By Lane Ellis

What do B2B marketers need to know about search in 2023?

B2B marketing and search have always had a complex relationship, and 2023 will undoubtedly see new shifts arise in numerous areas, from how search engines deal with human versus artificial intelligence (AI)-generated content, to indexing a partially or fully-siloed metaverse, combating dwindling organic search opportunities, where to best invest paid search advertising dollars, and key SEO fine tuning challenges.

Let’s turn our attention to each of these five areas of search in B2B marketing, and take a look at the changes marketers will need to adapt to in 2023 and beyond.

1 — How Will Search Engines Deal With More AI-Generated Content?

One algorithm at a time, AI has continued to play an increasingly sizable role in our lives, and search technology is one of the areas at the forefront when it comes to using and iterating on it.

B2B marketers certainly find AI in search and a growing number of areas — not only search — as I recently explored in “Riding The Razor’s Edge of AI in B2B Marketing.”

There’s been a proliferation of AI-generated content, from AI-powered image generation applications including DALL-E, Meta AI’s Make-A-Scene, Stability AI, and the like, to AI writing tools such as Jasper.ai, Writesonic, Article Forge, Ink, WordAI and a growing cadre of others.

These AI content creation tools can produce fully automated content with very minimal human input, however most are still used to augment and fine-tune content produced by a human hand.

How are search engines dealing with the proliferation of AI-generated and AI-augmented content, and do people want to be able to identify or even filter out such content?

Danny Sullivan, public liaison for search at Google, has urged creators to focus on content that is primarily crafted by people and not AI.

“If you’re an SEO trying to figure out how AI fits in with being successful or not on Google, you’re too focused on the tool not the content,” Sullivan recently tweeted. “Is the content you’re producing helpful, reliable and people-first in nature?” he added, referencing Google Search Central’s guide to “Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content.”

[bctt tweet=”“If you’re an SEO trying to figure out how AI fits in with being successful or not on Google, you’re too focused on the tool not the content. Is the content you’re producing helpful, reliable and people-first in nature?” — @DannySullivan” username=”toprank”]

One of the bigger challenges search technology faces is how to handle this type of content. Just as AI can create content, to some extent it can also help identify AI-augmented writing, images, and video.

In 2023 the amount of content touched by or entirely created through the use of AI will continue to explode, and it remains to be seen whether this will create a backlash among consumers, or whether AI-generated content will forever battle it out against …read more

Source:: Top Rank Blog

Author: Aaron