Key Insights for Seos on Sge

My Take on Google’s AI Overviews Update and Where I Think This is Headed Yesterday’s announcement wasn’t just another Google I/O demo. It confirmed what many of us in SEO have been preparing for: the transformation of traditional search into a query resolution engine powered by real-time LLMs, multimodal inputs, and personal context. What really stood out: - Google is no longer positioning AI Overviews as an experiment. It’s core to the future of search. - AI Mode is now baked into the UI and set up to handle deeper reasoning, personalized context, and even transaction workflows. - They’re essentially building a browsing assistant layered on top of Search, not just a summary generator. From an SEO perspective, this means a few things: 1. Less Clicks, More Skimming Expect continued decline in CTRs on top organic results for many query types. Even if links are present in AI Overviews, users are likely to get what they need without clicking, or they’ll only click the one link Google spoon-feeds as most “helpful.” 2. A Surge in Zero-Click Rewrites Google's ability to fan out queries, synthesize multiple pages, and stitch together a response means we’re looking at the largest-scale content remixing machine ever built. Google’s pulling from your site to answer the query, not to send users to you. 3. Content Relevance > Rankings Ranking #1 isn’t enough. If your content isn’t structured and contextually rich enough to inform an AI Overview, you’re invisible. Google’s “under-the-hood” query decomposition means your content has to satisfy subtopics, not just surface-level terms. 4. Topical Authority Still Matters, But in a Different Way The model will reward breadth and depth, but especially depth. Brands that build dense, structured, internally-linked hubs on core themes are more likely to be referenced as sources, even if they don’t appear first in traditional rankings. 5. EEAT Becomes Table Stakes If Google is citing your site as a trusted source in an answer it’s generating with real-time reasoning, that content better carries authority signals, real people, clear expertise, and trustworthy data. Thin affiliate-style sites are going to vanish from visibility. 6. A Shift Toward Source Optimization This is the beginning of a new category: optimizing your site not just to rank, but to be referenced in AI Overviews and agentic workflows. Think schema, structured data, and real-world credibility indicators like reviews, awards, and citations. 7. Search Intent is Fragmenting Further AI Mode introduces a layer of subjectivity. One person’s search will yield a different response based on prior activity and context, making targeting “the” keyword less useful. Future SEO is about understanding intent clusters and use cases. 🧵 continued https://lnkd.in/en6tSZ5W 

Forbes estimates 60%+ of organic traffic is being effected due to the introduction of AI summaries, the adoption of LLMs, and ultimately the changes in SEO. I recently spoke at Affiliate Summit East on the emergence of AI and the impact to eCommerce. I touched on SEO and the move to SGE (search generative experience), the issues facing identity capture and noise created by bots as well as AI-generated content, and how content goes viral with changes to TikTok & Meta's algorithms. Sharing some of the learnings (and slides) on AI summaries and rankings: Impact - Google's AI summaries can take up to 3 full mobile scrolls or 2 desktop scrolls (1500 pixels) - LLM search went from 0.25% of traffic to 2.25% in <12mo - 60% of organic site traffic is impacted meaning the CTR drops aka people do not end up landing on your site. How to adapt - SEO & SGE are underpinned by the same recipe: content. - How to show up as the featured AI summary or authority? 1. Create unique content and lots of it 2. Build contextual content At Checkmate we get 1.5M+ unique visitors/week to our public-facing product pages. We also are featured on 1700 ChatGPT pages. How we were able to do that is by pulling in long-form structured content for the products we help sell as well as using LLMs to generate some unique content. For those in eCommerce I featured Stanley 1913 with what I think as a really strong product pages that rank well for SGE. If you look at any of their products they have extremely rich, unique content. They leverage product descriptions, product specs, related other products, reviews (not hidden or collapsed) & FAQs. For SGE shorter isn't better, the more unique content the generally better the indexing. Stanley 1913 also has a really strong formatting structure with clear H1, H2 tags, and containers. You have to remember if a bot can't make sense of the text then it won't surface in AI summaries. This will also be extremely important in the future of agentic commerce. 2. Building contextual content The way people are searching is moving from "black shoes" to "best shoes for running a marathon". Context is key. To be able to show up in LLMs or AI summaries, you need to associate your products within that context. 3 easy ways to do that: 1. Create and leverage a PR strategy 2. Build your own written contextual information in a blog on your website 3. Contribute/invest to review sites If you are able to both create unique content with a strong structure and build contextual content AI summaries and LLMs can be a great source of traffic. It is early days so investing in content and structure is a must. Drop me a note if you have other tips you see working or other brands doing it well!

This is your reminder that an SEO apocalypse might be around the corner. I see SGE (Google's generative AI results) on at least 60% of my queries. If Google goes live with what they have today in beta, the sites that generated clicks off that 60% of queries will see their search traffic decline dramatically. That's an apocalypse. However, I caveated my headline with "might" be an apocalypse because Google can still reduce how much visibility they give SGE. Still, I have no doubts that it will be the most disruptive thing that has ever happened to search. For context, the Panda algorithm in 2011 impacted just under 12% of search results, and it was one of the largest changes ever on Google to date. I have written several newsletters (link on my profile) on my predictions and suggestions on how to inoculate a site against SGE, but the biggest thing you can do right now is communicate that this is coming. There's always a tiny chance that nothing ends up happening, but I would rather be guilty of warning of a doomsday that never occurs than fail to warn about a doomsday that I saw coming. The good news for SEO managers, consultants, and agencies is that when this storm hits (see my upcoming newsletter for my prediction on when it happens), YOU will suddenly become the most valuable person anyone can know. Websites that suddenly see dramatic shifts in their traffic will want a voice of calm to tell them what to expect and what they should do; SEO people will have those answers. Here are a few points to keep in mind as you navigate whether you should be concerned or ignore it as some are doing: 1/ Google doesn't typically announce a product launch and then not launch it. This was announced in May - it's coming, like it or not. 2/ This might be the worst thing ever for users, but Google products fail SLOWLY. If/when Google gives up on this, most of the sites impacted will already be out of business 3/ Sales and conversion won't change much across the Internet, but the traffic will. Anyone who is focused on traffic as a KPI is going to feel pain. 4/ Traditional measurement tools will become less reliable. Keyword rankings won't matter if the user doesn't scroll past the generative response. 5/ Links and images in the SGE box are liability protection features for Google, not a new way to send traffic to sites. If the answers satisfy the user, there's no reason to click any links 6/ According to the DOJ's antitrust suit, Google spends $10b+ to maintain its dominance as the world's leading search engine. ChatGPT is a threat, and they will do whatever it takes not to lose market share. SEO results WILL get caught in the middle of this fight. 7/ There's very unlikely to be a big announcement before Google lets in their first few logged-out test cohorts, so if you are waiting for a warning before starting to plan, consider the May announcement the warning. What did I miss? PS please share so more people know this is coming!

To optimize for SGE, you need to insert your product in Google's training data. In this example, ClickUp executes this perfectly: Optimizing for SGE goes back to understanding how LLMs form a response. At their core, LLMs are a predictive engine that guess the terms that are statistically most likely to come next. They use their training data to determine this. So in order to appear in a given Search Generative Experience result, the first criteria is that your product or service needs to appear in the training data. Without that, you won't even be in the consideration set. Google's SGE actually gives you clues to the training data its using via the citations at the bottom. In fact, training data is a pretty loose term. We often see that the LLM results VERY CLOSELY match one of the cited articles. So how to make yourself a better part of Google's training data? 1. Create content on your site that aligns with the core queries. This gives your site a chance to be the citation that Google chooses. 2. Review third party sites that list products/services and see if you can be included in that content. In this example, we can see that when searching for "best outreach software", Google lists "ClickUp" as the number one result. When looking at the citations, we can see that SGE is using Clickup's "10 Best Email Outreach Tools" article in the citation. As a result, the LLM is using training data that references their product, so it lists them in the result. So if SEOs want to get ahead of optimizing for SGE, this is a way to do it. Review your core keywords and see if you even have content on your site that's eligible and optimized to be included in the citations. If not, go out and create it.

Google just wrapped up its latest core update. It ran for 16 days and, like usual, shuffled the deck. Some sites that got hit back in 2023 saw a bit of a bounce back. But the real story isn’t rankings. It’s what’s replacing them. AI Overviews are showing up more often, especially on news and informational queries. In some verticals, they appear nearly 70 percent of the time. And most of those searches end without a single click. If your content isn’t being cited or quoted in those overviews, it doesn’t matter where you rank. You're not getting seen. This is the shift that’s catching a lot of marketers off guard. SEO isn’t dead, but it’s not the only visibility channel anymore. AI is rewriting the rules. I’ve been teaching founders and other marketers how to adjust for this in my AI Visibility (GEO) System course at the CMO Growth Guide. It’s not about chasing keywords, it’s about being the source AI tools pull from. Time to start thinking that way.