What the Apple/Siri and Google/Gemini Deal Means for the LLM Race to the Top

Alright, so, Apple and Google signed the deal.

We’re talking a billion dollars a year to put Gemini inside of Siri.

 I think this might be the moment Gemini wins the AI war.

Let me explain.

What actually happened

So here’s what actually happened…

Apple looked at where they were at with AI.

Obviously, no one is happy with Siri results anymore.

Apple’s had a really hard time diving into the AI side of things. They have some partnership with ChatGPT and Apple Intelligence, but at the end of the day, they’re like, “yeah, we’re behind.”

Which for Apple, that’s huge. They don’t admit things like that. But, they’re pretty far behind.

So they’re going to pay Google a billion dollars a year to use Gemini as the brain behind Siri, but running it on their own side.

So, it sounds like they’re gonna be able to keep all the privacy pieces that Apple offers, but it’s still just Gemini. It’s like wearing an iPhone costume, essentially.

So, did Gemini just win?

This is where it gets pretty interesting to me because everyone’s obsessed with ChatGPT. Like, that’s what everyone talks about.  That’s all the commercials you see, and that’s all the drama you hear about, too.

But Google’s been quietly chipping away at their [ChatGPT’s] lead and implementing things in real ways that impact real people in a way that’s already in the ecosystems that they use every day.

Google may have just taken over basically every new iPhone on the planet, and every other new phone on the planet because Android’s already got Google.

So, they may have just pulled ahead.

That’s next level game over for ChatGPT if this goes well.

So, ChatGPT might have the hype, but Gemini is gonna be in billions of people’s pockets eventually answering their questions every single day. So, potentially, Gemini just won, not in the flashy way, but the way that actually matters.

What the Siri/Gemini deal means for everyday users

So what does this actually mean for regular people, though, using Siri?

Because let’s be real: Siri’s been pretty bad for a while.

We’ve all used it. It’s just, I don’t know. I feel like most times I use it, I end up just typing into Google or typing into my phone anyway.

So the new version, I think, could be way different.

I’m hoping it’s more agent-like.

As in, it can pull context from anywhere else on your phone, like your emails, your text messages, your calendar — all the different apps that maybe connect with it.

So you could ask it something like, when’s my next meeting? And it won’t just tell you the time. It could also be like:

• Do you wanna see email threads?
• Here are some docs you have attached to this meeting.
• Here’s a summary of important speaking notes and updates from other people before the meeting.

That kind of thing.

But I’m also curious, will developers be able to integrate into this?

So could I, you know, talk to Siri about being in the mood for tacos tonight and integrate with DoorDash to make sure there’s an order on my step before I get home for dinner?

Would Siri be able to facilitate that whole thing? Because if you can, that’s a whole new way of thinking about voice search. That’s not just SEO or local SEO anymore.

And nobody really knows if this is a thing yet. We don’t know how it’s gonna look. It could actually be pretty bad too, but, I think the potential is definitely there.

How the Siri/Gemini deal raises relevance for voice search

So from a marketing perspective, remember five, six years ago when everyone was freaking out about voice search? They said:

“Optimize for Alexa voice!”

“Voice search is the future!”

And it just didn’t happen because the tech was just not great.

Siri wasn’t good enough. Alexa wasn’t good enough. It was functionally basic.

And I know Alexa has some pro plus thing now that has AI in it, but, I mean, I don’t personally know anyone who pays for it. But that’s the advantage of this Google and Apple partnership — it’s just baked into the iPhone.

Previously, people would do all these voice search things, and would just go back to typing. But now it could, like, actually be really good.

And I think users were tolerable of that, knowing that this is the capability that was possible at the time.

But now we’re used to conversational searching and interaction with our devices with ChatGPT and things like that.

So Siri and Alexa just aren’t cutting it anymore.

This deal needed to happen.

So Apple, on their end, may have just won the voice assistant war too.

What your business needs to do next

This is huge for how people discover things. So think of top of funnel, but also bottom of funnel for more potentially local elements as well.

Imagine this: You wanna ask questions related to work on your way in the car. You might be able to come up with a roadmap for how you want to purchase your next big thing at work. Or you need a web design for something very specific in this particular area — whatever it may be.

Those questions are moving from search results to voice search and AI conversations now. So, if you’re a business, you need to start thinking about AI visibility.

Think about local SEO too.

The reviews that you’re capturing — that’s context for a whole conversation someone might have with Siri, and the reviews that you have are providing the answer of, “This business is good at these things because these comments have said that.”

How are you gonna show up when someone asks their phone a question?

Not just [typed] searches — They actually ask.

So the playbook may change.

Here’s the thing that’s just wild to me: Traditional SEO was all about keywords and ranking first on Google. Right?

You wanted position one, but in an AI world, there’s no results page. The AI just says the answer back to you. That’s it.

So now it’s about being the source of truth for what AI trusts.

And you have to optimize for what those things are. It might be reviews on Google, reviews on Amazon, Yelp, things like that.

It might be just the content on your website. Are you saying the things that people are asking for, and is that built into the structure of your website?

Talk about brand building. You need to really optimize for this to make sure all the LLMs out there know about you. Get mentioned in articles, get linked to, be talked about.

That’s not just marketing anymore. That’s literally just how you are going to end up in AI responses.

You can’t just SEO your way out of it. You have to think about these broader contexts.

You have to be part of the knowledge that AI learns from, too.

What’s next?

So here’s the opportunity.

I think at this moment where everything’s changing, most people don’t realize it yet. Most businesses might be doing SEO like it’s 2020 or 2015 even, or not at all.

They’re not thinking about AI agents.

They’re not thinking about voice discovery.

But people who figure this out now, who start testing this, who start thinking about conversational optimization, they’re going to be the ones that are far ahead in a year or two.

So that’s my take on the Apple and Google partnership. It’s not just a newsy thing right now. It might be a game changer for, you know, the digital marketing industry and how SEO actually works in the future.