Google Answered With Its Own

What happened today

Google opened access to Bard, its own conversational tool, through a waiting list.

Access is limited to the United States and the United Kingdom to begin with, so Canadian businesses cannot try it yet.

Google has described it as an experiment, and has kept it separate from Search rather than putting it into results.

Which is a more cautious position than the coverage this week will suggest.

How this arrived

Worth the short version, since it explains the caution.

Google announced Bard in February, shortly before Microsoft put a conversational tool into Bing.

The material accompanying Google's announcement contained a factual error in the tool's own example answer, which was noticed publicly and coincided with a substantial fall in the share price.

That was an expensive demonstration of the central problem with all of these tools, delivered by the company with the most to lose from it.

The experiment framing and the staged rollout follow directly from that.

Which is a more informative sequence than any comparison of features.

What it means for your business

• Nothing this week.
• You cannot use it here yet.
• Search results are unchanged.
• No action is required on your site.
• Nobody knows what happens to search.

The third is the one to hold onto. Bard sits at its own address and does not affect what appears when somebody searches for a plumber in your town, which is where your visitors actually come from.

The competition is the story

Rather than the product itself.

Three months ago one company had a conversational tool that people were using.

There are now three serious efforts, moving quickly, with a great deal of money behind them.

Which means the tools will change substantially over the next year, and anything you conclude now has a short life.

The practical implication is not to build anything that depends on a specific tool behaving a specific way.

Use them, and do not construct a process that breaks when one changes.

What might eventually change for you

Speculatively, and worth flagging as speculation.

If conversational answers eventually appear in search results, some searches that currently produce a click to a site would produce an answer instead.

That would matter most for informational questions and least for somebody looking for a local business to hire.

Nobody knows whether that will happen, in what form, or when, including the companies building it.

Which makes it something to watch rather than something to plan around.

Anybody selling you a service on the strength of knowing how this will turn out does not know either.

A worked example

A business was told by a caller this month that they needed urgent work to prepare their site for a coming change in how search works.

The specifics were vague, the urgency was not, and a figure was quoted.

What would actually have helped that business, which had no prices on its site and eleven unanswered reviews, was none of that.

Announcements of this kind reliably produce a wave of selling against uncertainty, and this week will be no exception.

The answer to any such call is that nothing has changed in search results and you will look at it when it does.

That is both true and sufficient, and it costs nothing to say to anybody who calls this month.

Test it yourself when you can

Which is the useful thing to do when access arrives.

Run the same five questions from your own trade that you used on the other tool.

That gives you a direct comparison rather than an impression from coverage written by people who do not do your work.

Expect them to differ in where they fail rather than in whether they do.

And note that Google's tool has access to more recent information than the others have had, which changes what it is useful for rather than how far to trust it.

Keep doing the same things

Since the advice does not change with the announcement.

Get your prices onto your pages, answer the questions customers actually ask, take photographs of your own work, and collect reviews.

Those helped before any of this, help now, and will help in whatever arrangement follows.

A business that is genuinely the most useful result for a local search is in the best available position regardless of what the interface looks like.

The tools change, and being the obvious answer to somebody's question does not.

If anything, a system that summarises rather than lists rewards the site that states a price plainly over the four that avoid the question.

Watch the referrals, not the announcements

A practical way to follow this over the coming year without reading any coverage.

Your analytics show where visitors come from, so if answers in search ever begin taking traffic, it will appear there as a decline in arrivals from search against steady rankings.

That is the signal worth watching, and it is one you already collect.

Note your current arrivals from search now, by month, so you have a baseline to compare against rather than an impression.

Checking that quarterly costs nothing and tells you more about your own business than any article about what might happen to search.

The counter-case

This may matter more than it looks.

Google handles the overwhelming majority of searches, so anything they do to results eventually affects every small business with a website.

The pace of the last four months also suggests that a year is a long time in this, and dismissing it entirely would be as wrong as panicking.

And for businesses whose traffic is mostly informational, the eventual risk is real.

Do nothing this week, watch what happens to search results rather than to product announcements, and keep improving the specifics on your pages.

This week

1. Note that it is not available here.
2. Check your search results look unchanged.
3. Ignore anybody selling urgency.
4. Keep your five test questions.
5. Try it when access arrives.
6. Avoid depending on one tool.
7. Carry on with the specifics.

Step three is the one that will save somebody money this month, since every announcement of this kind is followed within days by calls selling protection against it.

How to evaluate any of these is covered in asking it about your own trade.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.