[Estimated read time: 8 minutes]
Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) are capable of radically disrupting the way we search for and consume information on the Internet. The convergence of several trends and technologies has resulted in a new interface through which people will be able to interact with your business. This will have a dramatic impact — if your long-term marketing/business plan doesn't account for IPAs, you may be in the same boat as those people who said they didn't need a website in the early 2000s.
Your website is an API to your business
If we look to pre/early Internet, then the primary interface to most businesses was the humble phone. Over the phone you could speak to a business and find out what they had in stock, when they'd be open, whether they had space for your reservation, etc., and then you could go on to order products, ask for directions, or place reservations. The phone was an interface to your business, and your phone line and receptionist were your "API" — the way people interacted with your business.
As the Internet matured and the web gained more traction, it increasingly became the case that your website empowered users to do lots of those same things that they previously did via the phone. They could get information and give you money, and your website became the new "API" for your business, allowing users to interact with it. Notice this didn't necessitate the death of the phone, but lots of the requests that previously came via phone now came via the web, and there was also a reduction in friction for people wanting to interact with your business (they didn't have to wait for the phone line to be free, or speak to an actual human!).
Since then, the web has improved as technologies and availability have improved, but fundamentally the concept has stayed the same. Until now.
The 5 tech giants have all built an intelligent personal assistant
Intelligent Personal Assistants apps such as Google Now, Siri, Cortana, and Facebook M — as well as the newer appliances such as Amazon Echo, the new Google Home, and the rumored Apple Siri hardware — are going to have a profound effect on the way people search, the types of search they do, and the way they consume and act upon the results of those searches.
New entries, such as Hound and Viv, show that intelligent personal assistants are growing beyond just something phone makers are adding as a feature, and are becoming a core focus.
In the last couple of years we've discussed a variety of new technologies and their impact on search; a number of these are all feeding into the rise of these personal assistants.
Trend 1: More complex searches
The days of searches just being a keyword are long since over. The great improvements of natural language processing, driven by improvements in machine learning, have meant that conversational search has become a thing and we have seen Hummingbird and RankBrain becoming building blocks of how Google understands and handles queries.
Furthermore, implicit signals have also seen the rise of anticipatory queries with Google Now leading the way in delivering you search results based off of your context without you needing to ask.
Contributing technologies & trends:
- Implicit Signals
- Natural Language
- Conversational Search
- Hummingbird & RankBrain
Watch this video of Will Critchlow speak about these trends to hear more.
Trend 2: More complex results
Search results have moved on from 10 blue links to include the Knowledge Graph, with entities and direct answers being a familiar part of any search result. This has also meant that, since the original Siri, we've seen a search interface that doesn't even do a web search for many queries but instead gives data-driven answers right there in the app. The earliest examples were queries for things like weather, which would turn up a card right there in the app.
Finally, the rise of conversational search has made possible complex compound queries, where queries can be revised and extended to allow the sorting, filtering, and refining of searches in a back and forth fashion. This phase of searching used to be something you did by reviewing the search results manually and sifting through them, but now search engines understand (rather than just index) the content they discover and can do this step for you.
Contributing technologies & trends:
- Entities / Direct Answers
- Faceted search
- Data driven answers
You may like Distilled's Searchscape which has information and videos on these various trends.
Trend 3: Bots, conversational UI, and on-demand UIs
Bots and conversational UI provide a new interface which lends itself to all of the benefits provided by natural language processing and ways of presenting data-driven answers.
Note that a conversational UI isn't limited to purely a spoken or natural language interface, but can also provide an "on demand" UI for certain situations (see this example screenshot from Facebook, or the Siri/Fandango cinema ticket example below).
Contributing technologies & trends:
- Conversational UI
- Bots
- On-demand UIs within the IPA interface
Trend 4: 3rd-party integration
Going back to the first versions of Siri or Google Now, there were no options for 3rd-party developers to integrate. They could only do a limited set of actions based on what Apple or Google had explicitly programmed in.
However, over time, the platforms have opened up more and more, such that apps can now provide functionality within the intelligent personal assistant on the same app.
Google Now, Amazon Echo, Cortana, and Siri (not quite — but rumored to be coming in June) all provide SDKs (software development kits), allowing 3rd-party developers to integrate into these platforms.
This is an opportunity for all of us integrate directly into the next generation search interface.
What's the impact of all this?
More searches as friction reduces
Google published an (under-reported) paper on some of the research and work that went into Google Now, which when combined with their daily information needs study indicates how hard they're trying to encourage and enable users to do searches that previously have not been possible.
The ability of intelligent personal assistants to fulfil more complex search queries (and of "always listening" search appliances like Amazon Echo and Google Home) to remove the friction of doing searches that were previously "too much work" means we'll see a rise in search queries that simply wouldn't have happened previously. So rather than cannibalizing web-based searches that came before, a large segment of the queries to IPAs will be wholly new types of searches.
Web rankings get bypassed, go straight to the top
As more and more people search via personal assistants, and with personal assistants trying to deliver answers directly in their interface, we'll see an increasing number of searches that completely bypass web search rankings. As 3rd-party integration becomes more widespread, there will be an increasing number of dynamic queries that personal assistants can handle directly (e.g. "where can I buy The Martian?," "flights to Berlin," or "order a pepperoni pizza").
This is a massive opportunity — it does not matter how many links and how much great content your competitor has to help them in "classical SEO" if you've integrated straight into the search interface and no web search is ever shown to the user. You can be the only search result shown.
The classic funnel gets compressed; checking out via IPAs
This part is probably the most exciting, from my perspective, and I believe is the most important from the impact it'll have on users and businesses. People have modeled "the funnel" in a variety of different ways over time, but one common way to look at it is:
The search is separate to the browsing/checkout process, and that checkout process happens via a website. Apps have had some impact on this classic picture, but so far it hasn't been a big part.
However, conversational search/UI combined with the ability for developers to integrate directly into IPAs opens up a huge opportunity to merge the interfaces for the search step and the steps previously fulfilled by the website (browsing and checking out). There are already examples of the funnel being compressed:
In this example, using Siri, you can see I was able to search for movies playing nearby, pick a particular movie and cinema, then pick a particular showing and, finally, I can click to buy, which takes me to the Fandango app. I am most of the way through the checkout process before I leave the intelligent personal assistant app interface. How long until I can do that final step and actually check out inside the personal assistant?
Integrating with intelligent personal assistant apps currently normally happens via the app model (i.e. you build an app that provides some functionality to the assistant), but how long until we see the possibility to integrate without needing to build an app yourself — the intelligent personal assistant will provide the framework and primary interface.
Summary
Intelligent Personal Assistants bring together all the recent developments in search technology, and as integration options improve, we will see an increasing number of queries/transactions go end-to-end entirely inside the personal assistant itself.
People will conduct searches, review data, and make purchases entirely inside that one interface, completely bypassing web search (already happening) and even checking out inside the personal assistant (within the next 12 months) and thus bypassing websites.
IPAs represent an absolutely massive opportunity, and it would be easy to underestimate the impact they will have (in the same way many people underestimated mobile initially). If you've been on the fence about building an app, you should re-evaluate that decision, with a focus on apps being the way they can integrate into intelligent personal assistants.
What do you think? I'd love to have a discussion in the comments about how everyone thinks this will play out and how it might change the landscape of search.
hi Tom,
thank you for the deep dive into IPAs. 2 questions for you:
Hi Jean, I thought your questions were really interesting! I think that the keyboard searches won't dissapear because sometimes voice search gets you wrong or you need to search something specific, but in the end, SEO is going to have to adapt to it by starting counting voice searches as regular searches. The problem is that many of those questions are referred to local, like: where's the nearest coffee shop? So the only thing you can do is to make your business more visible so anyone can find you when they're close.
I'd like to hear Tom's thoughs about it too :D
Good questions!
Furthermore, 'ambient' search devices (such as Amazon Echo, Google Home etc.) will mean there will be lots more searches that didn't happen before. For the number data-driven searches to grow it isn't necessary that all of those searches replace web searches (though some will).
IPAs is an another addition to have understand so that we can implement it in our SEO strategy. We always feel annoyed while google update or create any new algo, but I think it will be an interesting thing to do.
Hi Tom!
Well, my thinking about your post is simply: "we have to adapt or die." It's simply natural selection. I loved you aware us about thinking about making a solely app or an app with IPA integrated! I think that this kind of technology make us life easier, but one thing I've seen is that this is something unknown for too much people and for example, if we want to ask about products of a store we like, we have to make a direct call.. and it's ok, but let's be honest. In this new era we want things faster, but also at our rhythm. Is like when you receive a WhatsApp message. You can read it, but answer later... what we want is to have instant information. So I'm agree with you. Thinking that markets don't need this kind of technology is like thinking like people in 2000's that didn't believe they needed a website. I really enjoyed your post!
I just saw this tweet conversation where the founder of foursquare talks about opening up their "context" API. Thought you might find it interesting...
Hi Tom,
Thanks for the amazing article.
I have understood what IPAs are doing and going to do in coming time.
Want to ask, how is it going to change SEO industry? What SEO people have to do in order to keep themselves in race?
Looking forward for your reply.
The website as an API is not a new concept. Many in the development community have seen the move to structured data by the engines as a step closer to this for some time. Most recently in the SEO community from many of Justin Sanger's talks about local discovery (Pubcon New Orleans 2014) and the slow erosion of the traditional website to "little more than an API".
The information housed in your website and its accessibility to the major social platforms & engines are going to become more and more important to how business is discovered. Thinking about the quality metrics an IPA / AI assistant may use to filter the results it finds relating to a request like "Find me the best restaurant in Denver" - then optimizing those inputs efficiently (the top places that type of data most commonlygets pulled from) is where our jobs are headed.
I would argue that at some point - those very inputs will become the commercial interest of the engines & platform providers, but that's an argument for 2027.
We've known the bots were coming and increasingly more advanced AI available in the consumer market would grow by leaps and bounds.
I don't think many in the community I've talked to were making this connection. Your analysis brings these emergent tchnologies together and highlights a discussion I think the SEO community needs to have, sooner rather than later. Great overview.
Thanks for your insight, Steve. I absolutely agree that we should already be talking about this more - especially as there is a competitive advantage to being amongst the first who embrace and leverage this trend.
I agree that our jobs (or a significant part of them) are headed in this direction, but I don't yet have a clear idea of exactly how it will look. Engagement and user-based metrics make sense for 'ranking' in a world of IPAs but how does discovery work? How do you get a new entry 'off the ground'?
As others have expounded, I don't see really complex searches being as much as a factor in the discovery process, at least for the next 3-5 years. To make IPAs / AI assistants useful for complex searches, people would have to give persistent, open access to these platforms to their personal information that would amount to deep profiling / fingerprinting at the device level.
This is already happening through various applications we already use (accelerometer identifying motion signatures of it's owner, fingerprint access for your Apple phone, etc...) but to make complex searches useful, you would need an ongoing catalog of more intimate details than we have previously seen beyond just broad meta data and modern biometric identification methods.
I think in the immediate future - the bread and butter transactional and informational searches that we all know and love, the ones that do not require a lot of personal information to be useful (outside of localization & personalization the engines already use) are going to be the first to be pulled away from us.
Within those searches, I think the trusted data providers who inform those searches will be dictated by the platforms themselves. If you are searching for products on Google Now via an Android device, Google Shopping, AdWords & various related product feeds will be the data source of preference for obvious economic reasons. If you are the poor sod using an Amazon Fire paired with Amazon Echo, it's not a far stretch to see that product data will be provided by Amazon.
In that way, each platform will be little more than an extension of it's retail and advertising programs. That's really nothing new right? We have a lot of factors to weigh against on desktop to keep us from making bad purchase decisions. They can push ads of preferred vendors / products / services, but we'll skip right past them to the organic results. On a phone, with an IPA / AI assistant being fed preferential information to drive the sale of a requested product or service? Not so much. That is a slippery slope.
There is an even bigger problem at play than just consumer goods and services. Where does this technology put us in the context of an open web - the web we have all been building for the last 20+ years? If anything, the convenience actually sets us back 50 years, more reminiscent of the top down control of corporate media than a democratized consumer experience. It's in these platforms best interest to feed us outputs they can monetize.
Again - not that it isn't already happening right now, but we have a lot more granular control over what we consume in the current desktop / mobile model than we would with cherry picked information from an IPA / AI assistant. Being fed "the best" option for any consumer good or service is one part of the equation I would put under heavy scrutiny depending on the relationship of said good or service to the platform. How will the FTC deal with IPAs / AI assistants disclosing these relationships? That's a whole other can of worms.
To bring it full circle, its going to be fairly predictable how we would optimize for IPAs / AI assistants depending on the platform. Learn to optimize for Google - and what data partners and quality metrics they use for a particular vertical / search query, you are halfway there. The same for Amazon, Facebook, etc... This is where shit starts to get real, we need our community to figure this out now more than ever.
One things for sure, the platforms aren't going to make it any easier for us.
Thanks for this post. After reading,I wonder how the personal assistants could change the world SEO as we know it now. It's amazing!
Thanks! I definitely think IPAs will change the SEO world.
Dear Tom,
I've just been amazed with your post. Loved how you've explained it all and all the stuff I've discovered about Personal Assistants. Actually, I had never used Google Now before, but I'm gonna give it a nice try right now!
Thanks Tom, very interesting reading.
Whenever I hear of intelligent personal assistants I think of the TV series Knight Rider. Here goes a quote from one of the chapters:
""Kitt, where are you?"
"I'm in your parking space, Michael. Where else would I be?"
Tough in this example we can get the feeling that persons will stop thinking, the reaity is Kitt was gathering information from many different data bases, etc. to answer complex questions
In the post you mention integration of Apps into the personal assistant is critical. Would you not see the Assistants gathering / building the answers and proposals mixing content from different sources including the way we understand search today? or would maybe be for a later stage when they get more advanced?
I think IPAs will gather information from various sources and allow you to sort and filter that information all via their interfaces. That information will come from websites (both via structured and unstructured data), but apps will allow IPAs more granular ways to access your data/service. I think, though, that apps will later be superseded when it becomes possible to just write connections directly to the IPAs. The personal assistant may very welcome become the new platform (see the two blog posts I linked to in the 'Trend 3' section.
Thanks for the article. We recently did a video post about rethinking your keyword research partly because of personal assistants and how they changing search.
Hi there Tom, interesting post indeed. I think AI will be soon between us, but i´m concerned about it. Could we really let it enter in our lives as normal? I don´t think so at the moment. Humankind is not prepared for that of course, we see the very basic example with smartphones.
Every time i go out for a walk and see a "zombie" looking at his/her screen i feel sad about them. We deprecated paper write too. Make you a question: How many days without writing anything in real paper with a classic pen?
Debate open
Love the API analogy! I think the web will still play a big part in our lives in the near future, but I can see bots taking on many of the tasks that people currently conduct through websites.
Hey, I made some predictions about this a couple years ago. Back then Google Now speech recognition sucked, but in the short span of 2 years, it has become admirably accurate. One thing which articles about AI Personal Assistants don't discuss is the physical technology. To me it will clearly be an earbud--at least until implants and Thought Interfaces become ubiquitious--but the world hasn't caught onto the earbud AI assistant thing yet. The other thing which the rest of the world isn't discussing (yet) is that the earbuds, due to their small size, won't be able to house complex AI--at least at first--and will draw processing power from wifi networks. To be honest this is essentially what Personal Assistants are now, but Bluetooth earbud technology has been a bottleneck up until the past year. The public wifi infrastructure to seamlessly support processing power to your earbuds is still a few years out -- yeah you can get Wifi at coffeehouses but the security of these networks is abysmal. https://www.seer.ws/saydo-future-earbuds-may-become-your-friend
Tom - great post; insights like this help the digital marketing community stay a step ahead and (if they heed your advice) take advantage of disruption rather than be hobbled by it. A question though - your examples of search integration within IPA's focus primarily on for-profit, e-commerce-related businesses. How do you feel IPAs-as-a-Website would affect non-profit Web sites (or similarly content-heavy non-commerce sites)? Users would still need to learn about the organization before donating. How do you see IPAs handling these types of immersive experiences?
This new form of search can be a revolution in all SEO techniques known so far, will be prepared
Great post Thanks!
Good article. I imagine that the staff assistants have already changed the SEO not ? Because Google already allows voice search in your browser and is not the same to say something orally written.
Hi Tom,
I had no idea how the APIs can get to change the SEO world!
Thanks for your post! :)
The customer information we collect is so essential that IPAs can be perfect for desarrolar nuedtra SEO strategy in a short period of time
It will take some time until those IPA will make a difference!
An intelligent personal assistant is a type software agent that can perform tasks less integration with the Internet voice support
I love the development of these tools to help people search for products and services in the web. We are on the cusp of a major change in the SEO world with this, my question is; will we see this data in our analytics tools so that we can effectively monitor our website performance with regards to these apps?
Hi Tom.
Very nice post on IPAs.
Point is, it is very tough to find a good IPA. Many of them do not have the right skiils and most, do not even know English.
Best wishes and regards.
Veena:)
Hi Tom
We have reached a point where you have to collect information customer is so essential, we can not allow anyone afford to lose a customer or have it dissatisfied can not give you the right information.
IPAs we also can help brands to get other different but equally valid responses to the customer suggestions
Nice post. Good advice. Any ideas how to improve my site www.dreamland.travel? Any help will do
Hi there! This is an extremely broad question. However, you may find some helpful answers to specific answers you have about our site by searching our Q&A Forum. Best of luck!
Thanks for sharing a great post!
Thanks for sharing such informattion Nettech India Appreiates you.
Ok, Google..
Nice info about API and mobile transformation... Thanks
perfekt post.
Nice post.
Thank so much!