S3E13.1 - Intentional AI: What the rise of conversational search means for your website cover art

S3E13.1 - Intentional AI: What the rise of conversational search means for your website

S3E13.1 - Intentional AI: What the rise of conversational search means for your website

Listen for free

View show details

Summary

 Conversational search changes the fundamental contract of how users interact with a website. Instead of returning links, it returns answers. That sounds like a clean upgrade. What it actually does is make the quality of everything sitting underneath the AI impossible to ignore. In this episode, Virgil and Cole bring in their first-ever guest for the series, Will Noble from Squiz, who has spent over a decade working in the information discovery space for large enterprise organizations.Will explains the shift with a clean analogy early in the episode. Traditional search is like asking a librarian for help and getting handed a stack of encyclopedias. Conversational search is that same librarian reading every book in the library and handing you a direct answer. The user experience improvement is real. But so is what it depends on, because the AI reads everything, including the outdated policy documents buried in a subdomain that nobody has touched in a decade. When dormant content gets surfaced as a confident answer, the gap between what was published and what is actually true becomes a reputational and legal problem.The practical guidance that emerges from the conversation is to start with a defined slice of content you know is solid. Will walks through a real example of a university with 250,000 pieces of content that scoped its initial conversational search implementation to 50 pages focused on student life. Questions related to that area got clean, accurate answers. Everything else defaulted to traditional keyword search. That controlled scope is what allowed the project to prove value before expanding, and it is what kept stakeholders from pulling the plug the moment a bad result surfaced.The garbage-in, garbage-out principle has always been true in search. What this episode makes clear is that it has never carried higher stakes. LLMs do not skip the bad content. They find it, surface it, and present it with confidence. The first step toward getting conversational search right is the same step the rest of this series keeps coming back to: know what you are working with before you deploy.Previously in the Intentional AI series:Episode 1: Intentional AI and the Content LifecycleEpisode 2: Maximizing AI for Research and AnalysisEpisode 3: Smarter Content Creation with AIEpisode 4: The role of AI in content managementEpisode 5: How much can you trust AI for accessibilityEpisode 6: You’re asking AI to solve the wrong problems for SEO, GEO, and AEOEpisode 7: Why AI can make your content personalization worseEpisode 8: The real value of AI wireframes is NOT the wireframesEpisode 9: Just because AI can create images doesn't mean you should use themEpisode 10: The Super Bowl didn't sell AI, it exposed itEpisode 11: AI video rewards planning, not your ideasEpisode 12: AI might struggle with creativity, but coding isn't creativeNew episodes every other Tuesday.For more conversations about AI, design, and digital strategy, visit https://www.highmonkey.com/podcast and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform.(0:00) - Intro(0:51) - Meet Will Noble from Squiz(2:14) - Today's topic: Conversational search(4:14) - Welcome to the new era of information seeking(7:10) - The dormant content problem(9:48) - You can ignore the problem, but it won't ignore you(11:45) - Where do you start with thousands of pages?(14:36) - Start small, don't go big(17:14) - AI's opportunity as a content auditing tool(20:39) - Search is the foundation of everything AI does(22:13) - How do you keep up when AI moves this fast?(25:43) - OutroSubscribe for email updates on our website:https://www.discussingstupid.com/Watch us on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@discussingstupidListen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Soundcloud:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/discussing-stupid-a-byte-sized-podcast-on-stupid-ux/id1428145024https://open.spotify.com/show/0c47grVFmXk1cco63QioHp?si=87dbb37a4ca441c0https://soundcloud.com/discussing-stupidCheck Us Out on Socials:https://www.linkedin.com/company/discussing-stupidhttps://www.instagram.com/discussingstupid/https://www.facebook.com/discussingstupidhttps://x.com/DiscussStupid
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_c
No reviews yet