How will generative AI in search change SEO?

So what happens when Google search results become fully AI? Having AI-generated topic summaries appear in search, or what Google calls “AI summaries,” can improve SEO, referral traffic, and more broadly. What does this mean for brand discovery?

These are the questions many people have after Google announced new services. Generative search experience powered by Gemini,it is Incorporate responses like ChatGPT into your search.

As you can see from these examples, the new search experience is already being rolled out and will provide generated answers to some queries prior to actual website links.

The first example above provides tips on how to clean your couch, the second provides a list of yoga studios in a particular area, and the last example shows how the system provides instructions based on image input. An example is shown.

And in each example, the responses provided will take traffic away from your website.

Now, in some cases, that might not be so bad. Over time, the web has become highly optimized for long-tail search queries, and pages that provide answers to common questions have become abundant in order to bring in more traffic. Some of them are good, some are not, but with the advent of generative AI for text, many of these responses will be generated by AI and potentially linked to spam sites. Masu.

So, at least in some cases, it may be better to centralize answers from trusted sources.

However, it can also derail the traffic strategy of websites that have followed common best practices and provided detailed answers to these types of questions on their sites. Responding to all relevant queries is a good way to increase website traffic and as a result increase business, but providing the same information directly to his SERP will ruin it and this will cause his This is not a very realistic SEO approach.

Perhaps other SEO processes will emerge as a result of this. Note that these AI-generated summaries will not be shown for every query, but only for those that Google detects as good candidates for these replies.

But no matter the size, there will always be an impact and it will change the SEO game in at least some ways.

It would also be a problem for websites like Wikipedia, which collect large amounts of traffic by matching information queries. 80% of Google search traffic is informationAs many of those queries are answered in-stream and in detail, as opposed to transactional (product) or navigational (“nearby” searches), users will have less need to click through to access them. Masu. Verifying your details will further limit your referrals.

But at the same time, Google recognizes the value of search to its core business and the need to maintain direct links in the SERPs.

Google even tried to dismiss these concerns in its announcement: noticed that:

“With AI Overview, people will visit a wider variety of websites for help with more complex questions. And you’ll see that links included in the AI ​​overview get more clicks than if the page were displayed as a traditional web listing for that query. ”

As you can see, the traffic does not decrease, it increases.

I mean, I wouldn’t bet on it, but perhaps, in theory, even if Google could use its normal ranking algorithm to determine the origin of the generated answers and include links to those sources in the summary, People can still tap to learn more.

If they want. I suspect that many of the queries are also fairly shallow and users don’t need to read too deeply to understand them. But Google is essentially saying that there are still ways to generate traffic, and the impact is likely to be less than we expect.

However, it is unlikely that there will be no impact, and depending on the scale of these new AI briefs, the drop in referrals could be significant.

But then again, if the top matches are still highlighted in the overview, it probably won’t change as much as some are expecting.

You’ll find out soon.