Google's AI Mode is Here. What Does it Mean for Your Business? Ep. 136

Google's AI Mode is here, and you need to know what it means to your SEO and your business visibility online. 

Things are changing quickly, my friend. If you don't adjust your strategy, your website traffic may likely decrease. You need to be ready for AI Mode, and I'm walking you through what to do to protect your website's visibility, SEO, and traffic. 

We'll even talk about how to do SEO for AI Mode, Overviews, and ChatGPT because our strategy needs to expand if we're going to keep up with the changes. 

Transcript

0:32

Hi there. Welcome back to the simple SEO podcast. So this week I actually had a different podcast episode already recorded, scheduled, edited, all of that, but things are changing quickly in Google's world, and so I wanted to swap it out and bring you a new. Different one because this is super, super relevant right now, and so I wanna make sure that you get this information immediately. Even though you know, I'm on kind of not summer break, but I'm summer part-time because Christopher's been home with me. So today I wanna talk about Google's AI mode and what it means for you and your business because it's here. So in March, Google started testing AI mode and AI mode. If you're not familiar yet, it looks very much like chat, GPT. So it is. A new tab on our Google search results page. You know how you have the standard tab that's got all the different websites that we're used to? Now it's got the AI overviews at the top of the page where it's giving information. They have added a new tab. It's generally to the left of your original tab. If you're on your Google search results page, you'll very likely see an option that says AI mode. If you click on that. It is giving you all of the information to answer your search query without necessarily having to go through to a website to find the information. So I just wanna make sure you're aware this is here. I know it's brand new. They just barely started testing it. I got access to it I think in late April, early May, and now they're already rolling it out. So they're rolling this out. Faster than they did AI overviews. They're rolling it out faster than they roll out a lot of their updates. So we need to talk about it because it's going to change things for you. So if you want to remain relevant and continue to be visible and get website traffic, you're going to have to adjust your strategies to accommodate Google's AI mode. Because if you don't, if you don't do anything. Your visibility is very likely going to drop. So let's talk about it real quick and kind of what we need to do. I personally think that AI mode is a direct response to chat GPT and its search capabilities, because while Google still has the lion's share of search, they still have like 95%, 90. No, they did just drop in Q4. They dropped to like 88%, but they still have the majority of the search chat. GPT is gaining steam and it is picking up in popularity in large part because of how conversational it is when you're searching and it gives you different information. And so I think Google is using AI mode to try to combat that because. Chat GPT. While their search share is small, it is growing fast and there have been models that have said that they predict that chat GPT could potentially surpass Google for searches in the future. So Google needs to obviously make changes to stay relevant. We as publishers, business owners. Website owners have to also make changes to stay relevant. So let's talk about this. So we talked a little bit about AI mode. It is a whole AI tab in your Google search results. So when you go to Google and you type in a question, you're very likely going to see the AI overviews, which rolled out last year. They're in the top of the page that's gonna give you some information, a little bit of detail, but it still sends you to. Other websites, it still has other websites on the page. Now, AI Mode is an entire new search tab that is all AI information. At this point in time, it is not the default. You have to click through to go over to it from the traditional search results page. However, if people use this more, my guess is Google will ultimately make. It, the default search page. What does that mean for you? Is this going to hurt your website traffic? Because that I'm sure is the next question that you have. So in all honesty, it's possible this may hurt your website traffic. If you do nothing. If you do not adapt, you do not change your strategy. You do not work with Google and now AI Mode and Chat, GPT and all of this. Yes you are. Website traffic is at risk, so we're going to have to adjust what we do. The latest that I've seen is that I think it was around 40%. It was in an article I read last week, I think it was around 40% of searches now have an AI overview or an AI answer, meaning Google thinks that people don't necessarily need to click through to find additional information. On that many of the queries that they're searching on Google each day. So what we wanna think about is how do we stay relevant? How do we stay visible? How do we show up in those AI overviews because that's going to be more important than ever. So our AI overviews and now AI mode, like is it changing everything? In some ways, yes, in some ways, no. AI overviews themselves remind me. A lot of direct answers and direct answers came out in 2012, so having additional information at the top of the Google search page is something we've had since 2012, which was 13 years ago. I know it may not feel like it, but it was 13 years ago, so we've had this for a long time. My favorite example of a direct answer. Is how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon? Well, there's three teaspoons in a tablespoon. There will always be three teaspoons in a tablespoon. We don't really need to read an entire blog post to find out that there are three teaspoons in a tablespoon. Google can give us that information right at the top of the page. We can move on with our lives. We know what we need to know to adapt because. Who knows where the kid put the tablespoon, and all you have is the teaspoon to work with when you're making dinner. Not that that's ever happened to anybody, so that is what a direct answer was. I kind of see AI overviews being similar. It's a small amount of information. It's a blurb. You can click on the little bear claw there. You can find out and see, you know, what websites did they find the information from. You can get more, et cetera. So what's different is AI mode. So if you haven't seen it yet, you haven't used it, I want you to go to Google Search something. If you get the AI overview, take a look at that and then click on AI mode. Like I said, it's gonna be up at the top of your search bar towards the left. It's usually just below wherever you typed in what you were searching for. Click on AI mode because AI mode is much more in depth, it's much more detail. It's longer. It's got a lot more information now. What content might be hurt by AI mode? If you have a lot of top of the funnel, very general, very how to basic information, um, it's likely that you will see a drop in traffic because the information in the AI summary is fine. It answers the question, it helps the person. It's kind of like the direct answer. And how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon. Nobody needed to come to your website for that in the first place. Now if you want to stay relevant, you want to continue to get traffic to your website, you're going to need to adjust your content strategy, and you're going to need to think about what other questions does my ideal customer have? How do I help them? How do I keep my content strategy so that Google and the new AI bots like Chat, GPT, and Perplexity and everybody know that I am a great resource for this information? You're really gonna have to think about this and we need to balance it. Because it's those more in depth, detailed, nuanced queries that we are seeing. Somebody wants to learn more about a subject, they're more likely to look at even AI mode and decide to dig deeper. So if you have a website that is full of top of funnel, very basic information, very. Simple how-tos, like I have some old posts that are things like how to write a meta description or how, you know, what is a meta description. Those are not going to get traffic at this point because they're really not what people need to go read a blog post on, because an overview, an AI overview or something in AI mode can say. A meta description is an SEO element. It's approximately 160 characters. You should include your keyword in it. Like you can get enough information from that that you really don't need to read a blog post. So I am anticipating traffic will drop on posts like that. However, posts like this Google AI mode is here. What does it mean for your business? This is more in depth. This is gonna give you more information, it's more helpful. So yes, you're gonna be able to get. Some info in AI mode, but how does it work for your business? How do you apply it? What do you need to do? That's probably not going to be all be covered in the AI overview or in AI mode, so you're more likely going to want to click through and go and read the blog post, listen to the podcast, et cetera to learn more about it. So then I want you to think about that. We need to adjust our content strategy. We need to be willing to think about what will and will not work Next, I want you to think about how do we optimize to be in AI overviews? AI mode chat, GPT perplexity. The world of search is changing. If you are still only focused on Google, you will be left behind. So we really need to make sure. That not only are we optimizing for Google, because Google does still matter. We've talked about that a lot on the podcast recently. Google does still matter. It is not going away. SEO is not dead, but it is definitely changing and this is the biggest change we've had in a while. And what I want you to look at is. How do we get included in there? So I want you to start thinking about writing your content for Google and ai. So the good news is that we're seeing that our traditional SEO best practices are not only important to our traditional Google search results, the page with all the websites on it, but they also. Are important for ai, so AI overviews, AI mode chat, GPT Perplexity, all of them are also relying on our traditional SEO best practices. If you don't know what those are, get my beginner's guide to SEO. It will walk through what those are. That's gonna work for Google and ai. So that's gonna get you started. Then what you're gonna need to do. Is to format your content for AI inclusion. Now, AI does not look at key words the way that traditional SEO does. AI is more about the phrases. It's more about being conversational. It's more about having the words that it's looking for, that it anticipates there. So what they're saying from an AI optimization standpoint is that we want to create great content. That's helpful. Sounds familiar, right? That's what we do with Google. But here we wanna make sure that we are focusing on answering specific questions for our readers. One question for each blog post. So staying very. Focused on that one question, being in depth, providing value, being helpful. Don't just give the surface level information because again, you're not going to. Get results. If all you're giving is information they can get anywhere else, you need to be unique and different. Add in your EEAT variables, so your experience, your expertise, your authority, your trust. Help your audience understand why you're different in how you can help them. It also helps Google and now the AI search engines. Understand how you are different, then you want to make sure that you're formatting it for ai because AI is going to read it differently. They're going to read your traditional Google signals. They still need your site to be fast. They still need it to be technically sound. They still need to have content that makes sense and they need it to link together and all of that so they understand the context and the content and everything. For ai, you're going and it really, honestly. This is also beneficial for your reader. You want it to have short paragraphs. You want to have extra white space between your paragraphs. You wanna break up your text so it's easier to scan and understand. You want to use headings or header tags. We talk about your H two and your H three tags. You want to include those in your content and you want to use. Questions or phrases there? Consider using the headings that you see in Google's. People also ask within your header tags when you are creating new blog posts. So when you're doing your keyword research and you're looking and you're refining, if you're one of my students, you know how I teach you to do this process. Now, I want you, we've started talking about this a bit in the group. I want you to take note of what people are. What is there, and people also ask and see if it's applicable and relevant to what you're writing about because that can be a way that you optimize to have a better chance of showing up in ai. The other thing we're seeing that really works, AI likes a small FAQ section. At the bottom for maximum searchability Skimm ability, because AI remember is looking for matches on the text and the phrases more so than the keyword. So we wanna make sure we have the information that it expects to see. Now, you may be wondering, can your old content rank in AI mode? It can. I have blog posts that I wrote many, many years ago that are ranking in AI mode. Um, and AI overviews and on chat, GPT. So if you have a wealth of old blog posts and you're not sure what to do, what to focus on first. What I want you to do is just go through and work on'em one at a time. You don't have to do all of them at once. Start with the ones that are the most popular, meaning the ones that get the most traffic or the ones that have keywords that are ranking the highest. Refresh, the SEO if necessary at just the keyword targeting. If you need, look at the formatting, decide if you need to adjust your content or your formatting to have a better chance to help the AI search engines understand the information and do all of this because this. Is going to make a difference in helping you stay visible. So like I said, just start with one, do the refresh. You don't have to do all of them. Just focus on one at a time and start working on it. If you're creating new content, make sure you're creating new content with Google. And AI search in mind. Now, if you are ready to do this, you wanna learn how to do it. You want somebody to show you what it looks like, what to do, walk you through it step by step. Just make this easy. Join me in simple SEO content and I'm gonna walk you through exactly what to do step by step by step. You can sign up, I'll put the link in the. Show notes are in the description for you. Um, you can find it on the website or if you go to etched marketing.com/yes, because you are a podcast listener or if you sign up for the webinar and take the free live the free class that's on the website. You'll save$500. So do that. Don't pay full price like you're here. You're in my world. You should get the better price. So go to etched marketing.com/yes or take the free class. Either way, you'll have access to the discounted rate for simple SEO content. You can do this. It is changing. We need to adjust our strategy for AI mode. AI overviews chat, GPT, all of it. If you do not adjust now, you will very likely see a dip in your website Traffic. In the coming months because more people are starting to search via ai. And like I said, if Google decides that this is what works better, people like it better, this could potentially become the Google search page, the default search page, rather than the one that we're used to with all the websites. So if you wanna continue getting traffic. You gotta learn how to play the game and show up in AI search as well. Alright, I know this is longer than normal, but this one was a really important one. I'm going to go ahead and move things around so that it comes out for you next week. So you're not gonna know it's next week, but this is the very next podcast episode that I'm going to release, which is not normal for me. I am actually. My other ones I'm recording now are my July ones, so I'm sliding this one in here so that you can get it right away because it's so important. Alright, thanks for being here. Bye for now. I'll see you next week.