VIDEO: AI + SEO, the current trends

For too long now I’ve been meaning to record videos and use them for blog posts. For various reasons I’ve not done it: legitimate focus on other more pressing work, procrastination, fear of looking like a dork, you name it.

In January I bought a fancy microphone and got all the software to record and edit HD videos. I added various video related tasks to ClickUp in February and did… precisely nothing.

So today, I recorded a video. I’m not that happy with it, but it exists and is live on the blog.

If you’re reading this please treat this as an experiment and as public accountability to do more and better videos soon.

And who knows, maybe something in the vid or accompanying post will be helpful!

This blog post is based heavily on the video transcript, ~95% overlap.

If you’re asking “why is my organic traffic dropping?!”, this post for you.

I’m going to take a look at the direction SEO is moving in, summarising learnings from this webinar by GetStat and two articles – one by Moz, the other by GetStat.

I’ll refer to the AI overview on Google and AI mode, which are two distinct things, so make sure you’re familiar (head to Google, search something, the AI overview is at the top of the normal results, AI mode is a separate tab you can switch to).

AI + SEO: the current trends

The current trends in search and AI search are part of a long-term shift away from gameable search queries to natural conversational search.

Google’s goal is, and arguably always has been, showing users the most relevant thing to their needs as quickly as possible.

They now have far more sophisticated tools to understand what their users need in granular detail, and even to help their users refine their understanding beyond where it might be at the point of search.

As a result, demonstrating what your product or service does and all the situations where it’s a good fit is the focus. You’re helping Google understand the link between you and the needs of potential users.

The desired outcome is more visibility in all relevant related searches across different result types versus just a focus on traditional organic search results.

In an ideal world, success now means less sweating the metrics and more trusting the process, engaging by tangible business outcomes like sales and inquiries, rather than through proxies like clicks and traffic.

The top level issue: organic is dropping 📉

A lot of businesses are seeing their organic search is dropping across the board. If you feel this, you can rest assured it’s not just you.

The GetStat webinar proves pretty comprehensively that it’s happening across all sorts of sectors. Traditional organic results count for less than 50 percent of position one search results with the rest being features, and they are hoovering up traffic.

As a result clicks are dropping, often because people get the information they need within the features rather than clicking through to a result to find it.

And with clicks formerly being one of the most important KPIs for sharing movement from search results pages to websites, this disruption in metrics is causing anxieties for companies who track their SEO, for agency clients, and so on.

It’s getting harder to demonstrate value and ROI with traditional metrics, making these metrics and their interpretations less reliable.

The top level goal: more AI visibility 🧠

The top level goal is increasing visibility in those features of all types, and being able to link that visibility to an increase in commercial outcomes like purchases.

It’s also about the psychological shift of feeling that this is where value is demonstrated, rather than traditional metrics. And that’s a real challenge: getting that buy-in that the metrics to look at are changing.

What’s the same?

We’ll look at what’s the same briefly because there is an important through line that connects search 20 years ago with today, and that is satisfying user search intent.

This has been the goal of search since the beginning: 20 years ago Google was trying to connect people to what they needed to meet their needs, and the same is true today. The only difference is the level of sophistication involved.

So, Google is pushing for optimisation for longer tail keywords to capture users’ increasingly granular search intent, and also to train their AI models to get better at doing this in the future. They’re encouraging people to search in a way that will increase the sophistication of their search algorithms, and that is an ongoing process.

The take-home here is that longer tail queries need answering on your website to make sure Google associates you with the information it thinks its users are requesting.

It’s about perception of the entity for the user as much as it is for the AI engines, and this leads to shifts in KPIs and attribution. The things to focus on become:

• The quality of information presented about your brand in generated features
• The amount of brand mentions in AI overviews: their frequency and their accuracy
• Positive mentions and citations in related areas
• Conversions on your website

The question is, are you a coherent entity in a relevant ecosystem that Google understands well enough to display, and are people behaving as you want them to on their website?

Less emphasis on how people move from the search engine to your website, more on how they behave when they get there.

Limitations with traditonal metrics

Traditional KPIs are also limited in part by inaccuracies in GA4 tracking. The Direct channel is less useful than it used to be because it’s a catch-all for all non-referrer traffic.

There are also limitations in organic tracking because we can’t reliably split out traditional results from traffic coming from features, AI overviews, AI modes and so on.

Google Search Console limits long-tail queries for privacy reasons so we can’t access those as reliably, all combining to make it harder to get as clear a picture as previously of where traffic is coming from.

What this means for your business

To recap the goal is visibility in features.

And to summarise, what’s happening in search at the moment – and the reason for the organic drop a lot of people are seeing – is the next step in a long-term shift away from gameable search queries to natural conversational search.

Google wants to show users the most relevant thing to their needs as quickly as possible, and they now have far more sophisticated tools to do so with the advent of AI.

Demonstrating what your product or service does in all the situations where it’s a good fit is the focus. The desired outcome is more visibility in all related searches, AI or otherwise.

And in an ideal world, you’ll be looking less at metrics like clicks and traffic and more at tangible business outcomes.