Is Google Selling Out? Search Giant Considers Charging for Answers

This Week

• Google considers charging for AI-powered search results

• eMarketer charts the top AI marketing uses

• New AI community for marketers

• 10-day AI crash course from Section 4

• Tool of the week: Felix AI

• 6 AI tools for content creation

• News

Google Planning to Charge for AI-Search Answers

Google is considering charging individual users for AI-powered search. 

Google reported $175bn in revenue from search and related ads last year, more than half its total sales. This presents a conundrum for the company as it tries to embrace the latest AI innovations while preserving its biggest profit driver.

Why the change? AI chatbots focused on search - like Perplexity - have gained popularity as an alternative to Google because they can provide a complete answer on the search results page - no blue links required.

How it would work: Regular Google search wouldn’t change, but you could upgrade to a paid subscription where Google’s AI tech, Gemini, powers search results in a zero-click environment.

Google’s next move will have enormous implications for SEO marketers. Regardless of its direction, zero-click search will disrupt the current ad market and impact traditional methods for generating website traffic.

Read the full article at The Financial Times. 

The Top AI Uses for Marketers

In the US, 100 million people will be generative AI users this year. That’s a steep climb from just under eight million two years ago.  According to eMarketer, the number one task marketers use AI for is personalization (38%), followed by ad optimization (34%) and chatbots (33%). 

Visit eMarketer for all the charts.

The #1 Community for AI Marketing

The newly launched AI Marketing Forum (AIMF) offers free and private access to a CMO, agency owner, and marketing leader community.

Join for free and you’ll:

• Learn and connect with others pursuing AI advantages for their companies and careers

• Engage in AI learning with free on-demand courses

• Upgrade for AI certifications, group-led advisory calls, and personalized guidance

If you feel like you are already falling behind, need answers, or want a better understanding of how AI can work for you, the AI Marketing Forum is a great place to start.

Jason Cormier, founder of AIMF, says the organization’s mission is to be AI's most valuable learning resource in marketing.

Join the community here.

The 10-Day AI Crash Course

Still not totally confident in AI? Section 4 is offering 20% off its AI crash course, promising to make it your superpower in 10 days.

You get:

• 1.5-hour Intro to AI Prompt Writing workshop (live or on demand)

• 2-hour AI for Personal Productivity workshop (live or on demand)

• 20+ downloadable AI resources to use at work

• Office hours with a seasoned AI expert 

You can use CRASH20 at checkout. Enroll at Section 4.

Tool of The Week

Quantum Metrics just released their new genAI tool, Felix AI to help summarize your product user insights.  

Felix ingests and visualizes your customer experiences across all your surfaces—web, app, kiosk—to quantify the moments that matter most.

You can build specialized metrics based on events and interactions, giving you granularity in tracking and monitoring. One of the most popular features is the ability to replay any customer session, allowing you to see what your customers are experiencing almost in real-time. 

However, getting the most out of Quantum Metrics requires a certain amount of work and engagement from multiple team members. Building dashboards and aligning metrics with data sources can be challenging.

Overall, if you want to take your digital analytics to the next level and gain insights into your customer experiences, (and have the budget!) Quantum Metrics and the Felix AI functionality are worth a look. 

Website: Quantum Metrics
Pricing: Starts at $5,000
G2 rating: 4.2/5

6 AI Tools for Content Enhancement

There’s a lot of hype around AI tools.

Hundreds of tools promise to automate your writing, research, and editing. But almost every content creator will tell you that automating your content creation by asking ChatGPT to provide the output and cutting and pasting verbatim gives you poor-quality content that performs poorly and does little to interest your audience. 

The challenge as a marketer is making your content stand out in a crowd. Generative AI, when used as a cut-and-paste tool, will do the opposite. It’ll make your content look and sound exactly the same as every other brand. 

Descript editor Alec Opperman takes a different approach and looks for tools that enhance content creation, not magic it out of thin air. 

Here’s the list of six AI tools to crush your content creation:

1. Mac Whisperer for creating and editing transcripts

2. Adobe Voice Enhance for audio enhancement

3. Adobe Firefly for image enhancement

4. OpusClips for the creation of short-form videos from longer content 

5. ElevenLabs for voice cloning

6. Descript (unsurprisingly, given they wrote the article) does all of the above

Read the full article at the Descript blog. 

News

• Google in talks to buy Hubspot. Read more.

• OpenAI’s Year of the Enterprise. Read more.

• How to Navigate the AI Industry's Legal Problems. Read more.