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Dr. Ravi Sen is an Associate Professor at Mays Business School, Texas A&M. He received his Ph.D. in 2003 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include cybersecurity, open source software, and economics of electronic commerce. He has published in the Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS), Production and Operations Management (POM), Decision Support Systems (DSS), Decision Sciences, International Journal of Electronic Commerce (IJEC), Communications of AIS (CAIS), Electronic Markets (EM), and Journal of Electronic Commerce Research (JECR).

Why Google, Bing and other search engines’ embrace of generative AI threatens $68 billion SEO industry

Dr. Ravi Sen discusses how Google, Microsoft and others boast that generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT will make searching the internet better than ever for users. For example, rather than having to wade through a sea of URLs, users will be able to just get an answer combed from the entire internet. There are also some concerns with the rise of AI-fueled search engines, such as the opacity over where information comes from, the potential for “hallucinated” answers and copyright issues. But one other consequence is that I believe it may destroy the US$68 billion search engine optimization industry that companies like Google helped create.

Subjects: AI, AI in Banking and Finance, Economy, Search Engines, Search Strategies