Generative AI search is an entirely new way of understanding and retrieving information.

Conventional search delivers a list of results based on keyword matches. The user must make sense of the list and explore multiple links to find the information. There’s nothing intelligent about the search method and the user does most of the work.

Generative AI search does the work and the thinking for the user and delivers one natural language answer from all the information it was trained on.

For example, ChatGPT is an open AI model trained with information on the Internet. If you ask ChatGPT how to fix a tap, it will give you one answer from everything it ‘knows’ about fixing taps.

The risk to knowledge owners is that AI will combine their expertise with low-grade content, resulting in average answers. Users will then copy and paste the combined answer without visiting the resources that AI used to compile it – even if sources are cited.

Thinking about traffic, marketers will want to keep a close eye on what’s happening with AI in search engines like Google. We foresee three potential challenges for knowledge owners:

1. AI provides one combined answer, so users do not need to continue their research by following links.

2. AI overview could push organic search results down the page, contributing to a potential decline in web traffic.

3. Knowledge owners won’t be able to control how their knowledge appear in AI answers, reducing the brand value associated with specialist knowledge.

People's search habits are also changing. Young people, for instance, prefer to begin searches on social media like TikTok rather than search engines. Mintel predicts that as AI adoption increases, search habits and expectations will shift towards conversational search.

"The integration of conversational AI into search engines will transform the way consumers look for information and discover brands and products. As search becomes more immersive and conversational it will change the way brands need to position themselves online to ensure they remain visible and stand out from the myriad of content."

By training your own Generative AI expert, you can take advantage of changing search behaviour and mitigate the potential risks to brand visibility and traffic.

You can train your own AI model to search your expert knowledge whether it exists in a website, community, or forum - public or behind a paywall. We believe this is a game-changer for anyone who owns the top 5%-10% of knowledge in their specialism, which is often the case in science and innovation.

A Generative AI expert can understand and interrogate everything you've ever created and then join up your published knowledge into one natural language answer. 

Marketers can leverage this tech in the following ways:

Fill content gaps

Singular, combined answers make it easier to see what's missing as well as what's there. You may find out that your content no longer reflects the business or that critical new thinking is missing. You may discover historical articles, videos, or presentations that are still relevant and valuable.

Develop deep subject expertise

Using Generative AI, evergreen content becomes evergreen subjects as your model can be trained on new knowledge and opinion while retaining historical information. Therefore, AI can assist in demonstrating expertise in a subject over time and help create individual articles that generate leads today.

Use knowledge to drive brand awareness and growth

Fresh content, of course, can come from something other than new information. As you can see in the screenshot from Perplexity AI, you can curate new search experiences and products from existing knowledge to generate leads.

If you recall, open AI models like ChatGPT don’t have to attribute sources. References are less important to users looking for ‘how to fix a tap’ than those searching for specialist and expert answers. Your own model can search websites, communities, and forums and reference the exact page or timestamp in formats including web pages, PDFs, videos, and PowerPoint presentations.

This isn't a hypothetical Generative AI expert - AI is here. It’s more straightforward than you think to create knowledge-driven customer experiences that build trust, increase brand visibility, and drive commercial outcomes for your business.