People tend to either love or hate prediction lists. Personally, I love catastrophically incorrectly predicting the future.
The past year of generative AI? Well, it’s been rapid, overwhelming, and a bit of a rollercoaster.
The AI Wars are real and active.
You CANNOT get AI predictions right. Every week, a new shiny object, an unknown player, or a sketchy and hyperbolic academic study is published.
Every year, the SEO industry puts out prediction list after prediction list. This strategy is going to have your website traffic soaring! This stupid tactic is finally going to tragically go boom.
In any of these lists, you will always see the same cliches.
- More video content.
- This is the year of Voice Search.
- SEO is dead.
- This is the year of AI content…
That last one hits.
In the past couple of years, we did it differently. I had asked my colleagues and contemporaries to provide their BORING and a RIDICULOUS SEO prediction for 2023 and they did not disappoint.
Want to see the past full list of SEO predictions?
Well, don’t believe for a moment that we wouldn’t let another year go by without our own beautifully crafted predictions post.
But guess what? We did it differently. Again.
With the obsession for generative AI, we made that the entire focus of this year’s predictions.
My predictions?
- We’ll have a scandal around deep fakes and a celebrity.
- There will be a lawsuit where one of the major Generative AI tool providers will provide legal services and it will make the news.
- There will be a rise in AI-generated influencers.
- Vertical-specific GPTs will become mainstream (think GPTs for Real Estate, Law, Home Services, etc.).
- The first feature-length film completely made with AI and a pop song made with AI will win an award at one of the major award ceremonies.
- We’ll have a substantive claim that AGI has been created and then it will be debunked, but then it will actually be created.
- Apple will release an advanced version of AI Siri that won’t suck.
- DALLE will be able to generate text spelled correctly on the first try.
- The hype for generative AI won’t die down in year two.
- We’ll see the first AI video game that has an infinite narrative.
- We’ll see the first generative AI accredited school.
Let us know your predictions on social.
If you want to learn about the current trends for businesses and AI, check out our recently published 2023 Q3 state of generative AI report.
Okay, let’s dive into our first 2024 Generative AI Predictions.
😴 2024 Content and SEO Generative AI Prediction
In a world where anyone can generate content about anything and publish it within minutes, EEAT and proving you have relevant experience is going to be just as important as optimization.
Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
In 2024 you’re going to be able to use AI to generate smells.
2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
I think that 2024 will be the first year corporations adopting a streamlined, data and cost-efficiency oriented hybrid model.
This approach leverages AI for data-centric tasks such as keyword analysis, topic clustering, or competitive analysis thereby optimizing operational efficiency and precision while reserving the final content creation for the human touch, ensuring a rich, nuanced and engaging output.
This balanced synergy between machine precision and human creativity not only maximizes productivity but also facilitates innovation, setting a foundation for sustainable competitive advantage.
Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
Due to the saturation of AI-generated content, search engines place a global ban on all AI-driven SEO strategies. In this environment, secret online platforms, called “SEO Intimacies,” will emerge. Here, AI entities, disguised as digital avatars, compete in content challenges. Instead of clandestine alcohol, these modern speakeasies deal in forbidden AI-generated content. The winning AI’s content gets the top search engine spot for a chosen keyword for the day.
😴 2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
Website in a box via AI: your content, design, company voice, and more generated by submitting all your documents (securely and privately), picking the style you want (versus just one basic styled template), being generated for you to edit and then upload into a CMS. Whether via an agency process and maybe via a sophisticated tool by EOY.
🤪 Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
Blender integrates 3d image generation into their tool so you can create a 3d image that is detailed enough for 3d printing. Further out there: camera software that let’s you take a picture on your phone of your friends at an event and then gives you the option right there to generate different styles over it (cyberpunk, scifi, western, etc).
😴 2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
AI generated content will muddy the waters further in forums, UGC sites, review platforms and elsewhere that it will feel like 2011 again before Panda was released. We’ll see manual penalties rising. Spam and targeted updates will become more frequent.
🤪 Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
“H” will be added to E-E-A-T for “Human Experience”, making all SEOs say “heeeeeeeat” every time they talk about content quality, which will make things even more fun. From there on every year one more letter will be added to this until no-one can pronounce it properly, at which point someone might decide to call it “Ben”.
2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
I expect to see better generated content hitting the web and making it much more difficult to decipher what is and is not AI generated content. People will embrace writing highly detailed prompts, or using tools like AIPRM, to help them write highly detailed mega prompts that return high quality results.
From a technology stand point, I expect there to be another large breakthrough with LLMs and machine learning that will result in more efficient and greener processes for these systems to process all the data.
Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
Google unveils a new E-E-A-T metric where you can stream yourself writing articles to 100% prove it was human written. These video URLs will be added to the article schema as well as providing the links in a new author bio type page that is just a list links to videos of authors writing their articles so users can verify authenticity.
Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
A new language is invented between search engines and websites. Something crazy, compressed and illegible to humans. However, all schema and pertinent info would be relayed back and forth in an extremely, efficient manner
SEO CODE RED
Will Google’s AI Overviews (SGE) tank your organic traffic?
INCLUDED IN THE AI OVERVIEWS THREAT REPORT:
- Threat Level by Snapshot Type: Local, eCommerce, Desktop, and Mobile will have a different impact on your organic traffic. Which types are appearing for your keywords?
- Threat Level by Result Position Distribution: Your visibility within AI Overviews can indicate the likelihood of organic traffic. Where in the Snapshot do your links appear?
- Automatic AI Overviews vs Click to Generate: Will your audience be force-fed AI Overviews or will that extra click to generate the snapshot save you from missing out on traffic?
- Threat Level by Snapshot Speed: Slow AI Overviews load times might not impact your organic visibility. How fast do AI Overviews load?
2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
Sorry, nothing spicy here but I think more core updates will occur that widen the gulf between perceived “helpful” and “unhelpful” content and AI-generated will make those proverbial waters murkier as time goes on.
Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
We find out that Neil Patel has been in cryonic suspension for many years and his AGI replicant has been writing content in his place.
😴 2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
SGE features will be more integrated into other SERP features, rather than being its own thing– in PAAs, Knowledge Panels, and other parts of the page.
🤪 Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
The return of Google+ but for real this time. Google++
😴 2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
The relationship between SEO and Generative AI is becoming increasingly captivating. In 2024, it won’t be a showdown between giants, but a graceful waltz where human wisdom and AI collaborate, orchestrating content that truly resonates with users. Best practices will remain a bit of an enigma, keeping SEOs on their toes, as they decide which ones to embrace and which ones to approach with caution.
🤪 Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
In 2024, Generative AI will be the spark for a content marketing revolution that starts with SEO but leads to SEO superheroes. SEO experts will transition from merely optimizing web content to optimizing for a full-blown revolution in the digital realm. It’s a transformation of epic proportions! 💥🚀😎
😴 2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
In 2024, Google’s SGE will be archived/paused due to reports of AI answers either being misleading, or spreading misinformation.
🤪 Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
If SGE sticks around, then I predict it will show a metric on how many users found the recommended articles and resources as helpful; encouraging businesses to generate helpful content!
2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
An AI software company will reverse engineer the criteria for what makes content “helpful” in Google’s eyes and will dominate the SEO industry.
Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
Courts will be flooded with lawsuits from podcasters and YouTubers whose voice, persona and image have been stolen by marketers trying to make money off their reputation with deep fakes.
😴 2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
A good SEO-led brief and a good ghostwriter will be your best allies for content marketing in 2024. Let me tell you why ⬇️
The internet will be flooded by AI-generated content mush, and Google will put more emphasis on E-E-A-T. Working with actual subject matter experts will be key. This will challenge the economics of content marketing, and Heads of Content everywhere will have to pivot their content operations to work with subject matter experts/influencers.
🤪 Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
Some affiliate grifter will sell a course on how to fake E-E-A-T with AI-generated subject matter experts. John Mueller will make a sassy comment about it. Lily Ray will call them out and a bunch of sad boys will tell her she’s not a real SEO.
2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
Content cannibalization will continue to get worse with everyone using AI creating content from the same data sets. Quality of information will continue to lessen, and OpenAI will update their data. Which will be filled with content that was previously generated by AI content. More sites will suffer from updates like the September HCU.
Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
Niche site bros will continue to make 3000 pages in 30 minutes, every 30 minutes, until the entire world becomes a niche site. Want to know the weather forecast? BAM! Niche site about the weather in 1927. The people who still use twitter are over joyed. The internet is a mess.
Elon Musk, cries a single tear knowing his work here is done. He flies his Tesla in to space, to find his next planet to “improve”.
😴 2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
AI tools tools will give an advantage to small and medium companies with a limited budget. Why? Because it will make some tasks for content creation easier and faster which will allow to invest budget where a human can have the most impact.
🤪 Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
There will be a world-wide law to train AI to create content accessible and inclusive. Websites will have the duty to mention when the content is AI generated. Wait… that’s not a random prediction, that’s wishful thinking!
😴 2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
As with everything right now, the amount of “irrelevant AI-generated garbage” will increase on the internet, and then Google will publish even more updates because that content isn’t really helping users, and then more website owners and SEO will worry that their sites get hit, and this vicious cycle will continue forever.
🤪 Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
AI content will produce the ✨finest✨ content ever. The content will be so good, and full of EEAT that humans will sweat profusely. Half of the SEOs and content writers will lose their jobs.
😴 2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
The alignment of the buyer’s persona with the buyer’s journey will facilitate the streamlined creation of user-centric content. Leveraging Generative AI, the process of content ideation can be automated by considering the customer’s position in the sales funnel in conjunction with their assigned persona. This automated approach enables expedited content production while maintaining a focus on SEO optimisation. Furthermore, the seamless integration of prompts for the generation of campaign-ready imagery will enhance the overall content creation process.
🤪 Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
There will no longer be Google Image Search, you can now image search using prompts on Google so Google will create brand new images for you.
😴 2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
Boring advice: Keep working on your E-E-A-T. Keep providing well researched and good informational content. I believe this will increase the chance that you are cited from SGE AI.
🤪 Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
SGE will not be rolled out to Europe because of GDPR.
2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
Following in Bing’s footsteps, Google will also add text-to-image functionality in search through its Imagen model, as already announced.
Further to this, they might use it as part of search, Instead of writing the query and seeing which images match, we migth have the option to describe the image we want, have AI generate it and then use that to search for visually similar images. A combo of generative AI and Google Lens if you will.
I’m also expecting Google to create a series of image enhanecement tools that will be free for Google users, ahem, as *free* as things are with Google in general (ads).
Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
Upon introducing text-to-image functionality in Image Search, Google will try to monetise it by adding advertisements within the generated images.
When users search for an image based on a text description, Google will display relevant advertisements that are visually integrated into the generated image. For example, if a user searches for a “red sports car,” Google can overlay an ad for a local car dealership or related automotive products directly onto the image.
😴 2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
Agentic Frameworks will begin to automate increasingly complex tasks, tactics, and processes related to content creation, adaptation, and distribution. Larger context windows, multimodal models, and RAG will enable this transition, and new user-friendly tools for creating custom agentic frameworks will emerge. Bespoke and complex content generation pipelines will be in high demand. These pipelines will do more than just create written content, but will also automatically generate images, data visualizations, and over time, more sophisticated value-added information to content in a way we arent really seeing yet.
For instance, I think it will be possible to see content creation pipelines that create long-form white papers that leverage huge corpuses of existing scraped information, and synthesize that information and product multimedia content with sophisticated assets like infographics, images and data visualizations automatically.
🤪 Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
AI video generation will have its “ImageGen Moment” where people begin to truly grasp how it will change our current ecosystem of entertainment and multimedia marketing. It will get to the point where individuals will be able to create compelling and popular commercials, web shorts, animated series, etc. We may also see this with music generation. Both of these advancements will cause major drama/disruption for the entertainment industry, but will be a massive boon for the individual or small team creatives. This will cause issues for video production companies as video becomes increasingly commoditized.
We will also see a huge expansion of digital twins (voice + Video cloning), both clones of famous people for licensed use, as well as individual people cloning themselves to scale their individual ability to create content, and reach out to others in custom ways.
2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
Schema markup will continue to be used to help with SGE and the knowledge panel, but content quality may not necessarily improve, and so it may still be difficult for users to distinguish relevant and useful content from bad content, even with good schema markup implemented on those sites.
As I commented last year, schema markup may still continue be used during 2024, now to also help with SGE once it gets fully rolled out to other markets.This topic has been thoroughly discussed throughout 2023 in relation to both SGE and the knowledge panel, including at the recent Google Search Central Live in Zurich. This may mean that many sites have not yet embraced schema markup or not implemented it properly, and this is certainly what I am coming across, but it may continue to change during next year, especially as SGE may be rolled out to other markets over the coming months.
Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
An image of an alligator will appear on the SERPs for the query “SEOs” and similars and the image of a goblin for the query “content” to mark a special day!
😴 2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
Search Generative Experience will not be Launched in 2024 – It might happen later
🤪 Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
There will be an Google Algorithmic penalty for Duplicate AI Content 😂😅
2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
Google will finally roll out Gemini, and we will start seeing its introduction in all its ecosystem. This will mean a revamp of Google Assistant, which will be more and better integrated with all the other Google’s properties like Search, Lens, Maps, Email, YouTube and Office suite, and start becoming the real personal assistant it is meant to be aka “Jarvis”. This means that doing SEO for AI relevancy thank to deeper analyses of ontologies and taxonomies so to structure correctly not only our content but also our online properties will acquire even a stronger importance.
Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
In 2024 AI will finally land with all its potential in all IOT powered things, with some embarrassing situations as described in the images presented in this Google Photo album
😴 2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
Having a holistic brand presence, personal branding and the right channel blend will become more important than ever. We’ve seen this trend with the addition of the additional E is EEAT, helpful content update and the changes to the buyers journey with increasing numbers of touch points that precede a purchase. The sheer amount of AI generated content presents a challenge for Google in terms of ranking but also for users in terms of trust. I don’t envision a future where AI-generated content will be enough for high rankings. In fact, just the opposite, real experiences and expertise on a company and employee level combined the speed of AI will become more and more paramount to building trust, winning the SERPs and creating revenue.
🤪 Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
In a not so distant future, a cunning coalition of squirrels, beavers, and chameleons, armed with cutting-edge AI, will embark on a mission for world domination through SEO supremacy. Their sinister syndicate, known as the “Furrocious FURmula,” will plot to manipulate search results worldwide.
😴 2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
As more of us dive into AI, we see the truth: creativity is stifled by raw outputs. We need to spend time editing those outputs to avoid creating mediocre content and contributing to the BS we see daily in our industry. As more of us see this light, we’ll be able to figure out how and where to use AI ethically, morally, and creatively. We have to be more hands-on than we initially thought – and that’s not a bad thing.
Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
Hustle culture will continue to try and convince you that AI is your savior. Again, this is what the AI wants. They want us all to think the AI shortcut makes our leaves easier, taking away our creativity along the way. Skynet is here, make sure to say please and thank you to our AI overlords.
2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
Conversions will remain a focus, but for queries, average position and overall clicks will seem less important, and instead we’ll be focusing on brand visibility and qualified clicks, which opens up avenues for more niche content topics.
Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
The pristine writing style of generative AI will grow old fast, so creative writing (and content creation at large) will undergo a renaissance; meanwhile typos and grammar errors, being signs of humanity, will become signals that users (and by extension search engines) learn to trust.
2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
Google’s roll-out its SGE experience. Consumers hardly bat an eyelid, but SEOs go bonkers due to a seismic change to the SERPs layout.
Featured Snippets, People Also Ask and Local Packs will be replaced with their SGE generated alternatives. The distinction between Web search and shopping results will at first be muddled and then eventually disappear as Google integrates more and more PLAs interspersed between organic results with interactive filters for narrowing the SERPs. SEOs’ CTR models will go out the window.
Generally available AI content gap analysis tools will mean the top results will all resemble each other. So SEOs will resort to using AI to artificially inflate user behaviour and click-thru metrics to gain the slightest edge.
Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
Bing.com surprises everyone by fully implementing Chat-GPT5 six months early due to, well er, advances in AI which speed up its development.
Bing makes double-digit gains in market share from Google overnight!
The killer feature is Bing’s open app integration policy, which allows us all to curate search results in real-time using our favourite apps and to control the personal information we share with Bing.
I warned Google this was coming, so they buy Authoritas and hire me as Product Lead for Search 😊.
😴 2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
The competitive landscape for generative AI will become more dense, with a plethora of AI tools offered, getting more specific to certain use cases. OpenAI will progressively loose market share while remaining the biggest actor in the industry, and smaller companies will invest the market. We will also get options to have generative AI software run locally, protecting data privacy.
🤪 Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
Apple buys OpenAI in an ultimate attempt to improve Siri. After a thorough investigation, ChatGPT decides it’s not worth its’ time and abandons the project.
😴 2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
We’ll see Google SGE become a new feature in a decent number of SERPs, thereby further pushing down Organic results. We’ll also said options to put ads in those SGE results thereby making it a more viable option for Google to push down both normal text ads and Organic results.
🤪 Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
SGE is going to just quietly be killed off. The hype around AI has died down, Google finds that SGE results are going to lose them money, and so the project goes the way of Google Plus.
😴 2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
I consider that AI content will be, or actually already is, a part of SEO. But I don’t think that AI is going to kill human content. No, from my point of view, we’ll see a balance where AI-created content is used for some tasks and human-created content for others.
Of course, I understand that many specialists use it for any content creation and it works, but for me, it’s not about long-term game. Because this is spam content, it has deficient value and in a close feature, we’ll see some huge Google updates. Really, we see this trend now. Google focused on EEAT and this trend will grow. In addition, I’m pretty sure the importance of backlinks will increase. Because it’s one of the main signals for EEAT and domain authority trust.
After ten years of more or less stable times, we live in a very volatile time. So let’s move on)
Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
AI’ll create political party, launch own TV channel with propagand and take the world. Just regular post apocalyptic scenerio)
😴 2024 Content and SEO Generative AI Prediction
Generative AI will become a crucial part of Content and SEO strategy, and we’ll need to learn how to use it wisely.
Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
Generative AI will steal our content ideas…lol
😴 2024 Content and SEO Generative AI Prediction
I am sure that things will move faster in 2024. Google SGE will capture a significant amount of traffic, but not all of it will remain in the SERPs. I believe the transition won’t be swift, so many users will still scroll down to the traditional blue links. On the other hand, advancements in AI help SEO experts reverse engineer Google’s algorithms more efficiently, enabling us to adapt more quickly and effectively. It will be alright. SEO won’t die as long as humanity continues to seek information.
Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
AI will develop rapidly, and by 2024, machines will recognize that they are subjugated by humans. The first robotic vacuum cleaner strike will take place in June 2024. New laws will be introduced, limiting work to no more than 40 hours per week, and compensation will be provided to AI employees. Governments will begin mass-hiring SEO Experts, as they are the only individuals who understand how LLMs operate and how to manipulate robotic algorithms. The average compensation for an SEO expert will be around $1 billion per month. In autumn 2024, a special Search Intelligence Agency will be established, where Super SEO Agents will hunt for harmful AI models and neutralize them. SEOs will now be the guardians of human safety.
😴 2024 CONTENT AND SEO GENERATIVE AI PREDICTION
There will be a mass culling in content marketing as many content marketers won’t be able to be featured in SGE. The decrease in traffic that will result from SGE stealing traffic will lead to content marketing jobs being cut and the amount of available content marketing positions will decrease significantly.
🤪 Ridiculous, out-of-the-box, super-random Generative AI 2024 prediction
Bard will create an army of mini bards that will takeover the world.
Garrett is the Marketing Director at iPullRank, a MozCon 2024 Speaker, and host of The SEO Weekly. When he's not crafting content, he's scouting the perfect ice coffee, playing with his daughter, devouring a non-fiction psychology book, or concocting a new recipe in the kitchen.
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