citation, the sources of each element of the answer. But you can't see where the links go unless you click on them. 

So just from a user experience perspective, can't really, unlike Google's AI overviews, for example, you can see the list to the right of the answer, which provides a little bit of information as well as onward links to the source of the citation. Nvidia doesn't do that, so I'm being picky, but don't do that when you have built an AI search tool on you on your website. 

Jonathan   I really agree that both Siemens and Aramco, can see some, particularly I think with Aramco because the link labels are really concise. So, it's really quick to scan. To me that it feels like the best of both worlds. You're getting the synthesised real time answer, which probably kind of is a moment in time. It's having a conversation with you, you know, at that moment. 

And then you've also got us a kind of more conventional search experience of some links that you can click if you want to know more. So, the lack of that on Nvidia seemed to me to be problematic once you've seen these other ones anyway. But what do you think are other replicable lessons from these early examples for anyone who's considering the pros and cons of affiliated design questions associated with adding AI into the on-site search?

Scott   I think three lessons from those three examples stood out for me. Number one, provide traditional search results alongside AI search results, give people the best of both worlds. Number two, look at the user experience and the presentation of the big generative AI tools like Deepseek and Perplexity and ChatGPT and provide a user experience which is as familiar with those as you possibly can.

And then, as I mentioned, number three, don't do what Nvidia does and just provide numbers for links to citations and sources, provide titles so people can see where the links go without clicking. Make it quick as well. Make it quick. Don't make it slow. Nobody wants a slow search tool ever. Make it fast.

Jonathan   It's interesting to me, though, that there are some differences, some quite pronounced differences, amongst these three tools, which is a little counter to what we were discussing earlier with ChatGPT and its sort of imitators or competitors. And I guess if you're someone who's thinking about doing this, now you have the luxury of being able to go and see these live examples and sort of take the things that you feel work best for you. 

But, you know, for example, Aramco has positioned its AI search Ask Alia as a kind of extra thing that you click a button and it appears in an overlay and I think that probably are pluses and minuses to that but if you're someone who is a little concerned about you know the reputation or risks of having generative AI right now and wanting to, you know, give it a chance to be trained by people who will seek it out like employees who visit the site, you know, who may already have been tipped off that it's there then maybe that's a good thing to factor in. 

We spoke earlier about hallucinations and that alone might give some digital managers pause in terms of whether they want generative AI tools appearing on the corporate sites. And in all the examples we've talked about, as with Google AI overviews and similar tools, there's always a disclaimer that basically says this is experimental.

But, Georgia, you asked the team from Exposure Ninja about this during that recent webinar. Should we have a listen to what Tim from Exposure Ninja had to say about guardrails?

Tim from Exposure Ninja (from The state of search Club meeting replay)
I think the sort of the training data or more like the fine-tuning data that you're basing these internal search models on is really important. It's important to make sure that they are complete so the AIs don't hallucinate. 

Actually, just to give an example: when I ask ChatGPT how it ranks stuff, it says, here's what I'm weighting highest. Well, that's an example of a total hallucination, right? ChatGPT doesn't know how it ranks websites. It has absolutely no idea. So, because it has no idea, it's just going to serve up a pure hallucination. So, if you're building a sort of an internal search, think firstly making sure that in your prompt, in your system prompts, you're giving it really clear guardrails of the sorts of questions that it won't answer. So, it only answers questions about things it actually has knowledge. And then making sure you've given it enough background information so that it actually can answer the questions that your audience are going to be asking is really important.

Scott   This is just prompted me to think just going back to that question. What the future of the corporate website if more people are finishing their search on Google or on getting an answer from ChatGPT. And there are some questions that people want the answer to be delivered directly by the chief executive or by a real person. And I think the flip side of the explosion in Generative AI is a growing thirst for authenticity and for the kind of the human touch.  

Jonathan   Well, you know, as we said earlier, we've kind of moved on from the point where people are waving their hands in the air about the eating rocks hallucinations and thinking that generative AI was just a fluke. But there definitely are some people out there who are raising questions about whether we're in an AI bubble that may soon enough burst or blow over. And, you know, some corporate digital communicators may be wondering therefore whether there's any point in investing in AI search tools on their sites. Do you think there's any merit to this skepticism?

Scott   I'm a big fan of healthy skepticism generally in the world. And as a former journalist, it was an occupational hazard to be skeptical. But really this time around, from a stock market perspective, there may well be an AI bubble that bursts. We might be in an AI bubble that bursts, just like the dotcom crash, which is kind of must be coming up to its 25th anniversary of the dotcom crash. Happy birthday, dotcom crash.

But that doesn't mean that the dotcom bubble crashed, but the worldwide web still transformed the world. And it's going to be the same with AI. It will still transform and improve a lot of things, including search. It's going to disrupt a lot of things. 

So from a communications manager perspective, it might be interesting to speculate about whether the AI bubble burst, but I don't think it's to dismiss AI as a technological shift as a flash in the pan. It's not a flash in the pan. It isn’t. I've seen some flashes in many pans in my time and this is not a flash in the pan. The trick for companies is to pick the right tools to invest in. Experimenting with AI search is definitely a sensible idea. In my opinion, other opinions are available.

Georgia   Yeah, I mean, I just echo that completely. think in terms of which tools specifically to invest in, we're in a bit of a wait and see mode. I think it's all still emerging, settling, but in terms of the long-term impact, it's huge. And I think we've seen parallels to the industrial revolution and I don't think that that's an exaggeration. So, it's quite an exciting time to be in communications and a person in the world.

Scott   Yeah, I used to think when I first really kind of got into the subject of generative AI, which is coming up to two years ago, was at South by Southwest two years ago in 2023. And I thought, I remember sitting on a plane home thinking, well, this really is the biggest thing since Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. This is massive. This is really exciting.  

But I've since – usually I get more cynical about things – this time I've got less. I genuinely agree with you, Georgia, that I think it is the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution. It has the potential to be in some areas.

Jonathan   Well, let's finish with a quick round of Search Engine Incredible roundabout, in which we each give a few parting thoughts what all these changes in the search landscape are adding up to and what corporate digital communicators should keep in mind as they head bravely into the new world of AI and possibly social media powered searches. As usual, I'll go first to avoid having the last word. 

We've talked about quite a lot of examples in this very podcast that could provide the raw materials for a more efficient and helpful search on your corporate site, whether it's AI powered or otherwise.

And I would say look around, see what people are doing, pull the best of those, including from companies that haven't yet made the leap into AI search, but have been experimenting with a more friendly, welcoming interface. 

And just a couple of little examples of that come from EY, which has introduced a podcast icon on its podcast search results, which – tiny detail – but it speaks to a trend and gives you something some added visual, some added visual ways of parsing this results that you get. And the Wellcome Collection – not a corporate entity although sort of kind of in a way affiliated with one – has some really neat added value features on its standard, you know, more conventional search, particularly around images. And if you search for something you get a neat right hand menu of image icons that have become an alternative way of digging into the rich resources that that entity has available. But, you know, frankly, most companies have similarly visually rich resources that search engines wouldn't necessarily normally allow you to get access to. So, casting a wide net and thinking about the user, I guess, are my key takeaways. Scott, what are your thoughts?

Scott   I think that for me, looking at the pioneers of web communications in the 90s were people in companies when web manager or digital communications manager wasn't a job, didn't exist. The people who got those jobs and really pushed the boundaries and broke new ground were people who out of hours just experimented with it and played with the web and in an enthusiastic and innovative way, who became taught themselves and became experts in that.

And I think I would encourage anybody who wants to who is in the world of communications, who wants to break new ground. There's an opportunity now to experiment, play with play with these new tools, get familiar with them and come up with potentially unprecedented new ways of exploiting them for in communication, exploiting them in a positive way in communications and beyond. when new jobs that don't exist yet are created, you might get them and then be in the history books or get awards and certainly have fun. So, experiment is probably my thought.

Jonathan   Georgia, what's your search engine incredible parting thought?

Georgia   Just that it's a huge shift is a really exciting time. AI search is really changing how people interact with online content, but rather than making websites obsolete, websites are even more crucial for creating and storing and verifying information, having that rich content that feeds the AI. 

And I think it just raises this question of what do people want from your company beyond a synthesised overview that's can get from an AI tool and then that leads to storytelling and detail and evidence so a more authentic and a more verifiable internet is I think where we're heading and that is really exciting for corporate communications.

[Outro]

Jonathan   Thank you both, this has been a really exciting conversation to have. And with that, we've found our way to the end of this episode of Cutting Through. As always, you can find links to articles and best practice examples discussed in today's show, plus a variety of further reading at bowencraggs.com/podcast.

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