TikTok is not a search engine
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by the Digital PR agency Search Intelligence and North Star Inbound. See their case studies linked in the newsletter.
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For many years, bloggers, journalists, and marketers have forecasted the death of SEO.
After defying the predictions of these doomsayers for now two decades, they have given up, but only somewhat. Now, instead of predicting that SEO itself is dead, they declare that Google search is dead because some other platform is going to overtake it.
Google’s search quality weakness
There are significant quality issues with Google search; however, none of those issues have been enough to make people stop searching on Google altogether.
Part of the quality issues is that SEO efforts have become more creative. Google is just an algorithm, and the algorithms will evolve and improve.
[SPONSORED by Search Intelligence]
How we landed top-tier Digital PR links in the pet niche:
▪ We analysed 568 million Instagram posts containing hashtags for 281 dog breeds
↳ The results showed that the French Bulldog is the most ‘Instagrammable’ dog breed
▪ We wrote up a 600 words report on our findings, with tables and clear content layout
Generative AI as the killer app
Last year, the naysayers declared that Google was dead because everyone was suddenly going to use ChatGPT. Bing believed the hype and quickly integrated Chat into Bing search.
Google believed the hype, too, and launched a beta of generative AI in search called SGE (see all past newsletters on this topic).
The results? According to Bloomberg, Bing didn’t gain any market share with its new chat features, and Google still hasn’t felt enough pressure to launch its generative AI tool.
Google, despite all its shortcomings, is still there.
TikTok as the new threat
The new(ish) threat to Google’s dominance is TikTok, as once again, there are those declaring it the next rising search engine.
Some go even further than increasing TikTok’s place in the discovery ecosystem to declare that Gen Z doesn’t search and only gets its information from TikTok.
While there is some truth in Gen Z's reliance on TikTok for information, it is a complete fallacy to assume that they don’t search at all.
Gen Z still Googles
I have worked on a number of products targeted at Gen Z’s SEO tendencies, and there is most definitely a channel there. It is certainly less than it was pre-TikTok; however, it might not matter.
I don’t believe that TikTok is a threat to Google; here’s why.
TikTok is a vertical search engine like every similar platform that went before it, and I believe that in its current form, that is all it will remain. I am happy to revisit my opinion should TikTok ever launch a web crawler and an index, but for now, I think TikTok only competes with other similar video and long-form media solutions. (yes, I know TikTok is a short-form video, but it’s long-form when compared to a quick answer in the text.)
Other vertical search competitors
In the past, it was assumed that Pinterest would challenge Google’s image search. It didn’t. It was assumed Facebook would challenge Google’s local search. It didn’t. Amazon would challenge Google’s shopping search. It does, but Google is still dominant.
TikTok fits in a very specific place in the search ecosystem and solves a defined search need. TikTok has the perfect answers if someone is looking for reviews of a vacation destination, a recipe, ways to fix their bike, or even how to do basic SEO.
TikTok is useless if you seek information to build a report or an image to add to a slide. It is obviously very useful if you need the HOW TO, but not for the quick stat. The same goes for a specialist doctor's address or aggregated product reviews.
Try these searches in TikTok; the terrible results you see today will likely always be there. Someone would have to create the content for these results, and there’s no incentive to do so.
Google still has YouTube
Even when it comes to those things that TikTok excels at, Google hasn’t completely lost the market. Google has its own YouTube shorts, which have video results for many of the queries where TikTok excels.
Obviously, TikTok has certain influencers that are not present on YouTube, but in my opinion, that is a separate topic. That speaks to people's specific brands and followings and is not an open SEO question.
The Android Trojan horse
Another thing that supports Google versus TikTok, even when TikTok is a better platform, is how strong Google’s distribution channels are for search. Google used its Android platform to grab market share even in places where it wasn’t the dominant player, such as Russia and Korea. Its partnership with Apple does the same and was the subject of the recent DOJ antitrust lawsuit vs Google.
While TikTok search is still only a tap or two away on many users' phones, it is still further away than Google, which has voice assistants and search bars readily available for every informational need.
I don’t think TikTok presents a viable threat to Google because it caters to a market segment that Google was ill-fitted to serve. There are times when companies win a market because they are the only available solution but lose it as soon as a better solution appears. I believe this is the case when it comes to TikTok, and those users who were looking for long-form answers were already not the best fit for Google.
Of course, this impacts Google's revenue, but it might just have been an undeserved revenue source.
I am certain other companies will arise to challenge Google in specific use cases, but if there’s anything we can see from Google’s continued dominance in the face of generative AI rise, it’s that user behavior is very sticky.
[SPONSORED] via North Star Inbound
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