New Research Shows SEO Is Key For Appearing In AI Overviews

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Based on an analysis of over 25,000 user searches, websites that rank at the top of Google’s traditional search results appeared in AI search answers at least 25% of the time. 

This means that even in the era of increasing zero-click searches and decreasing clicks to search listings, SEO remains a crucial marketing strategy for brands looking to improve their online presence and reach more customers. 

The Study

The findings come from Tomasz Rudzki, co-founder of ZipTie. In an attempt to determine if SEO was losing relevance in the AI age, Rudzki assessed searches from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI overviews. 

What Rudzki saw was clear – sites that rank at the top of Google search results had 1-in-4 odds of being highlighted in AI overviews. The lower the sites were ranked, the lower their chances were of being included in AI responses. 

As Rudzki put it: 

“The higher you rank in Google’s top 10, the more likely you are to appear in AI search results across platforms. This isn’t speculation – it’s based on real queries from real users.”

While this is particularly of interest for Google, Rudzki said this pattern was consistent across all AI search platforms he evaluated, including ChatGPT. 

How AI Search Engines Work

In his report, Rudzki uses information from Google to detail how AI search engines work. 

Pre-selection: In the first step, AI systems select the pages they believe are the most relevant for a query. In most cases, this includes the highest-ranking pages for similar searches. 

Content extraction: Next, AI tools parse the context of the selected pages and pull content directly related to the question it is answering. 

AI synthesis: AI systems finally aggregate the information they have collected from across the web and package them in one easy-to-read response. 

In the process of finding the most relevant and accurate information for a specific question, AI tools heavily favor the sites that are already favored by Google, just as most humans naturally favor the highest ranked sites in organic search results. 

Why AI Sometimes Pulls From Lower-Ranked Sites

When exploring why AI tools sometimes pull information from pages that rank lower, sometimes even falling below the top 10 search results, Rudzki provided a few potential answers. 

The first is search personalization. While a specific site may not typically be included at the top of the search results, there is a chance of it appearing higher in personalized search results. 

The second, and perhaps more notable, reason is a concept called “query fan-out”. 

Google’s AI documentation explains query fan-out like this:

“Both AI Overviews and AI Mode may use a ‘query fan-out‘ technique — issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources — to develop a response.”

In other words, when you ask AI a specific question, it may run several processes to ask questions about specific details of your question or related information. This means that while a selected page may not rank well for your specific question, it may rank well for a particular aspect that the AI system looked into. 

SEO is Here To Stay

There is no arguing that AI tools are drastically changing how we search and access information. While AI overviews are tied to decreasing click-through rates on organic results, brands can still gain ground by positioning themselves as an authority that Google can rely on to provide accurate information. This not only helps mitigate lost traffic from zero-click searches, but can also improve your reputation and connect you with new potential customers.

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Google Executives Say Falling Referral Traffic Are Sign Of Higher-Quality Clicks

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Critics accuse Google’s increasing use of AI in its search engine of taking referral traffic away from websites, but Google’s executives say the issue is a matter of quality versus quantity. 

In a recent press and Q&A event, Google’s executives argued that AI is improving the quality of search results (while largely avoiding the issue of decreasing clicks).

The session included statements from several executives, such as Jenny Cheng (Vice President and General Manager of Google’s Merchant Shopping operations), Sean Downey (President of Americas & Global Partners at Google), and Nicky Rettke (YouTube Vice President of Product Management).

Does AI Reduce Traffic To Websites?

Numerous studies have found that Google’s AI overviews have significantly reduced click-through rates to both organic and paid listings, leading to significant reductions in referral traffic. The trend has brought down CTRs for nearly every type of search, but non-branded informational searchers have been most heavily impacted since the introduction of AI overviews. 

Ahrefs, Advanced Web Ranking, Similarweb, and many others have independently verified that this trend is happening and seems to be getting worse as Google has increased how frequently it shows AI overviews. 

What Google’s Execs Have To Say

When asked about falling click-through rates in search, Google’s executives began by saying it is partially driven by an increase in follow-up searches while using AI-enhanced search. 

“What we’re seeing is people asking more questions. So they’ll ask a first question, they’ll get information, and then go and ask a different question. So they’re refining and getting more information, and then they’re making a decision of what website to go to.”

As this happens, Google seems to believe users refine exactly what they are looking for, ensuring that their clicks are more valuable. 

“When they get to a decision to click out, it’s a more highly qualified click… What we hope to see over time—and we don’t have any data to share on this—is more time spent on site, which is what we see organically in a much more highly qualified visitor for the website.”

Notably, even Google admits it cannot back up these claims with data. 

What About Ads?

While the Google executives did their best not to directly address falling referral traffic for organic content, they did claim that CTRs on ad placements are stable overall. Despite AI overviews pushing paid placements further down the page, Google says clicks remain largely unchanged. 

“When we run ads on AI overviews versus ads on standard search, we see pretty much the same level of monetization capabilities, which would indicate most factors are the same and they’re producing really the same results for advertisers to date.”

Again, however, the company declined to share any data on the issue. 

What About AI Mode?

Don’t expect anything to improve with the new wide launch of Google’s AI mode. Along with doubling down on AI features in search, this new mode, Google has made referral traffic from AI mode untrackable. 

When someone clicks through to your website from within AI mode, it is currently not being recorded in Google Search Console analytics. At best, some tools seem to be capturing when clicks occur, however, they are shown with no attribution. In most cases, however, they seem not to be registering at all. This will only serve to muddy the waters while websites deal with seeing less traffic from Google.

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Google AI Overviews Appear In 13% of Searches

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It may feel like Google’s AI overviews are appearing on practically every search you make on Google Search. New analysis, however, shows that while the number of searches that include AI may be increasing, overviews are in fewer search results than you may think. 

An analysis from Semrush indicates that AI search overviews appeared in just 13.14% of all U.S. desktop searches made in March. While that number seems low, it is a 102% increase from the 6.49% of searches that included automated overviews in January. 

AI Has a Big Impact for Being So Rarely Shown

The relatively low number of searches with AI overviews emphasizes how much of an impact AI is already having on people’s search behavior. Since they started appearing in search results, auto-generated overviews have been cited as the cause for significantly decreasing click-through rates and decreasing organic traffic from search results. 

How much of these shifts in Google search behavior is actually caused by AI is also contested by some in the industry who say falling organic traffic and CTRs are related to other changes in search or have been overstated. 

For example, the latest report indicates that although AI overviews generally have higher zero-click rates (ie, they do not lead to a click on a search result), zero-click rates have actually declined overall. This would indicate that the search feature does not necessarily contribute to more zero-click searches. 

AI Overviews are More Likely For Specific Types of Searches

According to Semrush’s analysis of over 10 million keywords, AI search overviews were most likely to appear in searches for fact-based and uncontroversial content. However, there are signs that Google is also expanding AI to other, more competitive types of searches. 

Here’s a breakdown of where AI overviews appeared:

  • 88.1% of overviews appeared on informational searches
  • 8.69% of overviews appeared in commercial searches (up from 6.28%)
  • 1.43% of overviews were included in navigational queries

The report also identified 5 industries that were most likely to trigger overviews in search:

  • Science (up 22.3%)
  • Health (up 20.3%)
  • People & Society (up 18.8%)
  • Law & Government (up 15.2%)
  • Travel (up 14.3%)

For more, read the full report from Semrush here. 

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AI Content Gets Lowest Rating From Google Quality Raters

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New directions given to Google’s quality raters tell them to look for signs that a page’s main content is AI-generated or otherwise made using automated tools. If a page is found to be primarily made with AI, according to Google’s John Mueller, raters are asked to rate it as “lowest quality.” 

Though this policy shift was apparently part of the January 2025 Search Quality Rater Guidelines update, Mueller first publicly revealed it this week while speaking at Search Central Live Madrid. 

Why This Matters

Though Search Quality Raters do not directly affect Google’s search results, their work is used to improve Google’s algorithms. The way they are asked to rank pages typically reflects Google’s overall internal guidelines.

Here’s what Google had to say when they updated the raters’ guidelines in January:

“As a reminder, these guidelines are what are used by our search raters to help evaluate the performance of our various search ranking systems, and their ratings don’t directly influence ranking. The guidelines share important considerations for what content is helpful for people when using Google Search. Our page on how to create helpful, people-first content summarizes these concepts for creators to help them self-assess their own content to be successful in Google Search.”

If Google is instructing its raters to give AI-generated content, it is a sign that the company is hardening its stance on AI content and moving to reduce its presence in search results. 

AI content has always been a risky prospect when it comes to SEO, but this is the one of the most significant signs we’ve seen from Google itself that AI-generated content may be unwelcome in search results.

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Danny Sullivan From Google Explains How Small Sites Can Compete Against Giants

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Google Search Liaison Danny Sullivan spent time during a recent Google Search Central Live NYC event to give advice to small, independent websites wanting to rank in the search engine against big brand competition.

Does Google Favor Big Brands?

According to a report from Search Engine Journal’s Roger Montti, Danny Sullivan spent part of the event answering questions from attendees. Sullivan’s advice to small brands was inspired by one suh question asking if Google was moving towards primarily showing a shrinking number of websites – specifically, big websites. 

While Sullivan said he understood the perception that Google Search is designed to favor big brands or that big brands will always outrank smaller sites, he emphatically stated this isn’t the case. 

In fact, Danny Sullivan told the crowd that Google is specifically working to improve how it handles smaller sites and give them more opportunities to be successful. 

“We’ve been spending a lot of time (and we’re going to continue to spend a lot of time) to understand how can we do a better job on better understanding and perhaps guiding some of the smaller creators and small independent sites so they can be successful. It has been like a huge chunk of my time over the past year. And I’m not alone in it.”

Why It Feels Like Google Favors Big Websites

During his response to the question, Sullivan spoke at length about what leads big brands to rank well and why it is difficult to detach that from how search works.

“And I’ve seen where people do research and say, ‘I’ve figured out that if you have a lot of branded searches…’ That’s kind of valid in some sense.

But it’s not like you have a lot of big branded searchers or small branded searchers or whatever and you’re finding that correlates to your traffic. What it’s saying is that people have recognized you as a brand, which is a good thing. We like brands. Some brands we don’t like, but at least we recognize them, right?

So if you’re trying to be found in the sea of content and you have the 150,000th fried chicken recipe, it’s very difficult to understand which ones of those are necessarily better than anybody else’s out there.

But if you are recognized as a brand in your field, big, small, whatever, just a brand, then that’s important.

That correlates with a lot of signals of perhaps success with search. Not that you’re a brand but that people are recognizing you. People may be coming to you directly, people, may be referring to you in lots of different ways… You’re not just sort of this anonymous type of thing.

So, one thing I would encourage anybody, but especially to smaller and independent ones that are kind of feeling like the big brands are kind of getting it all is, are you making sure that people understand who you are?”

What Small Sites Can Do To Compete

Reaching the crux of the discussion, Sullivan said that helping users and search engines understand who you are and what sets you apart are crucial for competing against bigger brands.

“Anytime you ever have a question about what you should be doing to be successful in Google search and your answer is to ask if it’s a good thing for your readers, if you do that, you are aligning with the things we’re trying to do because we’re trying to send people to satisfying content so that they go, ‘This was great! This is wonderful, I loved it!’

So when they wind up on your website, probably for the first time and they don’t know you from anything and they’re coming from this crazy world where they don’t even know where the profiling for the author is, make it easy for them. Make it easy for them to come into the site and know exactly what you’re about.

I know the travel bloggers, you all have the thing on the side that says, ‘we love travelling the world…’ It’s like, OK, that’s fine and at least people know to expect that from travel bloggers and you’ve got it there.

But help them understand what’s unique or different about you, that makes you a brand. And that is a really good thing.”

It is never easy to be David challenging a Goliath in your industry, but there are ways to overcome. By defining who you are clearly and what sets you apart from the bigger names, you give Google a better chance of understanding your website and why it should be prioritized over well-established international brands. 

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March 2025 Core Algorithm Update Starts Rolling Out To Google Search

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Google has started rolling out the latest major core algorithm update to its search engine, according to an announcement from the company yesterday. This update is expected to take approximately two weeks to fully finish rolling out. 

In a LinkedIn Post from Google Search Central, the company said:

“Today we released the March 2025 core update to Google Search. 

This is a regular update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites. We also continue our work to surface more content from creators through a series of improvements throughout this year. Some have already happened; additional ones will come later.”

This is the first core algorithm update of 2025, following the December 2024 core update. 

What To Expect

Unlike the last few core algorithm updates, Google has given very little information about what to expect from the latest rollout. This makes it hard to know what areas of search rankings are likely to be most affected by the algorithm update. 

That said, Google has given broad advice in the future about what to do if your rankings or traffic see a significant decline following a core algorithm update:

Avoid doing “quick fix” changes (like removing some page element because you heard it was bad for SEO). Instead, focus on making changes that make sense for your users and are sustainable in the long term.

Consider how you can improve your content in meaningful ways. For example, it could be that rewriting or restructuring your content makes it easier for your audience to read and navigate the page.

Deleting content is a last resort, and only to be considered if you think the content can’t be salvaged. In fact, if you’re considering deleting entire sections of your site, that’s likely a sign those sections were created for search engines first, and not people. If that’s the case for your site, then deleting the unhelpful content can help the good content on your site perform better.

For more information about recovering from a core algorithm update, Google suggests reviewing its advice for creating content that is reliable and helpful for your users.

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Google Says Audio Versions of Blog Content Won’t Help SEO

After years of speculation and debate among SEO experts, Google has finally clarified that audio versions of blog content are unlikely to help SEO or directly improve search rankings. Despite that, representatives from the search engine suggest it may still be worthwhile to provide audio versions of blog content for users’ sake. 

What Google Says About Audio Versions of Blog Content

In a recent SEO office hours video, Google Developer Advocate Martin Splitt was asked whether providing an audio version of a blog post might improve its search rankings. 

Splitt’s answer was straight to the point; it is very unlikely that audio versions of blog content would help rankings. 

“I don’t think it will… I think it is a good thing for the user, though, so I would definitely do it – but not, for SEO reasons.”

What About Indirect Benefits?

While Splitt states plainly that audio versions of content won’t help existing blog posts’ SEO, they do still provide positive value to your site. 

By providing audio versions of content, you are making your page more accessible to those with visual impairments, providing a secondary way for users to interact with content, and giving users a reason to stay on your pages longer. 

In other words, while audio versions of text blog content don’t improve SEO directly, they DO give good opportunities to indirectly boost your SEO. 

Perhaps more importantly, it also provides a better experience for users, sets you apart, and helps make a lasting impression on those who come to your site. 

Where User Experience and SEO Meet

While audio versions of blog content may not directly improve your rankings, they contribute to providing the best user experience possible—and Google’s rankings consider that. 

If you are considering adding audio versions of your blog content to your website, first ask yourself whether they will be valuable to your visitors and customers. If yes, there is a good chance your website (and your rankings) will benefit.

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Google’s CEO Gives Wide-Ranging Interview On The Future of Google and Search

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In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said he expects that search will “change profoundly” in 2025 led by advancements in AI and increasing competition from AI search, social media, and hardware advancements. 

Below, we’ve collected highlights from the interview that may give us a peak at Google’s plans for 2025 and beyond.

Google Aims To Be a Leader With AI Development

When asked about where Google is today in comparison to the rest of the market, Pichai emphasized that the company is in the early stages of developing radically powerful new AI tools. Additionally, he emphasized that AI developments that may not seem connected to the company are largely built on the back of research and development made possible with Google’s open-sourced technologies. 

“Look, it’s a such a dynamic moment in the industry. When I look at what’s coming ahead, we are in the earliest stages of a profound shift. We have taken such a deep full stack approach to AI.

…we do world class research. We are the most cited, when you look at gen AI, the most cited… institution in the world, foundational research, we build AI infrastructure and when I’m saying AI infrastructure all the way from silicon, we are in our sixth generation of tensor processing units. You mentioned our product reach, we have 15 products at half a billion users, we are building foundational models, and we use it internally, we provide it to over three million developers and it’s a deep full stack investment.

We are getting ready for our next generation of models, I just think there’s so much innovation ahead, we are committed to being at the state of the art in this field and I think we are. Just coming today, we announced groundbreaking research on a text and image prompt creating a 3D scene. And so the frontier is moving pretty fast, so looking forward to 2025.”

Using AI To Enhance Search Instead of Replace It

Increasingly, AI is viewed by many as a competitor to traditional search, leading the interviewer to ask what Google is doing to protect the “blue link economy” in order to not “hurt or cannibalize” its search engine and the market around it. 

In response, Pichai discussed how AI has been a major part of Google’s development for longer than most people realize. Going back as far as 2012, AI has been part of Deep Neural Networks used to identify speech and images. Since then, artificial intelligence has been a core part of the search engine’s development. 

“The area where we applied AI the most aggressively, if anything in the company was in search, the gaps in search quality was all based on Transformers internally. We call it BERT and MUM and you know, we made search multimodal, the search quality improvements, we were improving the language understanding of search. That’s why we built Transformers in the company.

So and if you look at the last couple of years, we have with AI overviews, Gemini is being used by over a billion users in search alone.”

Where Is Search Going In 2025?

Looking forward, Pichai says he believes Search will be radically changing – and soon. While he says that advancement is becoming more difficult because the easiest innovations have already been done, he still believes that people will be surprised at how much is coming in just the first part of 2025.

“And I just feel like we are getting started. Search itself will continue to change profoundly in 2025. I think we are going to be able to tackle more complex questions than ever before. You know, I think we’ll be surprised even early in 2025, the kind of newer things search can do compared to where it is today… 

I think the progress is going to get harder when I look at 2025, the low hanging fruit is gone.

But I think where the breakthroughs need to come from where the differentiation needs to come from is is your ability to achieve technical breakthroughs, algorithmic breakthroughs, how do you make the systems work, you know, from a planning standpoint or from a reasoning standpoint, how do you make these systems better? Those are the technical breakthroughs ahead.”

Will AI Replace Traditional Search?

As increasing numbers of people seem to be relying on AI tools to get quick answers instead of using traditional search tools, some have suggested that AI could eventually replace search as we know it. At the same time, there are concerns that AI may be delivering less reliable or accurate answers, which Pichai believes will ensure that Google’s search tools remain relevant if not more valuable. 

“In a world in which you’re flooded with like lot of content …if anything, something like search becomes more valuable. In a world in which you’re inundated with content, you’re trying to find trustworthy content, content that makes sense to you in a way reliably you can use it, I think it becomes more valuable.

To your previous part about there’s a lot of information out there, people are getting it in many different ways. Look, information is the essence of humanity. We’ve been on a curve on information… when Facebook came around, people had an entirely new way of getting information, YouTube, Facebook, Tik… I can keep going on and on.

…I think the problem with a lot of those constructs is they are zero sum in their inherent outlook. They just feel like people are consuming information in a certain limited way and people are all dividing that up. But that’s not the reality of what people are doing. “

The full interview touches on several other questions including potential upcoming regulations, how the search engine views its responsibility towards creators, and other Google platforms like YouTube’s future direction. You can watch it here or below:

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Googles Latest Core Update Finishes Rolling Out

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If your website has seen a big drop in traffic within the past month, there is a chance you’ve been hit by the latest Google core update. The update started rolling out on November 11 and has now been confirmed to be finished as of December 5, 2024. 

Compared to other core updates, this one does not seem to be the most impactful. Early analytics as the core update rolled out did not show the level of volatility in search results typical of most core updates. Still, Google confirmed that this was a core update aimed at improving search results quality and decreasing the prevalence of irrelevant results across the platform. 

As Google said about the update:

“This update is designed to continue our work to improve the quality of our 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.”

Interestingly, Google specifically emphasized in private communications with Search Engine Land that the update would not be restoring rankings to pages affected by the September 2023 helpful content update. 

What To Do If You’ve Been Hit

Google didn’t provide much information about the core update, so currently it is difficult to gauge what types of sites are likely to have been affected or what specific steps can be taken to remedy your site if you’ve been hit.

The search engine does provide some broad advice about responding to loss of rankings following core updates generally:

  •  Avoid doing “quick fix” changes (like removing some page element because you heard it was bad for SEO). Instead, focus on making changes that make sense for your users and are sustainable in the long term.
  • Consider how you can improve your content in meaningful ways. For example, it could be that rewriting or restructuring your content makes it easier for your audience to read and navigate the page.
  • Deleting content is a last resort, and only to be considered if you think the content can’t be salvaged. In fact, if you’re considering deleting entire sections of your site, that’s likely a sign those sections were created for search engines first, and not people. If that’s the case for your site, then deleting the unhelpful content can help the good content on your site perform better.

It will likely be months until Google releases another core update, so any changes to search results in recovery from this update may take a while to occur. This goes to emphasize the importance of staying on the good side of Google, using approved SEO strategies, and trying to avoid any potential penalties before they occur.

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Google Now Supports The AVIF File Format Making It The Best Format For SEO

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This week Google announced that it now supports the AVIF file format, making the format eligible to be shown in Google Search and Google Images. Now that the search engine can index and display the popular file format, it will likely become the standard for lightweight high-quality images online quickly. 

What Is The AVIF File Format?

AVIF (AVI Image File Format) is a relatively new open-source file format used for images, that can deliver the same quality images as JPEGs or PNGs in remarkably smaller file formats (up to 50% smaller than a comparable JPEG). 

Notably, the format seems to combine all the most notable features of other popular image formats. AVIF supports the use of transparency like PNG and even has a higher dynamic range level, allowing for deeper blacks in images. Like GIFs, also allows for the creation of animated images.

What About WebP?

Another newly popular image file format, WebP, might seem like a competitor to AVIF but both formats offer their unique benefits which make them suited for specific needs. 

WebP is an ideal format for lossless images – typically used when an image must be of the absolute highest quality possible. On the other hand, WebP is not nearly as small as AVIF, so it is not ideal for those focused on maintaining fast loading speeds. 

Why The AVIF File Format May Help SEO

Over the last few years, Google has increasingly emphasized website speed as a major factor it considers when ranking websites.

The search engine has begun using a selection of metrics that measure different aspects of site speed, known as Core Web Vitals. 

Because the AVIF file format allows for smaller image sizes, it can help reduce loading speeds on web pages and potentially improve your online rankings. 

In an environment where any edge against the competition can be the difference to help you get the top spot, sites will quickly be moving to adopt the format now that Google supports it.

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