The Impact Of AI Overviews On SEO [Analysis Of 19 Studies]
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/impact-of-ai-overviews-on-seo/539982/
Kevin Indig brings you his personal analysis of 19 other deep appraisals of AI overviews and compares the outcomes. He synthesizes what the experts found into key points you can apply to your SEO.
He organized the insights he compiled according to how they answered the following questions:
How often does Google show AI Overviews?- What triggers AI Overviews?
- How do AI Overviews impact click-through rates and SEO traffic?
- How can you rank in AI overviews?
- How should you rethink content creation for AI overviews?
How often does Google show AI Overviews?He takes you through how the collection of studies answers these questions. For every claim, you’ll see a list of what each relevant study found so that you can compare them against one another.
Kevin also dives deep into the details. For example, when answering the first question, he shows you the industry distribution of AIOs and covers the implications of the data from every study put together.
For other questions, you’ll learn whether long or short-term queries are more likely to trigger AIOs when they appear in featured snippets and how often they appear next to PPC ads (not often).
Check out the complete guide for dozens more insights about AIO compiled from nearly all available studies. Next, you’ll find out what it feels like to go from a Google “success” story to feeling targeted for destruction.
The Google Update That Destroyed 4 Of Their Websites
The Google Update That Destroyed 4 Of Their Websites
Recent updates have destroyed many small business sites. The Ahrefs team shares one couple’s story of what it’s like to lose four successful sites without any explanation from the Google team.
This video covers the McBrides, a couple that has managed a series of craft websites in the DIY and woodworking niches. The entire business started as just one blog that was monetized through ads and SEO.
At its height in 2023, the site was collecting more than 300,000 in ad revenue. It followed a strategy of providing content that directly answered current trends and developed a strong following for woodworking instructions.
With a highly effective formula for meeting demand, the couple expanded to several additional websites covering children’s toys, home painting, and other topics. This was when Google pulled the rug out from under them.
This shocked the couple because they had once been proudly featured on the Google website as a “success story.” The couple was featured as recently as May 2024, a feature for which Google sent a photographer to take a photo.
The next day after the visit, the new February Update landed, and the original craft site lost 75% of its traffic. This traffic loss affected the couple’s entire income stream from the site. Several ad partners withdrew, and many pages with well-selling items stopped getting traffic or generating sales.
Check out the full video for the whole story, along with some in-depth advice from Ahrefs on what went wrong and how to restore lost traffic. Next, you’ll discover what one team learned from examining tens of millions of ChatGPT records.
Investigating ChatGPT Search: Insights from 80 Million Clickstream Records
https://www.semrush.com/blog/chatgpt-search-insights/
Brenna Kelly and Luke Harsel of SEMRUSH bring you this analysis of tens of millions of lines of global clickstream data from ChatGPT. Clickstream activity refers to the digital trail of a user’s journey through digital platforms. This data covers what they did, how much time they spent, and more.
All of this data was analyzed to give the SEMRUSH team serious insights into what prompts people were most likely to use or where they were more likely to go after an interaction with ChatGPT. From this, they were able to look at whether users chose to keep ChatGPT on or off or how long ChatGPT prompts typically were.
The team found that ChatGPT users behave differently when SearchGPT is on or off. When it was on, prompts tended to be short and direct, like those used in Google. However, when the search was off, prompts were far more detailed—stretching to 2000 words in some cases.
The SEMRUSH team also found that ChatGPT users tended to have different intent than search engine users. As the researchers put it, search engines like Google typically serve four types of intent, typically organized as Navigational, Informational, Commercial, and Transactional.
Only about 30% of all queries in the ChatGPT data set fit into these categories. The other 70% represented a new kind of querying, which may represent new problem-solving approaches by AI users.
It’s not surprising that users are speaking to AI differently. ChatGPT encourages users to address the engine in a new way, giving suggestion queries on the main page that include:
- create image
- summarize text
- analyze images
- help me write
The Semrush team also found that some sites benefited more than others from these changes. ChatGPT has started becoming a major driver of traffic toward academic publishing and research sites. It’s already driving more traffic to some technical documents and universities than the entire Bing search engine.
Check out the complete study to learn more about ChatGPT demographics and what they may mean for your online operations. We’re back on the topic of AI overviews, and it turns out they may seriously threaten the viability of some web pages.
Google AI Overviews significantly harms webpages: Study
https://searchengineland.com/google-ai-overviews-harms-webpages-study-452605
Danny Goodwin brings you this study into the effects of AI Overviews across a variety of queries. He found that sites excluded from AIO can suffer significantly in clicks.
Being mentioned in AIO can result in significant traffic increases regardless of organic position. If your site is included in AIO for top-ranked queries, you can expect around 3.2x more clicks than any results on your page that were not included.
Danny found that, for some queries, AIOs are likely to divert traffic from the top 1 and 2 positions but deliver increased traffic to the results appearing in positions 3-10.
The results seem to suggest that organic dominance is less reliable as a traffic driver than it has ever been. AIOs, like most other SERP features before them, appear to discourage interaction with results, even the “best” ones, according to Google’s own judgement.
The education company Chegg is suing Google over a number of complaints, including several involving AIO. In the next story for the month, you’ll learn about this case, and what it could mean for the future of SEO.
Chegg Sues Google Over Ai-Generated Information Blurbs in Searches
Chegg sues Google over AI-generated information blurbs in searches
CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin brings you this story about how Chegg is blazing a trail as one of the first companies to ever sue over a search feature. Near the end of February, Chegg filed an antitrust lawsuit claiming AIO had hurt traffic and revenue while acting as a monopoly.
Chegg claims this is a legal matter because Google is using that monopoly power to coerce companies into providing site content (produced at great cost, according to Chegg) to be scanned by AIO for free. The company accuses Google of scraping its site for the content it provides in AIO summaries.
In a statement, Chegg said they were taking a stand for the publishing industry and the future of internet search.
Google has responded to the lawsuit. A spokesman insisted that the company sends billions of clicks to outside websites daily and that AIOs send traffic to a greater diversity of sites.
Although the case has only been filed, many publishers watch it closely. Future roundups will cover any big developments. For now, you’re ready to enjoy a solid technical introduction to the best practices of pagination.
Pagination and SEO: A Complete Guide to Best Practices
https://www.semrush.com/blog/pagination-seo/
Carlos Silva and Sydney Go bring you this look at how to design your pagination to provide the best experience to all your users. Pagination refers to the process of splitting your content across multiple pages.
Pagination is far more of a planning concern than you might think. It can affect the speed of your sites and may affect how well your users can pay attention to all the products, posts, or search results that you offer them.
As Carlos points out, pagination is essential to creating the right look for sites in many niches, including e-commerce stores, news sites, forums, blog category pages, and photo galleries. In these niches, it makes a large number of items navigable and prevents any page from being overwhelmed and slowed down by the total number of options.
Carlos believes that the right pagination can have SEO returns, and he takes you through some of his personal best practices.
He recommends that you self-canonicalize each page, use descriptive URLs that are easy to understand, and avoid URL fragment identifiers (such as the # sign that sometimes appears at the end of a URL).
Carlos also recommends de-optimizing the paginated pages. Only the first page in a series should be the ranking page. You want the other pages to avoid competing with those pages.
Check out the complete guide to learn more about paginating your sites correctly. In the last piece of the month, you’ll learn about ranking your site in AI search engines and which ones will most likely give you credit for your efforts.
How to Rank Your Site in AI Search Engines
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y0lncBNfmw
Jared Bauman and Thomas Smith bring you this long look at ranking in AI search engines, including a close look at the engines currently providing publishers with credit and links when referencing their sites or content.
He pulled some interesting data from a study published by X-funnel AI, which can be found here. That study analyzed 40,000 search engine responses and the 250,000 sources provided to see when credit was offered and who was getting it.
The study looked at several different citation types, including:
- Owned: A company’s own domain.
- Competitor: Direct competitor’s domain.
- Earned: Third‐party or affiliate sites, often requiring some external listing or coverage.
- UGC: User‐generated content (e.g., Reddit, G2, Trustpilot).
Owned: A company’s own domain.The researchers determined that Perplexity, Gemini, and ChatGPT provided the most citations on average. It offered a (rounded up) average of 7 per answer, while ChatGPT only provided 3.
The research team also compared total citations by domain authority and found that sites with authority between 80 and 100 were most likely to be used as citations. This suggests that domain authority is still very valuable in AI search.
The researchers also discovered many other interesting effects, including the larger the company, the more likely AI engines were to cite that brand’s own site or close competitors.
Jared highlights other insights from the research you should check out and then provides some commentary on the Chegg lawsuit you read about above. The hosts argue this lawsuit differs from the others because it doesn’t have a basis in copyright. Instead, it’s accusing Google of hurting the competitive landscape.
Check out the complete video for all kinds of AI analysis and discussion. As AI secures its role in SEO, there will be plenty more to cover in future roundups.
