AI is having a major impact worldwide but especially in our industry. In the world of SEO, though, AI is transforming how search engines are being used and is resulting in six times the number of daily searches. However, these searches are seeing a 60% decrease in click through rate (CTR) due to Google’s AI overview answering their query on the search page. This is predicted to lead to a 30% total fall in organic traffic.
Due to the scale of content on the internet, Google’s data centres are unable to index everything. Add to this the huge volume of AI-written content and this problem becomes even harder.The result of this is Google deciding that any site that is rapidly producing content with a low trust rating will be seeing a reduced crawl budget.
This effectively means that Google will no longer crawl your site fully and will only check low crawl depth pages. More than that, though, if you are mass-producing unchecked and low-quality AI content, Google may stop indexing your site altogether. All content written exclusively by AI may be flagged as unoriginal and your site will be penalised
AI can be used to help ideate content, check and edit content and rapidly draft a structure. However, it should not be used to write any content directly and no AI content should be uploaded without broad human intervention.
Whilst AI search is being used in Google AI overviews, SearchGPT (ChatGPT’s search engine) and Perplexity still provide links to sites that have useful information related to the query. This means that high-quality, well-optimised pages will see raised CTRs as they will be one of only three options for AI results.
Writing better quality, well-targeted content for your audience is going to be much more successful than asking a Large Language Model (LLM) to provide a thin piece of content written from a prompt that your competitors could also write.
Having been rolled back following a rocky launch, AI Overviews have been rolled out again and are now being seen in a wider selection of search results across more users and across more countries. Updates to AIO appear to be aligning sources with search result ranking and improving AI overview quality.
Google has stated that AIO-featured links have increased click-through rates, however, independent research challenges this assertion as AIO answers the search query and reduces user motivation to click for further information. Product searches have seen increased clicks, whilst informational searches are seeing reduced clicks, further independent research is ongoing and our assessment of it will be available as more data is procured by independent researchers
Google has released another Core Update; this update started on the 15th and is expected to last up to 1 month. The Core Update is “designed to continue [their] work to improve the quality of search results by showing more content that people find genuinely useful and less content that feels like it was made just to perform well on search.” This backs up the assessment that “audience first” content is much more important than volumes of basic content with minimal and poor targeting.
Google goes on to explain that prior updates appeared to prioritise larger brands over smaller businesses and this update aims to make sure that independent and smaller sites creating original and useful content can still connect to their audience through relevant searchers. Google has stated that this continues to be a major priority and whilst we are yet to have solid data on the performance of this update, it is a good direction for many of our clients.
There was a ranking glitch in August that lasted from the 15th of August to the 20th which Google stated was unrelated to the core update. This glitch caused rapid changes in ranks for a variety of different search terms but is now over. We have seen some fluctuations across accounts however with performance levelling, it is not a cause for concern.
On the 5th of August Google was ruled an illegal monopoly by the US DOJ. Whilst this is being appealed by Google and no punitive action has occurred, regulators and competitors are discussing what should be done. This could be as little as a fine and a ban on buying default search contracts (agreements for browsers to use Google as a default search engine and the basis of the antitrust case), however, competitors and regulators are discussing breaking Google into its separate divisions: search, Chrome, advertising and Android. Google argues that this would simply increase cost to the user, the threat of any of this, however, and the growth of new competitors such as Perplexity highlights the fact that optimising just for Google may not be the only way forward in the future.
Despite all this Google still maintains around 82% global market share, 94% in the UK and 87% in the US, still making it the best game in town.