Google broad match type is back!

This is quite an exciting time as everyday we are having a new AI breakthrough. A few months back, Microsoft announced ChatGPT integration with Bing, that gave them the upper hand over Google in the search engine game.

Google tried to counter it with Bard’s introduction in Feb’23 but as we all know it was a half baked product and was not able to keep up with ChatGPT’s pace. Google worked hard and within the last three months they have improved brad dramatically.

In their latest announcement, they confirmed the Bard/Gemini integration with Google Adwords, their money minting search advertising tool. With this integration their age old broad match keywords targeting strategy will be supercharged to better interpret language nuances and context.

For example, a search query such as “treating a pet at home” would have matched with keywords like “treats for pet”, which is an irrelevant match. But now, with AI it will have a better context and can match with keywords that doesn’t have any commonality in them like “without a vet”.

It’s good both for advertisers & users, as advertisers will spend less time in manually writing the keywords synonyms. For example, cheap, inexpensive, budget and so on. And for users, it will provide better search results.

This is Googles way of adding intent to your search query, and earning some extra money from advertisers for using their AI based smart bidding strategies. It is a totally different approach to AI based service business, as they are not asking users to pay any upfront amount to use their AI services like we saw in the case of ChatGPT. Instead, they are targeting the advertisers, to pay extra for using their AI model.

Cleaver move, Google knows they have a large user base and they do not want to lose it. Introducing paid version of Bard might have resulted in some impact on their overall search business. But now, with this integration they will lead the search game for a few more years.

We have to now wait for Microsoft’s next move, they can either follow Google and integrating Bing advertising platform with ChatGPT or they could have a totally different approach to it. Only time will tell who would win the search battle, maybe in the near future we see Amazon coming up with similar AI based product that will add spice to already spiced up search war.