The first one that's mostly about AI

Hello there.

Welcome to Far From Shore.

No end of year wrap up on our part. Instead, a dive into something else:

Ever notice how Google’s AI seems to answer most of our search questions?

Maybe you’ve even found yourself disappointed when it doesn’t answer your question and you need to find the answer from the results?

People seem to be changing their searching habits rapidly (us included).

One thing’s for certain, the internet and the way we use it is changing (and more on this in the issue below).

One quick note before we start: we’ll be taking a break over the holidays, with our return scheduled for Mid-January. So this will be our final issue for 2024.

We hope you get to take the time off to enjoy yourselves and discover less clutter than expected in your inboxes whenever you make it back to the office.

Be sure to stick around for the coffee break at the end. Everyone needs a few minutes to themselves from time to time, don’t they?

How big of a dent is AI making in traditional search (and why does it matter)?

You’ve probably seen the posts floating around recently - you know, the ones talking about the death of traditional search as we know it.

Well, here’s another one - and the data is from Gartner.

According to this study, we can all expect Global search traffic to dip by as much as 25% from its current levels by 2026.

Think about that. It’s not that search traffic is expecting to plateau (which would still be a big thing) but drop.

The reason? You guessed it - AI.

AI is creeping into the way we browse the internet and people are putting a lot of stock it seems into the answers that AI chatbots like ChatGPT provide - as well as what Google’s own tools are delivering.

This in turn is causing people to do less traditional searches since they got the answers they wanted from the AI right away at the top of the search results.

Rather than talk about strategies for marketing around this or how to deal with AI in our own output, which is what pretty much everyone is whispering about, let’s stop and consider something else for a moment.

Namely, is this a good thing?

What do I mean, well, while traditional search obviously has its problems with authenticity and authority in the results we read (with tons of junky sites still gaming the ranking algorithm), AI offers a whole new level of complexity and challenge when it comes to accuracy.

While enough has been said about hallucinations and mistakes created by AI elsewhere to have to dive into it here, it’s worth remembering that compounding the issues with AI accuracy is that people generally have poor information literacy already.

I mean, just last week, I asked for the release date of an upcoming movie I was curious about, and it told me it released four years ago - and it even provided me a source for that info (which said nothing of the sort).

And that’s just me asking a simple question that actually reading the first link would have cleared up.

How many people wouldn’t even click that link, and just assume that was gospel?

Combine faulty answers with the inability to critically discern what we are reading and things are looking pretty ripe for disaster.

Okay, hopefully not a disaster, but undeniably this is going to lead to even more easy access to misinformation.

Feeling worried? So are some institutions. This is probably why the University of Maryland released online resources to help students (or anyone, for that matter) better understand the issues, challenges, and opportunities of AI.

I’ve always felt more education is generally better than less education. While it won’t solve everything, at least having some resources there for people to better understand how to navigate technology critically, and on their own terms, is a step forward at this juncture.

But still, everyday browsing isn’t the only issue we’ve been noticing lately…

Speaking of which, Adobe is releasing (and charging for) AI “stock images” with Firefly… to decidedly mixed results.

AI is widely being used to generate images.

We would know. We’re using it to generate the images on this newsletter.

But you might have noticed that something else is afoot.

AI isn’t simply being used to make silly, throwaway pixel art. It’s also being used to generate stock photos.

In other words, AI image-generation has evolved so quickly that it’s now able to compete with (and even replace) traditional stock photography.

People are certainly using them. After all, they’re popping up on the biggest stock photo repositories, including Adobe Stock - and in not-too-subtle ways either.

While it’s not the easiest to see from the screenshot below, when visiting Adobe Stock, I essentially had to scroll down two full screens before hitting stock photo offerings that were unequivocally human-created (and not AI-generated).

If Adobe is putting so much importance on AI for generating photos (and charging for it too), it must be producing results that knock traditional stock photos out of the fight.

Right?

Right???

Well, let’s just say we included one AI stock photo that really ups our apprehensions about the whole thing down below under the coffee break in today’s issue. I think it speaks for itself.

Elsewhere, enhanced CPC is on the way out for Google Ads in March 2025.

If you’ve been working with Google Ads for as long as we have (over a decade each - and closing in on 20 years on my end), then you’re probably aware of how much things have changed over the years.

From the interface, to the campaign types, to pretty much everything else - the platform we’re using today has travelled quite a bit from where it began.

What a journey it’s been! But it’s not over yet.

Now, one of the oldest features on the platform is on its way out for good - Enhanced CPC.

According to another report from Search Engine Journal, March 2025 will be the last stop for eCPC. After that, it’ll just be Manual CPC (which I’m amazed is still around) or one of the automated strategies.

While Enhanced CPC doesn’t get nearly as much use as it once did, it’s still interesting to see it being fully phased out. Already, it doesn’t look like you can switch any campaigns over to this bidding strategy, and with it being gone there’s only one non-automated bidding option left.

Overall, it’s not surprising - Google has been moving towards more and more automation for the better part of the past decade and most users rely on the already heavily AI-powered Maximize Conversions or Maximize Clicks anyways.

One more stick into the great AI bonfire I suppose.

Still, it was always nostalgic to think of the good old days when eCPC was seen as cutting edge and even a little risky.

Now we can all sit back and look forward to the day when Google just offers a single, fully-automated bidding strategy.

Coffee Break

And the winner of “best/worst” AI-generated stock image that costs real money to actually download goes to…

This work of art below: