Google’s AI Overviews are revolutionising how people find information, services and products on Google.
But how has this impacted website owners and the traffic they receive to their site? How have Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) practices changed and what can you do to optimise your website for Google AI Overviews & Other LLMs?
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What are Google AI Overviews?
Google AI overviews utilise Google Gemini, Google’s step into the world of AI chatbots based on LLM (Large Language Models). An LLM refers to AI models that can generate natural answers using a large amount of linguistic data (which Google has plenty of!).
The introduction of Google AI Overviews has seen a loss of traffic for many websites, with some sites ranked #1 organically losing up to 79% of their traffic for that query if shown below an AI overview. But how can website owners limit these drops in traffic and appear more prominently in AI overviews?
Does the Introduction of Google AI Overviews Mean SEO is Dead?
The process of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) involves the improvement of a website to increase its visibility on search engines such as Google and Bing. For years this has been based on improving a number of factors related to Google’s algorithm such as:
- Technical improvements such as improving site speed
- Adding target keywords to the site
- Creating useful content around your product/service
- Building domain authority through backlinks
But, have the changes to Google and Bing using the implementation of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Gemini and Chat GPT changed the fundamentals of how a site is optimised?
What better way to understand whether the introduction of Google AI Overviews means for SEO than by querying Google Gemini:
Thanks Gemini, it’s good to know SEO professionals will still have a job!
Quite simply, the fundamentals of SEO won’t change due to Gemini. Your site will still need to be technically sound; showcase the right keywords on the right pages; feature quality, informative content and have a solid backlink profile, which will be a big relief for SEOs doing their job properly.
However, as mentioned in Gemini’s answer ‘Gemini’s advanced AI aims to understand search intent better, providing more direct answers within search results, potentially reducing the need for users to click on links’. This is a concern for site owners who produce informational content in order to generate traffic for their site who may find they are not receiving the clicks they used to as Gemini answers the query without needing a click through to their site.
The answer is also interesting as it mentions “SEOs need to optimize for both direct answers and traditional search results, focusing on concise, high-quality content that satisfies user intent“. With SEOs traditionally focusing on long-form, informational content it’s important the word ‘concise’ in here – we are seeing more and more of these short and detailed answers featured in the results, meaning SEOs should consider developing clear, short answers in order to be featured in the links section of the AI overview.
The other concern for site owners is the idea that organic traffic could drop (and it has for many already). This is due to the rise in ‘zero click’ results, meaning no clicks are required to any site for any of the sites producing informational content. Below is an example of a informational AI query result for ‘How can I improve my sleep’?:
As you can see the result contains a good overview withou the need to click through to any of these sites (although a link is supplied to reference each point).
Despite this, Google fundamentally remains a search engine meaning they have to by definition serve up results from the data it uses for the queries.
If they choose to prioritise AI content over user-generated website content or not source the original data properly, it will likely lead to a drop in traffic for some informational terms for publishers.
Although there will likely be several tweaks on how Google displays generative AI responses in the future, we have listed some SEO tips for Google AI Overviews based:
What is GEO? Have SEOs Just Had a Job Change?
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) refers to the process of optimising content specifically for generative AI platforms, such as AI-powered search engines or assistants that produce direct answers rather than serving traditional search engine result pages (SERPs).
Unlike conventional SEO, which targets algorithms that rank webpages, GEO focuses on how content is structured, phrased, and attributed to ensure it is effectively indexed, interpreted, and surfaced by large language models (LLMs).
This involves techniques such as clear entity linking, maintaining factual consistency, using concise and authoritative language, and ensuring brand or author attribution is embedded in a way that AI systems can identify and reference (more on this below).
As generative engines increasingly shape how users access information, GEO represents an important shift in digital content strategy:
How to Optimise your Content for Google’s AI Overviews?
Ensuring your content is featured in Google AI Overviews is vital however to do this, we come back to creating quality, concise content that answers specific queries around your product or service.
But how else will we be able to optimise your site for Google Gemini? Let’s ask Gemini what it thinks:
Let’s expand on each of these points to see how they can be implemented in practice:
Create comprehensive, informative content
It’s no use creating pages of content that serve solely to rank for specific terms or keywords, the page in question also needs to comprehensively answer that query for its specific search intent in a structured and thoughtful way.
We would go beyond this and say you should be using common long-tail keyword queries as headings (see how we have done this in this post as an example!) where appropriate – meaning it is more likely to be featured by Gemini as one of their featured snippets.
You may want to actively target these Google Gemini AI overview by building out the FAQ section on your site to include more clear, concise answers to some common queries around your product/service.
Whilst Google Gemini is the biggest change to its search engine in years, it’s clear that creating quality, expert content that answers specific queries still reigns supreme.
Optimise for both users for AI
An important one! Content should mainly be written for humans – remember that content that resonates with humans will rank more effectively (and improve how people perceive your business).
It’s worth ensuring your content is not too dry and remains natural and written to appeal to the reader (and not just to search engines or AI).
Focus on user intent and long-tail keywords
Keywords are a vital part of SEO – and always will be. Identifying the top keywords for your business and adding them to relevant on pages to your site will always be crucial.
As Gemini is a large language model, it has been trained on a huge dataset of text and code, including search results from its staggeringly large database. This means that Gemini is able to comprehend a wide range of keywords and phrases and keyword relevancy so will serve your website for results if a query is asked that relates to that term.
However, it’s no use creating pages of content that serve solely to rank for specific terms or keywords, the page in question also needs to comprehensively answer that specific query for its specific search intent in a structured and thoughtful way.
As a simple example for hotel SEO, if your website includes an on-page heading for the long-tail phrase ‘What are some 5-star hotel options near London’s West End?’, your page will be much more likely to be surfaced on generative engines such as Google AI Overviews.
Enhance content with visuals
Images and videos definitely help to break up the text, make content more engaging and give visual aides to the reader. By adding keyword-rich alt tags, these images can also be indexed on Google search possibly bringing in more traffic to your website.
Improve site structure and navigation
Internal linking is the process of cross-linking pages on your website, ideally using popular keywords in the anchor text.
Internal linking both helps to make your website easier to navigate whilst also helping search engines such as Google understand the importance of different pages on your site and thus what terms to rank them for.
It seems that Gemini will use the same process to determine what results to serve in its responses, so make sure you keep linking to the most important pages on your site using target keywords for that page.
Sitemaps and robots.txt are two files that are key for search engines to understand the structure and indexability of your site.
A sitemap is a file that acts as an index of the URLs on your website. A robots.txt file is a file that tells search engines which pages on your website can be crawled and which should be ignored.
As with regular search engine results, bots will be crawling your website to understand which content to index or not and the same process will be used for Gemini’s results.
Ensuring your site is well-structured and crawlable remains a vital aspect of SEO that will continue with the introduction of Gemini.
Summary: What does Google AI Overviews Mean for the Future of SEO?
It’s clear that AI has changed how search (and generative) engines present their results and thus how SEO as a process is conducted.
Whilst it’s still relatively early to see how to optimise a site for Gemini, it’s clear that many of the fundamentals of SEO will retain their importance, with a focus on a well-structured, technically sound site with quality, keyword-rich content the key to success.
If you’ve been following SEO best practice, there shouldn’t be too much to scare you in all this, although you may see certain clicks to your website drop away as Google simply answers the query without a web link.
However, there are undoubtedly some important changes you can take to ensure your site remains relevant for generative AI searches, which include creating more concise, info-heavy content to be more likely to get featured in AI overviews as well as considering how you can integrate more long-tail queries into your on-site content.
Looking for a Google AI SEO Expert to Help Optmise your Website?
If you want to understand SEO for Google AI Overviews and increase your website traffic, Search Hog can help. Or maybe you have seen your web traffic drop since Google AI overviews were introduced and want to recover some of that traffic?
Search Hog are AI SEO Experts that can help your site rank higher and bring in more traffic to your website using both traditional organic search and LLMs. Contact us today to find out more.
