Why Voice Search Matters as Assistant Hits a Billion Devices
By 2019 Alexa and Google Assistant had reached massive scale, but the honest bottom-line case for voice search was about visibility and trust, not direct sales.
The scale numbers around voice assistants by 2019 were large. Amazon announced Alexa had crossed 100,000 third-party skills that September. Google had announced back at CES in January that Assistant was running on over a billion devices worldwide. Those are real, publicly reported figures, and they’re often used to argue that voice search must be a major new revenue channel for businesses. The honest version of that argument is more specific than that.
Scale in devices isn’t the same as scale in purchases
A billion devices running Google Assistant mostly means a billion phones with a button that can hear a question, not a billion active shoppers ready to buy through voice. Multiple industry analyses through 2019 pointed out that voice commerce projections from a couple of years earlier had run well ahead of what people did with a speaker: check weather, set timers, play music, ask quick factual questions. Building a bottom-line case on voice-driven purchases in 2019 meant building it on behavior that hadn’t shown up at scale yet.
Where the real value was: visibility, not transactions
The actual bottom-line case for voice search in 2019 was about being the answer, not being the sale. When a customer asks a speaker a question related to your business, “what’s the best,” “how do I,” “where can I find,” and your content is the source of the spoken answer, you’ve won a moment of trust and top-of-mind awareness that a competitor didn’t. That doesn’t convert instantly, but it shapes which brand a customer thinks of, searches for by name or clicks on later when they are in a buying moment.
Local businesses had the clearest, most immediate case
For businesses that depend on nearby customers, the bottom-line case was more direct: local, spoken queries like “is there a hardware store open now” convert into real store visits and calls the moment they’re answered correctly, the same way a typed local search does. That’s a case worth taking seriously with a modest, concrete investment: an accurate Google My Business listing, and a fast, easy-to-navigate site.
What a sensible 2019 budget looked like
For most businesses, the right amount to spend chasing “voice search” specifically was close to nothing, because the underlying work, clear content that answers real questions and accurate local listings, was already covered by good ordinary SEO. The businesses that benefited financially from voice weren’t the ones that built something new for it; they were the ones already doing the fundamentals well, who got an extra, low-cost channel for free as a result.
Continue reading in the SEO archive or see everything published in 2019.
