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B2B Generative Search update
If you’ve been following our research on generative search for B2B marketing, you may have noticed it’s been quite a while since we looked at Google’s offerings. More than a year in fact, when Google’s generative search tool was still called “Bard”. (We weren’t all that impressed, to be honest.)
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Things move so fast in generative AI that 2023 is kinda the Cretaceous Period. But we do have an excuse for our neglect of Google’s generative search – the mainstream functionality, now called “AI Overview”, hasn’t been available in the UK.
That’s changed as of this Google announcement in August 2024. So it’s time to bring our research up to date and see how Google’s generative search functionality stands up against Bing and ChatGPT for B2B research.
We’ve used our standard methodology to evaluate AI Overview. Will it be better than Bard for B2B? Read on!
(Spoiler: better than Bard but still bad for B2B. But – some interesting new SEO opportunities for B2B marketers.)
Accessing AI Overviews
There’s no special interface for AI Overviews. They just appear as part of Google’s search results for some searches. Here’s an example of an AI Overview showing in one of our tests:
You’ll see there’s a header with the four pointed “AI star”, followed by a chunk of formatted text that looks a bit like, say, a ChatGPT response. (There’s also a scattering of link icons, which we’ll come back to later.) The AI Overview itself can take a moment to appear, though it seemed to show up pretty much immediately in our tests.
It’s not obvious why some searches trigger AI Overviews and others don’t. In our research, around 2/3 of our B2B test searches showed AI Overviews – so it’s a common, but not universal, feature of the Google SERP. Google says here “You’ll find AI Overviews in your Google Search results when our systems determine that generative AI can be especially helpful – for example, when you want to quickly understand information from a range of sources.”
Google might change things over time so that more searches show AI Overviews. But at the moment we couldn’t find any way to encourage an AI Overview to appear if Google doesn’t want to show one. In particular, repeating a search doesn’t seem to generate an AI Overview if one wasn’t shown the first time. (It’s also worth noting that the availability of AI Overview differs by language and from country to country.)
AI Overviews can show in both desktop and mobile searches. But note that they DON’T currently show unless you are logged in to Google. So if you follow our normal advice for search engine research and do your test searches in an incognito/InPrivate window – to avoid biasing your results with personalised results – you won’t see AI Overviews. There’s no obvious reason for this as AI Overviews don’t seem to be personalised.
So quite a few little mysteries there for dedicated Google watchers. But enough prominence for AI Overviews in B2B searches to make them of interest to B2B marketers.
Interacting with AI Overviews
If you’re used to generative search with ChatGPT or Bing Chat, the options for interacting with an AI Overview will seem a bit…minimal.
In particular there’s no “chat” functionality here – you can’t carry on the conversation with a follow-up question. And there’s no equivalent of the wonderful time-saving ChatGPT features like “put those results in a summary table” or “add in the latest pricing information from the supplier websites”. What you get from AI Overviews is what Google decides to give you based on your initial search string, take it or leave it.
There’s one notable exception to this. Remember those little link icons that we mentioned earlier? Clicking or tapping on those does a sort of drill-down into the AI Overview. For example in this result from our tests:
…we’ve clicked on the link icon next to the bullet point about “shared budgets”, and as a result a relevant link from a WordStream article has appeared in the top right. That’s useful if you want to check on references or visit the relevant original source links. But it’s not exactly life-changing.
So…is it any good?
Hmm. It’s better than Bard, but that’s a low bar.
In our tests for a range of realistic B2B research queries, the results were mostly underwhelming. There were several cases where it seemed the AI Overview didn’t really understand the intent of the query. And some concerns about relevance and accuracy. A few examples from our testing:
- We asked “How should I split my budget between Google Search and LinkedIn Ads”. AI Overview replied with a rag-bag of plausible but unhelpful information, such as “It’s often better to control your spend by adjusting your bid rather than your budget.” (see the screenshot above for the full results)
- We asked “What are the pros and cons of edge data centres” and got the result shown below. It includes some valid but very superficial information that’s unlikely to be of much use in real-world B2B buying research. And it lists “Security” as both a “pro” and a “con” which suggests some muddled AI thinking.
- We asked “What are the best alternatives to WP Engine” and got a useful, if minimal, shortlist of WordPress hosting suppliers, but also some off-the-wall suggestions like Kentico and Sitecore – suggesting that AI Overview really didn’t get the point of this question.
ChatGPT-4o absolutely nailed these same questions in our tests. So this isn’t a fundamental limitation of generative AI for B2B research. AI Overview just isn’t as good as its competitors.
We think most B2B researchers would struggle to find a use for AI Overview results in their current form. They are too superficial and not reliable enough. There is one possible exception though.
A bright spot at the bottom of the funnel
Some of our test questions are deliberately very “bottom of funnel” i.e. simulating a researcher who is checking out a shortlisted supplier. And AI Overview is a little bit more useful for these.
Here’s an example where we used the query “Is YPO a good value supplier of school equipment?”:
Now this isn’t a particularly incisive analysis – pretty much all of the sources are taken from YPO’s own website or from YPO-issued press releases. So if you’re looking for an independent view, this is disappointing.
But what is, perhaps, useful is the way that AI Overview has organised the different pages of the source material. In the screen capture we’ve clicked on the “Frozen prices” bullet point, and AI Overview has shown a particular page from the YPO website that is relevant to that aspect of the “good value” question.
We saw a few examples of this in our bottom-of-funnel tests. AI Overview is effectively performing like a subject-specific site map, picking out and grouping the most relevant pages of the supplier’s website.
It’s not a game-changer, but it might save some time in some bottom-of-funnel B2B research.
Implications for B2B search marketing
We flagged here how generative search is a commercial problem for Google. Google’s business relies so heavily on paid search, and paid search is so tightly bound up with the user experience of the traditional SERP. Google has optimised the SERP user experience over many years to give the maximum yield from paid ads while still delivering value for searchers. Anything that changes that user experience is a threat to Google’s supremely-optimised business model.
So it’s no surprise that AI Overview doesn’t change the layout of the SERP very much. In our tests we noticed the following:
- AI Overviews are initially presented in a compact form (with a “show more” button). They don’t take up much space until that button is pressed, so they don’t perturb the SERP layout all that much.
- If there were already search ads at the top of the page, they still appear above the AI Overview.
- AI Overview itself doesn’t contain any ads – though it does contain a lot of organic links (which one could imagine might one day share space with ads).
So if you’re working on paid search for B2B marketing, probably nothing much changes for you at this point.
If you’re working on B2B SEO, AI Overviews are opening up some new opportunities for your content to show organically.
What should B2B marketers do now about AI Overviews?
Our tests suggest that AI Overviews in their current form won’t make much difference for most B2B marketers. Frankly, the results just aren’t good enough to be useful for B2B research. Real B2B buyers are going to use other tools. And AI Overviews don’t have a big impact on the existing paid and organic features of the SERP, so existing PPC and SEO strategies won’t need to change at the moment.
But, as ever, our tests are just a snapshot of a rapidly-evolving technical landscape. And there’s enough of interest in AI Overviews that it’s worth gaining a little bit of experience with them now so you can gauge their importance for your own brand and industry and get ahead of any surprises. So our advice is to try them out. There’s no cost and no signup requirement, since AI Overviews are a standard feature of the Google search engine now. Some suggestions:
- Try out some realistic searches for your own industry – remembering that you need to be logged in to Google! – and see what AI Overviews appear.
- Experiment with searches at different stages of the funnel.
- In particular, it’s worth focussing on some bottom-of-funnel, brand-related searches – perhaps for your own brand and for those of your competitors – where AI Overviews can be a little more useful at present.
And as always, watch this space for ongoing developments in the world of B2B generative search!
If you are interested in how Generative Search might impact your B2B marketing strategies, or if you need help with any other aspect of your B2B digital marketing, please get in touch. A 30- minute discovery call is free, and we’ll do our best to be helpful even if you don’t want to work with us right now.
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