The Gist
- SEO implications. AI Overviews could reduce website traffic as it answers user queries directly on the search results page.
- Technological evolution. Google’s AI Overviews utilize Gemini, enhancing search with anticipatory responses and comprehensive summaries.
- Strategic adjustments. Marketers must adapt SEO strategies, focusing more on context and user intent due to the changes AI Overviews bring to search dynamics.
Google made a big splash in the search industry when it announced a May rollout of AI Overviews, an AI-generated summary system that enhances search results. Its ability to gather search results into a few brief paragraphs as an answer advances the quality of information people receive online.
Some marketers worry that the advancement alters the search experience into a disadvantage for website owners, creating fewer website visits. But no matter the shared reactions, everyone agrees that AI Overview in Google Search will create a renewed effort to adjust SEO strategy as well as to be vigilant on service quality delivered through AI.
What Is Google AI Overviews? And How It Works in Search
AI Overviews is a search capability, an evolution of the search snippet first introduced with Search Generated Experiences (SGE). The enhanced snippets are designed to summarize the content returned from a search query, providing enhanced information in the process.
Gemini, Google’s underlying AI foundational model that has been inserted into a number of Google cloud services, powers the multi-step reasoning capabilities in AI Overviews. AI Overviews uses multi-step reasoning to address complex questions holistically, rather than breaking a given question into multiple searches. This allows users to ask complex questions while including the nuanced information and caveats that impact a response. This is particularly helpful as users are using voice dictation to conduct their search, relying on natural language that comes to mind as users describe their query.
The capability also introduces a level of anticipation, crafting responses that predict follow-up questions before they are asked in a query.
Related Article: State of SEO: Google Search Algorithm Updates for 2024
A Challenge to SEO as We Know It
Some concerns about AI Overviews emerged about its ability to drive users to websites — the main benefit of online search that has been long-touted among search engines.
The focus on conversational search has existed for years, but the focus was aimed at expanding the context of keywords. As search activity incorporated mobile search, keywords expanded from one word, like “restaurant,” to “Indian restaurant near me.”
SERP features like knowledge graphs and search snippets became the next major search evolution. As variations of these features appeared over the years, some SEO experts began to question if a search engine’s ability to guide visitor traffic to websites is being undermined. Many of the SERP features answer user questions, which then enhance the user’s search experience.
AI Overviews, along with GSE, extends the context concept further, but as an AI-based summary around the query results — the website links, metadata and initial text highlighted by the HTML in a given page.
But before AI Overviews launched, some research emerged to indicate that the SERP features lead to no visits to a website. In 2020, Rand Fishkin of Moz shared a highly discussed study that noted two-thirds of Google searches ended without a click. That implies that two out of three users gain answers to their questions on Google, and then decide to not navigate anywhere else online.
Thus, Google’s biggest challenge is allaying growing fears about dismantling the symbiotic relationship of search traffic to website traffic. Google has tested AI Overviews for accuracy extensively before launch, including “robust red-teaming efforts, evaluations with samples of typical user queries and tests on a proportion of search traffic to see how [AI Overviews] performed.”
Despite the testing, the AI Overviews initial performance came into question. Reports of a few erroneous responses arose shortly after the launch, including a hallucinated suggestion to make pizza with glue, according to Wired.
Google responded to the issues, stating that it “built better detection mechanisms for nonsensical queries that shouldn’t show an AI Overview, and limited the inclusion of satire and humor content.” It also noted its work to maintain the quality of AI Overviews.
Related Article: 10 Actionable Insights From the Google Algorithm Leak
The Path Forward
Ultimately, Google expects AI Overviews to be the prime search experience for customers in the foreseeable future, driven by how people search online. With AI, the conventional behavior of finding information on the web will further shift towards conversational search, the use of natural language in the search query and the search results.
In the meantime, Google continues to experiment, blending AI Overviews with other marketing media. Search Engine Land reported that Google will soon test search and shopping ads in AI Overviews. The test implies that a dedicated spot for Google search ads on the SERP will continue, playing a vital role in helping businesses reach their potential customers.
The arrival of Google AI Overviews heralds the need to move beyond search strategies solely emphasizing keyword rankings. It represents a mechanism for applying a context around the search results. This pushes marketers to apply a critical eye to diversify the effort to reach customers online, as feasible as possible given resources and budget. It will also encourage marketers to pay more attention to traffic source changes in their analytics. The result is better planning to reach an intended audience consistently.
But Google’s launch of AI Overviews is another reminder — to Google’s search engine competitors as well as other AI-based service providers — to stay vigilant on service delivery.
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