By Andrea Duffy-Cabana, Sr Director of Paid Media at Anteriad
A 40-year-old search marketer has had the same focus for their entire career – Google. The company’s Google Ads (formally AdWords) has been the dominant paid search platform for more than two decades and businesses have made billions by optimizing their paid search presence.
The future is going to look very different. Not only is Google’s dominance changing, Google itself is changing, and search marketers will find that the next chapter in their careers requires a variety of new strategies.
Two Big Changes to Search
Search is changing for two major reasons – fragmentation and AI.
Google is still by far the dominant search engine in the US, but most people don’t care if a company considers itself an actual search engine if they can use them that way. Amazon, Meta, Reddit and other platforms have syphoned a large share from Google over time. Many search marketers are already looking beyond Google to maximize search behavior, but those efforts need to ramp up even further as younger generations become adults. GenZ prefers YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram for their search.
The second shift that affects search marketers is AI. Google has added AI Overviews and AI mode to their search engine experience, which dramatically changes the way people behave during a search. For some types of searches, AI Overviews reduces clicks by more than 40%. And Google is not the only AI search engine – OpenAI, Anthropic and several other companies offer competing natural language search that are starting to nibble at Google’s share.
In the near future, it’s likely people will have “personal search agents” that search different parts of the web autonomously – creating agent-to-agent search behavior that can also complicate search marketing.
Changes to the Search Marketer’s Role
All of these changes mean the paid search marketer’s role is going to look a lot different in the coming years. Instead of focusing solely on paid strategies on Google, search marketers will need to think more like multichannel marketers – understanding user behavior across a number of different platforms and channels. And, the way search marketers do their jobs will change, too. Different search platforms and behaviors require different tools and tactics.
- Strategy becomes more important: With only one search engine to focus on, the best search engine marketers were deeply tactical experts, creating complex bidding algorithms, picking apart analytics data, gaming algorithms, mining for keyword opportunities, etc. With a broader suite of search behavior and search sites to think about, search marketing needs an additional strategic layer. Companies can’t go all-in everywhere, so they’ll need to understand their prospect audience and invest accordingly. This requires different layers of testing and analysis and a more multichannel view of user behavior to understand conversion value.
- Increase in automation: With a shift from manual, keyword based execution to strategic oversight, audience intent, first party data segmentation, and creative testing will be the priority. At the same time, the buyer journey is already so fragmented, with more search options popping up outside of Google it will only get more difficult to understand. This means smart automation will be a critical component of search marketing in the future. People will need to lean on agentic AI and automated workflows to manage the more fragmented approach.
- New platform experts: For every twenty Google experts today, there might be one Bing expert and a few Amazon experts. Expect that ratio to evolve quickly. Search marketing will soon have the same variety of expertise that other areas of marketing have – with people versed on channels based on a company’s focus – B2B, retail, etc. AI will continue to infiltrate search across many platforms, including retail and social, but each platform, and each area of focus will be different.
Getting from Here to There
Search is moving beyond typed queries into behavior, context, and prediction. Higher level analysis, a focus on user behavior and an understanding of the full customer journey becomes more important than ever. Companies can get started by learning more about their audience’s true search behavior across many different platforms, not just the classic search engines. It’s also key to break out search behavior by age cohort to make sure older behaviors aren’t hiding a growing trend.
Search marketers must also become experts in the evolving effect of AI on search. Already LLMs have altered the search results with natural language queries and aggregated summary results. Soon, agentic AI will enable someone to say into their phone “Find me the three best venues for a work event in Nashville that will include 50 customers in May.” This agent might autonomously search across many sites – Google and TikTok included. When it’s not a person on the other end of the search, how do companies make sure their content does its job effectively? It will be the search marketer’s job to know the answer.
