Google has been inching its way towards zero-click search for the past couple of years. Now, it appears it might be arriving to users soon.
Google is introducing an experimental ‘AI Mode’ in its search engine, replacing traditional ‘blue links’ with AI-generated summaries.
Currently available to Google One AI Premium subscribers, the feature aims to enhance user experience by providing quick, AI-generated responses to complex, natural language queries.
What is AI Mode?
Google’s AI Mode is essentially the same as Gemini (it is powered by Gemini 2.0), but it is built directly into standard Google search.
Users who activate AI Mode will not need to go to Gemini to seek AI-generated responses, it will happen within Google search.
You can watch a demo of the feature here.
While Google provides a conversational response to queries in AI mode, it does also link to other sites and blogs.
What does this mean for affiliate marketers?
The jury is still out on whether AI search is beneficial for affiliates or not.
On the one hand, some data shows that it’s effective at driving traffic to affiliate sites. Last year, a fifth of consumers used LLMs to search for Black Friday deals and recommendations. Some publishers have seen decent levels of referral traffic from AI search engines.
However, there’s also data to show that AI search isn’t great for publishers. New research from content licensing platform TollBit found that news sites and blogs receive 96% less referral traffic from AI search engines than from traditional Google Search.
By 2026, Gartner predicts that traditional search will lose 25% of its traffic to AI search. That’s a huge chunk. Since a lot of performance and affiliate marketing operates within the realms of traditional search engines, there’s a big change incoming.
That’s not to say it’s necessarily a bad one.
Positive implications for affiliate marketers
The integration of features like AI Mode (and general rise of AI search) presents several opportunities for affiliate marketers:
- Enhanced Visibility: AI-generated responses often include product comparisons and recommendations (such as Black Friday results), offering affiliate marketers opportunities to showcase products within these summaries.
- Increased Engagement: The conversational nature of AI Mode may encourage users to explore topics further, potentially leading to higher engagement with affiliate content.
- Improved Targeting: AI's advanced reasoning capabilities enable more precise targeting of user queries. Also, for the most part, they do include links to blogs and publishers. This could prove handy to niche affiliate sites.
Strategic adaptations for affiliate marketers
To leverage these developments, affiliate marketers should consider the following strategies:
- Optimise your content: Ensure that product information is structured and detailed to align with AI-generated summaries and recommendations. From what we’ve found so far, optimising for AI search is largely the same process as regular SEO.
- Focus on quality, unique content: If there is one distinction to be made between AI SEO and regular SEO, it may be to keep your content as unique and quotable as possible. Experts have noted that AI search engines prefer content that stands out and includes ‘quotable’ lines.
- Stay informed: Keep abreast of Google's AI advancements to anticipate changes and adjust marketing strategies accordingly. (We’ll help you here!)
If you make the effort to adapt, then these changes are nothing to fear. It’s simply the unlocking of a new era for affiliates.
