How do you optimise your website for Googles new AI Search?

It’s impressive because it’s been fed tons of text and code, so it’s got the ability to understand and reply to even complex questions. In answer, Google has promised to take great care in ensuring the reliability of the generated information to make sure it is as accurate as possible to dispel these concerns. To achieve this, Google will meticulously reference the websites it utilised to help generate the answer. By citing the sources, Google empowers users to evaluate the information provided & verify it from the original context if they wish. This transparency is intended to reinforce trust & encourage users to rely on the AI-generated answers. This type of content is used to form content moats to increase brand visibility for related and tangential search queries relevant to users who are the target audience for the end product or service.

Where a featured snippet pulls out a sentence or two from an existing page, the AI snapshot generates a brand new answer – consolidating and summarising multiple sources from around the web. The company continues to address AI large language models’ tendency to make stuff up as it did with the Google Bard chatbot. It says on its website that “there are known limitations with generative AI and LLMs, and Search, even today, will not always get it right”. At the moment, complex searches have to be broken down into smaller parts, leaving users to filter information to piece together the exact answer they want.

Testing the Potential of Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE)

These are normally based on longer phrases along the same topic and generally have less competition than the shorter top of funnel queries. Firstly that it’ll help searchers “easily get up to speed on a new or complicated topic.” It’ll use AI to add extra details to the result box rather than suggest just links that we’d have to explore or basic snippets. Integrating credible external sources, such as third party mentions, interviews, and corroborations from multiple sites, bolsters the authority and reliability of our content. This step increases the likelihood of our content being considered for SGE, thus improving our overall search visibility. We asked Google ‘how to boil eggs’ and it served us a very confusing recipe, that consisted of multiple different cooking times and non-chronological, repeated instructions! Of course, the time it takes to boil an egg is subjective, depending on whether you’d like a hard boiled egg or a runny yolk, which means different search listings will recommend different times.

Moreover, the company made a major improvement in SGE that reduces the time it takes to generate AI overviews by half. To help you better understand how recent the information is from the web pages, the tech giant also added publish dates to links. “As we’ve shared, in this experience, Search ads will continue to appear in dedicated ad slots throughout the page,” Google said.

Develop Simple Informational Queries and Add More Context

In short, our advice as a 10-year experienced SEO agency, one of the best strategies is to follow Google’s best practices in SEO. It is pretty exciting and helpful for those who have time to watch it, especially for SEO practitioners. However, as anyone who has used generative AI will tell you, it’s great at creating formulaic content but not necessarily so good at anything that involves original ideas or new thinking. In the short term, this could lead to an explosion in the amount of low-value content that simply rehashes old ideas. This could have a democratizing effect on content creation, as businesses (and individuals) no longer need specialist SEO knowledge. Similar to how Google updates work now, SGE will likely continuously adapt and learn from information available and adapt different ways of displaying it to users.

• But this doesn’t mean that you cannot optimize your website as well, as optimization does not end with publishing a new post or page but continues, and it’s more like an ongoing process.
• The Generative AI content produced for this commercial type query is typically quite generic but interestingly features reviews and stores as part of the answer.
• This will ultimately enhance the user experience and establish SGE as a valuable resource for accurate and relevant search results.
• In conclusion, Google’s Search Generative Experience is an exciting development in AI-powered search engines.

As explained in Google’s blog post, this feature is powered by Bard, a new generative AI model that can understand webpages and answer questions about them. Bard is also available as an API for developers who want to use it for their own applications. According to Google’s blog post, this feature is built on Google’s Shopping Graph, which has more than 35 billion product listings from various sources. This makes it the world’s most comprehensive dataset of constantly-changing products, sellers, brands, reviews and inventory out there.

The point is, Google’s existing search experience isn’t designed to handle such complex queries. Even if it accurately interprets the intent of the query – and all of the conditions included in it – the search experience can only return a list of results. SGE, however, may prove to be most disruptive to how we navigate the web today. This AI search experience pushes links to articles below the digital fold, summarizing the response to a search query up top as a conversational, ChatGPT-style paragraph. In theory, web searchers could get all the answers they need on the search results page; no need to click into the web pages from which SGE is pulling its answers. The new Search facility is currently being launched English-only on Chrome desktop and the Google App in the U.S., with further details of the roll-out coming soon.

Considering follow up questions users might ask and including content to answer these follow ups will also make sense. I.e. “buy [branded product] online” might lead a certain percentage of searchers to follow up with “how much does [branded product] cost? ” content that could effectively and succinctly cover the topic will become more valuable, as well as effective journey paths for users navigating to these pages. With traditional search, you would have to start a new session (with a new query) and hope Google can deliver relevant results. With the new AI search experience, you can explore topics in a linear process with Google remembering what you’ve already searched for and refining results as you provide more context.

Rather than just giving factual responses like singular date strings or specific metrics try to add context to the question like the search query. If your website is focused on simple informational queries that can easily be answered by an AI or language model, then you may want to consider adding depth to the topics you cover on your website. Through the use of AI, Google’s search experience will be receiving an update to make general searches much more user friendly and efficient in terms of finding relevant and important information. Google’s blog post states how this feature is powered by PaLM 2, a new generative AI model that can create summaries and suggestions based on various sources of information. PaLM 2 is also available as an API for developers who want to use it for their own applications. When you turn on Google with AI, you will be able to see how Google uses AI to power some of its products and services, such as Google Photos, Google Translate, and Google Assistant.

Google also said people liked to be able to ask follow-up questions and say they’re now asking longer and more conversational questions in full sentences. That’s a different experience than traditional Google searches where users simply type in a few keywords to start a query. Whether it’s dining, local searches, or shopping, a single prompt will offer a range of personalized result types for users to make a faster buying decision.

Productivity

“It’s going to upend the SEO industry, as everyone fights to be in the AI summary rather than in the links now pushed down below,” he said. It could also have huge ramifications for how people search and even what they search for. “So instead of genrative ai asking a series of questions and piecing together that information yourself, Search now can do some of that heavy lifting for you,” explained Google in a blogpost. These new Google updates allows us to search in way more detail than we do now.