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A couple of weeks ago I went for lunch with my family and a few other people. Somehow we got onto talking about buying new phones and one person at the table said that whenever he makes a large size purchase now, he goes into ChatGPT, enters all the price and technical specs he wants, and then asks for a top 10 list.
I am probably a slower adopter compared to many other people but I am also finding myself increasingly using AI for different tasks. Incidentally, a question that came up a lot at iFX was whether I use it to write. The answer is ‘no’.
I’ve tried to get it to rewrite some very bland PRs before but it sucks. Both times it hallucinated and made up stuff that wasn’t in the original PR. I can see that becoming a thing down the line though but for NPC content. For now, these tools seem more useful for stuff like analysing data (eg. ‘do a vlookup for me bro’).
Anyway, when I heard that story, my immediate thought was that if a large number of people are doing this then presumably any kind of affiliate that is gaming SEO is going to get hit hard.
This is only compounded by the fact that Google now has AI overviews and is already rolling out its own AI search option, which you can see in the top image of this email.
For example, if I Google ‘best forex brokers’ from the UK, I get this list…
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I have also seen a lot of SEO agency owners and other people working in that sphere posting gloomy pictures like this over the last few months:
Anecdotally, I have spoken to three affiliate sites who operate in the trading vertical who are seeing results like this and are having to change tactics accordingly. One is working more on paid, for example.
For those not working on SEO metrics day to day, the purple line are Google Search impressions – meaning how many times your site gets seen in search results. The blue line represents how many people are clicking through.
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As you can see, the launch of AI overviews has coincided with a disconnect between the two. That suggests people are getting the information they need without having to actually click through to the website.
This is probably not as terrible as some are saying. For example, traffic at a lot of large affiliates still looks good, even if it has gone down. I also think there is more value add from reviews that is hard to convey in a Google overview.
Nonetheless, traffic is still down and it’s easy to see that getting worse as time progresses. The main differentiator will be Google’s AI Mode, which they are testing at the moment in the US. Google seems like it will try harder and harder to keep people on their site and to not click through.
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By way of comparison, Facebook used to be a much better traffic source. They then actively sought to keep people on the site, which then killed a lot of the traffic you could get from it. Google seems to be heading the same way.
The consequences of this for brokers is that it may mean a lot of traffic and leads that come from e-commerce style review sites get hit. The problem is that those high intent queries won’t go away, they will just shift more to lower click through rate mediums, like Chat GPT or Google’s AI mode.
The funny thing about this is that no one knows how to rank there or what search data is there. Anyone telling you they have that data is lying and I would be extremely dubious of others telling you they know how to rank. No doubt this will change over time, most likely when paid ads get introduced. It’s also worth noting that Google AI Overviews do seem easier to rank in and/or manipulate.
For affiliate sites the goal is probably to develop more additional products or valuable materials, beyond just ‘best broker for x’. I actually think that will still work for a while yet but not just not as well long-term because of a lower click through rate.
Indeed, one broker marketing exec that I spoke to last week told me he had thought about doing a review-style side project for a different niche, outside of finance, but decided against it because he believes AI means it has no longevity.
Another component of this is finding alternative traffic sources. A lot of people are already doing a good job here to be fair. I also find prop particularly interesting in this regard. That’s because a lot of prop review and affiliate sites actually seem to have a larger presence on sites like X and YouTube than they do on their own website. Maybe that’s the way to go too?
Overall I don’t think SEO is dead or affiliate sites will be killed completely.
What I do think is probable is that they will see drop offs in traffic because the goal of Google and AI platforms will be to not have click throughs (unless it’s an ad). They will actively look to reduce clicks by serving people with the information they need. A consequence for brokers may be that they have to spend even more with these platforms to get the eyeballs they want.
Another point I’d note is that I have seen some people complain about the ethics of AI platforms taking content and limiting click throughs. This reminds me a lot of music and movie industry execs hating on P2P file sharing and streaming sites in the 2000s. They may have been correct about ethics and legality but they still lost in the end.
The only other thought I have on this point is that you can get so bogged down with technicalities in SEO, you often forget that you are ultimately looking to serve an end user.
I remember working at Freetrade and our then SEO lead running through a lot of technical points and then saying something along the lines of ‘but at the end of the day, you just have to write and create really good content – that’s it’.
Maybe I am naive but I think you can always figure out a way to reach more people by manipulating whatever system they use to access information. But if you make rubbish content then it doesn’t matter because they won’t want to use it. So focus on making good stuff first and figure out how to reach people second.
