Don't get distracted by shiny things

In 2021, prestigious Christie's auction house sold an NFT for $69M. People got excited and bought in. The market cap reached $376B.

Three years later, 95% of people holding NFT collections have an investment valued at zero.

At the same time as the rise of the bored apes, Facebook went all in on the concept of the Metaverse, a virtual space you can access using VR headsets. They rebranded to Meta and spent nearly $13B in R&D. The market for Metaverse real estate shot up to $1.14B.

The company claimed to have nearly 300K users. Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed, "Metaverse isn't a thing a company builds. It's the next chapter of the internet overall."

Someone checked the data and it turns out Meta goofed the decimal place. The Horizons World user page was closer to 32K. The company's flagship product was so bug ridden, even employees didn't want to use it. By the time they figured out legs it was too late.

But before you re-org...

I enjoy both pointing out the absurdity of tech trends and making a point. Before you re-work your org, tech stack, and reporting models for AI, consider that the the baseline for traffic from AI Search is >1%. What might you be neglecting with your acronym FOMO? Were you to through your SEO out with the bathwater? Pause and listen to the insights a fresh Google India blog provides:

“AI Mode is rooted in our core quality and ranking systems, and we are using novel approaches to improve factuality.”

The product is new but the trend isn't. John Mueller confirmed Core Update impact on AI Overviews 10 months ago. Google received almost 14 billion searches per day - 373x more than ChatGPT. Even if ChatGPT is growing rapidly, it still pales in comparison to searches on Google.

Glenn Gabe has done a fantastic job puting all these resources together and giving you the links you need to see for yourself. He's not alone in this thinking. Lily Ray and Rand Fishkin agree– with varying levels of contempt for new acronym nonsense.