Somebody in MAR VISTA is standing in her kitchen right now, phone in one hand, coffee in the other, typing a question into Google that would have been unthinkable five years ago. Not “branding agency LA.” Something closer to: which creative studio near me actually understands restaurants, won’t make us look corporate, and can shoot content that doesn’t feel like an ad?
That is not a keyword. That is a confession.
On October 28, Alphabet reported its third quarter, and buried among the cloud revenue and capital spending was a number every brand should have on a sticky note. Queries in AI Mode, Google’s conversational search, run on average three times longer than traditional searches. One in five AI Mode searches globally now uses voice, images or documents rather than typed text. Google says it has crossed 50 billion visual searches a month. And the Gemini app passed one billion monthly users, up from 650 million a year ago.
People stopped searching like robots. They started searching like people.
Your website did not get the memo!!!
Think about how people actually talk when they finally ask for help. They don’t name a service category. They describe a situation: we just opened a second location and nobody knows it exists; our founder hates being on camera; the last agency made us sound like a bank. Those are the sentences now being typed, spoken and photographed into search. Very few brand websites contain a single one of them.
Pull up the services page of almost any mid-size brand, agency, clinic or firm and you will find the same architecture. A hero line that says something like “Building brands through strategic storytelling.” A grid of six icons. Branding, Social, Content, Strategy, Web, Paid. Each with a paragraph that could be lifted and dropped onto a competitor’s site without anyone noticing, including the competitor. It was built for a three-word query. It was built to rank for “social media agency” and pray.
That page was always a little embarrassing. Now it is invisible.
Here is why. When someone types three words, the search engine has to guess what they want, so it leans on signals like authority, links and keyword matching, and a generic page with decent SEO can sneak through. When someone types a paragraph, the guessing stops. The question already contains the answer it wants: a specialty, a sensibility, a set of fears, a location, a budget mood. The system’s job is no longer to find the most popular page about a topic. It’s to find the page that actually answers this person.
And a page that answers everyone answers no one.
The money side of Google is reorganizing around this, which tells you it isn’t a passing interface quirk. Search revenue came in at $63.35 billion for the quarter, up 12%, and Alphabet said year-over-year query growth was the highest in five years. Earlier this year, Google’s ad chief Philipp Schindler described the longer, more complex AI Mode queries as inventory that was previously hard to monetize. Translation: the company that sells attention is betting the long question is where intent lives now. If the people charging for the shelf think that, the people stocking it should probably listen.
It isn’t only Google. Comscore data cited by PPC Land put Gemini at 30% of US prompt volume across seven assistants in June, up from 17% in January, while ChatGPT’s share fell from 70% to 50%. The specific platform matters less than the behavior. Across every assistant, people are learning that they can ask for exactly what they want, in their own words, and get a direct answer. They will not go back to typing like it’s 2009.
So what does a brand that gets matched actually look like?
It has opinions. Not mission-statement opinions, real ones. It says who it is for and, more importantly, who it isn’t for. It explains how it works in plain language, including the part where it disagrees with how everyone else in the category does things. It names the specific problems it solves, in the words customers actually use when they’re frustrated at 10 p.m., not the words the leadership offsite settled on. It shows work and explains the thinking behind the work. It answers the long question before anyone asks it.
That’s uncomfortable for a lot of brands, because specificity feels like risk. Saying “we work with restaurants and hospitality brands that want to be filmed, not photographed” shuts the door on the dentist who might have paid. Saying “we don’t do 30 posts a month” loses the client who wanted 30 posts a month. Every clear point of view excludes someone, and the instinct, especially in a soft quarter, is to keep every door open.
Here is the turn, and it stings: the door was never open. The generic page didn’t win the dentist either. It just felt safer to lose him anonymously.
The real cost of vagueness used to be hidden. You could rank for a broad term, collect some traffic, convert a sliver of it and call that a funnel. Long queries strip the disguise off. When a person describes exactly what they want and the system goes looking for a match, the page that says nothing doesn’t come in second. It doesn’t come in at all. It isn’t a weaker answer. It isn’t an answer.
And here is the second sting. The same AI tools everyone is using to write faster are making this worse. A brand that generates its service pages with a prompt like “write a professional description of our social media services” will get a professionally written description of everyone’s social media services. Fluent, polished, and statistically average. The machine that reads your website learned from the same internet as the machine that wrote it. It knows what average sounds like. It has seen a few billion versions.
What it hasn’t seen is your actual point of view. That’s the only thing you have that it can’t approximate.
This is a creative problem wearing a technical costume. You can hire someone to fix schema markup and page speed, and you should, but no amount of technical polish turns a page with nothing to say into a page worth citing. The work is closer to editorial than to SEO. Decide what you believe about your category. Write it down in the language your customers use. Put real examples next to it. Answer the questions people are already asking your sales team, in full sentences, on the page. Then do it again for the next audience, rather than writing one page that tries to flatter all of them.
It’s also, quietly, a culture problem. The brands that do this well tend to be the ones that already talk like people on social, that show up in comments, that have a voice someone could pick out of a lineup. The website is just the last place that voice hasn’t reached. For a lot of companies, the most honest description of what they do lives in a founder’s Instagram caption or a podcast clip, while the official site still reads like a brochure from a trade show.
So read your homepage out loud, then read the question that woman in Mar Vista typed. If your page doesn’t sound like an answer to her, it isn’t one, and no algorithm is going to pretend otherwise.
The query got longer because people finally said what they mean.
Your move.
