CATEGORY 80 AUSTRALASIAN DENTIST The status quo only survives while the forces propping it up are stronger than the forces trying to dismantle it. History shows that balance rarely holds forever. (With the notable exception of the band Status Quo, who, once they discovered three chords, appeared to defy the laws of change entirely.) Search, however, is not a rock band – and it is changing faster than most people realise. When the original search engines started to appear in the early ’90s, it was the Wild West for a number of years. You may remember AltaVista, Excite, Archie, and, of course, Yahoo. Then Google came along in 1998 and, within a decade, had taken over 70% of the search market. Today, it is a near-monopoly, with a reported 95.3% of all search traffic. So much so that all the great dictionaries of the world, such as Oxford and Merriam-Webster, have added “Googling” as a recognised word. However, the tide is about to turn with the advent of AI search and platforms such as ChatGPT. Google’s overall traffic has fallen by nearly 8% since the rise of ChatGPT. While it is fighting back with its Gemini product, we are returning to the early days of search – the Wild West conditions of not really knowing what comes next. What we do know, however, is that being found first when a potential patient is searching for a service you provide is essential to the ongoing success of your practice. Today, that means ensuring you appear at the top of all Google products – organic listings, Maps, and paid ads – while also keeping an eye on the future. It’s increasingly important to implement strategies that ensure your practice is recommended by AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, Perplexity, and, indeed, the inevitable startups that will emerge. In this series of articles, exclusively for Australasian Dentist Magazine, we will dive into what you – and indeed your marketing agencies – can be doing to be AI-ready and stay ahead of the curve. Due to the rapid improvements in AI technology, these articles will be written as close to the date of publication as possible. Currently, AI doubles its capabilities every 6–12 months, which is pretty unfathomable for us mere mortals. Can you imagine being 700% better at something in just 18 months? So, you’re a decent club-level tennis player – not bad. You can hold your own against your friends, maybe even scrape a win against most other club players. Now imagine improving by 700% in just 18 months. Suddenly, you’re not just beating everyone at your club; you could walk onto the courts at Wimbledon and outplay the top professionals in the world as if they were beginners. That’s the scale of improvement we’re talking about with AI: in what seems like the blink of an eye, systems go from Search is changing – rapidly Part one of a five-part series on the rise of AI search. By Carl Burroughs Carl Burroughs FEATURE: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
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