AI Search VS Google Search which is more important for SEO in 2026? Ep. 166

What matters most for SEO this year? Is AI search or Google search more important? How do they differ? Where do you want your business to show up? Find out what matters to your online marketing program so your business can be visible and grow in 2026. 

Transcript

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Hi, and welcome back to the podcast. I am your host, Rachel Lindteigen, and I'm really excited to have you here with me today learning about how to grow your business online in 2026. All these things that we can do. So today I wanted to answer a question that I am getting quite often in the free classes. You know, I'm teaching the free classes live once a week. If you've not joined, be sure you get signed up. The link is. The link to that is in the description, or you can just go to etched marketing.com/freebies to get yourself signed up for that. So in that class, we're talking all about how all of this is working, Google search, AI search, what's happening, how it works, how you get leads, how you show up in there, what the opportunity is. There's so much going on right now, it's so exciting. So I keep getting the question of which one is more important. If I'm only gonna focus on one, do I focus on AI or do I focus on traditional Google, SEO? And so I wanna talk about that today because I. Only focusing on one is a mistake. We need to focus on both. And I know sometimes it can feel a little overwhelming to be like, oh my gosh, I can't do that. I have to do this, I have to do that. It's so involved. What I want you to understand is it's not so involved, and I want you to stop thinking of AI and traditional SEO as being two different things. It's just the next generation of. SEO. That's all ai. SEO is. It's just the next step. It's a few other things that we do following the same best practices. So that's the great thing about it, because who wants to duplicate work, right? We don't have time for that. So let's talk about the two and kind of how your customer might use them and where it might be the most important. I want you to think about yourself for a second. Are you using chat GPT or reading the AI overviews or using perplexity or Gemini or anything like that to help you research information to help you make decisions? If you're not, I'm gonna tell you right now, you're probably in the minority, because when I ask that question in the live training class each week, most of the people are. If you've not yet done it, I want you to go play with it a little bit and ask some questions and just see how it works. Or even better join me in the free class where I show you I have screenshots that show you how it works and we talk about it and how your business can show up there and what you need to do and all of that. So I want you to think about that. Your customer is searching chat, GPT. They're seeing Google. They may be using both. They may be using one, they may be using the other. We need to show up in both places because our customers are searching both what we're seeing. That's kind of interesting. Is that in many cases they're actually using both in the same search. So I'm gonna walk you through an example that one of my students had recently. She is a therapist. She lives in a, a suburb of a major city and she has a new customer who she got and that new client. Told her when she asked, how did you find me? The new client said, I went to chat GPT. I knew I wanted to sign up for therapy. I knew I needed some help, but I wasn't really sure exactly what type therapy specialization I needed or what to search for. So I asked chat GPT to help me and. We went through like the conversation, figured out what I needed help with and what type therapy to look for, and then I took that information and I went to Google and I searched for that type therapist in my town. Now, because my student is a. A local business. Not only does she have her website optimized, she has her Google business profile optimized. So there was information about her business at the top of the page in Google. When that new client took the information that chat, GPT helped them put together and searched. And we're seeing that about 50% of the time, people who search on chat GPT go back to Google for refinement or go to Google when they're ready to make a decision because now they have the information that they want. And so now they can go to Google and they can make the purchase, they can hire the person, they can research and find the provider in their area, which is exactly what happened with my student recently. So I want you to see kind of how that works and why it's important to be in both places now. The great thing about it. Is it today? AI search is small. It's like 1% of search traffic. It's small, but it's growing fast. The last research study I read said that they expect that AI search will be five to 10% of our traffic within 12 months. If we are optimizing for it, meaning if we're doing our SEO within 12 months, it's expected to be five to 10% of your traffic. The next thing that I want you to understand, the last research study that I saw said that the industry expects that AI based search or answer engine search, AI based like chat, GPT, Google Overviews, all of that. Is expected to overtake traditional SEO traditional Google in 2028. That's only two years out, so this is going to be happening very quickly. The other thing I want you to know is that right now the AI based search engines are learning which websites to trust. So if you do SEO, now you are actually laying the foundation for your business to be visible, not only on Google, but on AI as well. This is why it's one of those, like don't pick one versus the other. Don't focus on Google versus ai. Look at it as it's both together. So the really good thing is. What we do for traditional Google search helps immensely with AI search. I have, as you know, I've been in business a long time now. I have blog posts that I wrote back in 2017. It's now 2026. That's been nine years. They were written before AI based search existed, but because they are optimized, they are updated each year. They have relevant, helpful information. They're great posts. They are also showing up in AI search, and it's because they were done in the right way. So that's why I want you to understand like it's not one or the other. It's do your traditional SEO and you have a chance then. To show up not only on Google, but to show up in AI search. Now with ai, there are specific things we want to do with our new content that we're creating. We want to make sure that we're addressing a single question. It's very conversational, it's very helpful. All of that really. Goes back to traditional SEO, right? Focus on one thing, on the page, be helpful, provide value, optimize. All of that's kind of the same. Now, from a traditional SEO standpoint, we focus on keywords. The interesting thing with AI is we don't, we don't have to worry about what keyword do we have a good chance of ranking on Google for, so it's kind of freeing, and this is what's made it. Easier, I believe, for small business owners. That, and the fact, the last research study that I saw, and I'm trying to remember if it was Somer that put this one out, um, the last research study that I saw on rankings and citations and like which websites are cited in ai, whether it's chat, GPT, AI overviews, et cetera. You don't have to rank at the top of Google. You don't even have to be on page one or two. 90% of the websites that are being cited in AI rank Position 21 or above, they're smaller sites in many cases. This is why I say this is such an amazing opportunity for us as small business owners, especially if you've ever felt like you were in such a competitive niche, you couldn't really get a foothold. You didn't really have. A whole lot of visibility. You had to work really hard to find a keyword that you had a chance of ranking for based on your niche. All of that, this has changed the playing field for us as small business owners and is giving us a better opportunity of ranking. So it's really good. It's such a good opportunity for us. The other thing. Is that what we're finding is that the AI-based search leads are worth four times what a traditional search-based lead is worth. The reason behind that is the person who's searching an AI has so much more information they can. Ask questions. They can refine the search. They can ask, you know, which one is better? How should I use this? How do I decide? And then by the time they go to Google to make that decision or to make that purchase, they already have had all of their answers que their questions answered and they're ready to go. So that's why that AI based. Chat lead is worth more than a traditional lead because they have a much higher chance of closing or converting. So what do you focus on as a small business owner? You need to focus on traditional SEO. Make sure your website is runs quickly. Make sure your image files are not big. Make sure you're creating content that has an audience. That's where your keyword research comes in. Make sure there's actually demand for the content that you're creating. Make sure you're creating content that's going to bring the right people into your world, meaning make sure that. You're aligning what you're creating with what you offer in your business so that we're bringing buyers, not browsers, and so that we're getting the right people into our world. Because you can get a lot of traffic, you can be visible, but if you're visible for keywords. Or phrases or you're showing up in AI search for things that don't really drive business, they don't drive revenue for you, then you're not going to grow, and I don't want you to take the time and the energy and potentially the money to create your content if you're not going to be able to have it pay off for you. Now, I had a situation like this and I've shared a couple times about it. I had a blog post that I wrote back in 2017. Back early on, it ranked in position number one on Google. It drove a lot of traffic to my website. However, it was about how to nail your first Facebook live. Back in the day when Facebook Live was new, it was exciting. People weren't quite sure what to do with it. They weren't sure how to go on camera and how to do it. But for years that post continued to rank in position one. It continued to get traffic. It continued to bring people to my website. The problem is I don't have anything else on my website that addresses. Facebook marketing because as you know, if you've listened to the podcast for a while, I don't do a lot of it. I do some ads full. You know, full disclosure, I do run some meta ads, but I don't do much from an organic standpoint because I've not been able to prove an ROIA return on investment for social media marketing for my business, so I do not prioritize it. Because I've not seen where it's generated leads and all of that. So I had this post that was working great. If you just looked at the traffic, like it ranked, it got traffic, but the people who came to the site did not have a way. To convert and work with me because what they were interested in was not something that I offered. I didn't offer training on Facebook marketing. I didn't offer social media marketing, so I ended up removing that. Blog post, my traffic took a hit, but in the end, my performance was better because those people, yes, they were coming to the site. Yes, they were finding me, but no, they were not interested in what I was offering, so they were not going to convert. So we wanna look at that and make sure that. If we've got old content that isn't super relevant anymore, we might wanna just remove it. And then as we're creating new content, we wanna make sure it's tied to what we offer in our business. So what I want you to think about is. Getting started with this. So, couple ways that I can help you with this. If you want to join me, I'd love to teach you how to do this to help you with it the exact same way I'm helping other students in simple SEO content. It's the group program. You're gonna learn how to do it. I'm gonna look at it with you. I'm gonna review. I'm gonna say, you know what, let's adjust this. Let's adjust that. Um, let's try this instead. We're gonna go through all of that together. That's a six month group program that helps you. Lay this foundation. Um, if you wanna do that, you can get signed up. The link is in the description. You can also come in and join me in the free class if you want to get a better understanding of how all of this works before you make the investment in your own business. You can do that if you want the beginners PDF guides, you wanna be able to see how those work. Those are on the freebies tab on the website as well. Etched marketing.com/freebies. If you would like to work one-on-one, I do work one-on-one with a small number of clients. Right now I have one potential opening, uh, starting. In February. So if you are interested, there's one spot available to work one-on-one. There's information on that on the website, on the marketing consulting page that is$2,500 each month for the first three months, and then you can extend from there. So if you want my help putting together your strategy, doing this on your website, you don't wanna be in a group. You want somebody to just guide you and show you what to do and look at your work with you one-on-one. That is an option. Alright. Hopefully you understand at this point it's not Google, SEO versus ai, SEO. It's that we need to do SEO to benefit both and that's it. That's really all it boils. All it boils down to is we need to focus on both. But it's just SEO in 2026. In all honesty. All right, thank you for being here. If you have questions, you know how you can get ahold of me. Um, I will see you back here next time. Bye for now.