The Impact of Generative AI on Search Engines, Legaltech, and Future Disciplines

The rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in search engines, such as Google's Bard and Microsoft's Bing AI, threatens the $68 billion search engine optimization (SEO) industry. Generative AI provides direct text answers to user queries, bypassing the need for users to browse through search result listings. As the quality of AI-generated answers improves, users will have less incentive to click on paid links and websites' SEO efforts will become useless. This will have a significant financial impact on the SEO industry and search engines, which heavily rely on revenue from search engine marketing. While generative AI search engines still face challenges, it is expected that they will eventually dominate online search, rendering the SEO industry obsolete.