Is Your SEO and Content Strategy AI Ready?

By Amber Mizell, Global Co-Lead, Integrated Marketing and Arun Kumar, Global Lead, Data, Analytics + AI

Traditional search is still the most popular way to find content, products and answers online. Even with AI-specific tools like SearchGPT emerging, Google gets more than 158k searches per second, 13.7B per day and 5T per year. Its market share of search is around 90%.

That said, AI-powered browsers are positioning themselves to replace traditional search. The recent 9% ($160 billion) drop in shares of Alphabet (Google’s parent company) is a timely case in point. It occurred after Apple expressed interest in ending Google’s status as Safari’s default search engine and replacing it with AI-powered search embedded in the browser.

And even Google’s own AI Overviews (AIOs) are cutting into traditional search engagement, creating more and more “zero-click” searches and changing the game for search providers and marketers alike.

Here’s what’s changed, what’s staying the same and how to ensure your SEO and content strategy is ready to adapt to the future of AI-powered, zero-click search.

SEO and AI: Both are all about results

AI and traditional search are the same in some important ways. Enter a query and the tool sifts through a lot of information and returns results. Both are designed to give the best, most relevant results based on your query.

But where typing “running shoes” into Google will yield pages of results, asking Alexa, “Where can I buy running shoes?” yields fewer, more targeted answers. In this specific case, the latter will respond with two or three options based on your location. It’s almost as if you’re asking a friend.

You’ll have a similar experience asking questions to an AI tool like ChatGPT. Rather than pages and pages of results, you’ll get a single answer.

The impact of this shift from pages of results to a single, conversational answer is changing marketing. If you’re a marketer, getting your content or products on that first page of results really matters. Less than one percent of searchers on Google ever click on anything beyond the first page and Google’s number one result gets 27.6% of all clicks. The first three results share over half of all clicks, leaving the remaining 4 – 400 results to fight for scraps.

And with a single, conversational answer, those top results matter even more. Everything lower on the page virtually disappears. In a sense, there’s no top ten anymore. Just a winner – or two or three linked winners in an AI Overview – and the rest.

But that’s not the only difference between AI and traditional search.

AI-powered Answer Engines vs. Traditional Search: What’s the difference?

Searching vs. asking

At the risk of sounding like one of the countless “search is dead,” articles that pop up perennially, it’s time to admit that people don’t search online anymore.

Instead, they ask.

For example, a few years ago I might have typed in keywords, “best,” “running” and “shoe,” into Google. But now I’m more likely to ask Alexa, Siri or Google Nest, “What are the best running shoes for someone with plantar fasciitis?”

Queries are becoming more conversational and more personal – and the personal data in that question that puts me into a specific profile that should return better search results. Will some results just be “running shoes?” Of course, but I won’t be clicking on those. There will be niche content that establishes expertise relevant to my specific question.

That’s where I’m clicking.

AI delivers context, not just content

No search is made in isolation. Google predicts what you’re likely to ask based on previous searches. Recently searched for cake recipes? It will predict that you’re also going to search for frosting recipes and offer appropriate autocomplete search terms as you do your next search. In addition to search history, search engines can access results or ads that you’ve clicked and even see what content you like or dislike.

All of this helps search engines personalize results specific to the searcher. But AI takes this to the next level, analyzing vast amounts of data to understand the relationships between queries and topics, figuring out the context of a question or phrase and bringing it all together to offer a more complex and complete answer to queries.

AI looks for answers, not keywords

Your site and your content should be an ecosystem rich with the answers your audience is asking for. Predict and answer follow-up questions to every answer you provide or point you make. Thorough explanations offer AI the context it’s looking for – and create a comprehensive, expert point of view worth clicking through to.

AI can read, process and deliver information better when it’s presented within a larger context. So, rather than simply offering data points, tell a data story – something like, “While consumers spent X last year, our projections show they will spend Y this year, representing a Z% difference in spending and possibly a shift in consumer confidence.”

This shift from keyword to answer is also changing keyword bidding, particularly for short, simple keywords. Fuller, “long-tail” keywords will likely remain more valuable. The focus for SEO content creators will continue to shift towards fully addressing specific questions rather than just peppering content with keywords.

AI Overviews and zero-click answers

In a sense, conversational “search” platforms like ChatGPT are a double threat to traditional search platforms. Traditional search is a platform where you make a query, but it sends you elsewhere for the answer, generating clicks for content creators. Conversational platforms don’t just play the part of “where you ask the question,” but also serve up answers right there on the same platform. They don’t send you elsewhere. Put another way, ChatGPT is a destination where Google has traditionally been a portal.

That said, Google’s AI Overviews – which summarize results much like a conversational AI tool – makes the platform much more of a destination than a portal. While AI Overviews do provide links to sources that searchers can click, often the AI Overview is sufficient, and the search journey ends with the overview.

In this way, AI Overviews are driving up zero-click searches,and hurting both paid and organic CTR for marketers.

• Paid CTR drops from 21.2% to 9.87% when an AI Overview is present in search results.

• Organic CTR drops from 2.94% to 0.84% when AIO is present in search results.

Being featured as an AIO source does help, but it only increases CTR by roughly half a percentage point.

How can brands prepare their content and sites for AI?

Optimize for AI Overviews

Google is still the primary player in search and that won’t likely change anytime soon. This makes it crucial for marketers to mitigate the drops in CTR caused by Google’s AI Overviews. There are two primary ways to do this.

• “Buy” the AIO. While you can’t just purchase a specific result, Google does sell ad space within AI Overviews. These ads don’t replace the AIO but simply appear above the line between AIO/paid results and other search results. These ads are still auctioned the way other Google ads are, so there’s no guarantee you’ll get the placement you want. Are they worth it? This really depends on your overall ad spend strategy and budget.

  Remember, because AIO offers relatively clear and succinct responses, searchers might have the answers they need to take immediate action. This means having ads or links within AIO can drive your audience to quickly and directly buy, subscribe or otherwise engage with your brand.

• Optimize for AIO. There are several ways you can optimize your content and site to increase your chances of getting linked to within an AI Overview. For starters, AIOs focus less on keywords and more on domain authority and user intent, so it’s important to build credibility and authority in areas that matter to your audience.

Make content king (again)

The bots that drive AI search are democratic. The responses they return are weighted by the volume of content they encounter, rather than just paid results. This gives brands less control over how they show up in searches. There are a few ways to respond to this.

• • Strike back at the bots. Because AI bots don’t know the difference between what you’re saying about your brand and what everyone else is saying, it’s extremely important to create, deliver and promote content across your site, blogs and social media accounts that reflects your brand and products accurately.

    You can go all in on both volume and velocity of the content you produce to dilute any non-brand negativity. You’ve already spent a long time writing, editing and fine tuning your content and your site for SEO. But you need to ask yourself if it still creates results in an AI-driven world. The SEO standard EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) approach matters more than ever. If AI is looking for an answer, you have to clearly present your brand and your content as just that.

  • Get back in alignment with your audience. If negative sentiments about your brand are showing up in search, engage with them. Listen to the feedback and, if it’s valid, don’t bury it. Use consumer feedback and sentiment to create a roadmap to realign your brand, products or experiences with consumers’ reality.

    That said, make sure sentiment and engagement are legitimate. Bots don’t just gather information; they can generate it as well. This means that some of the sentiment out there is not being created by actual consumers.

    Worse, about half of all web traffic comes from bots and they sometimes click ads, generating false engagement that advertisers still have to pay for. This kind of click fraud is predicted to cost businesses $172B between 2023 and 2028. There are tools to help detect this fraud, but smaller companies may not have the resources to combat it, and regulation will have to play a part.

Audit and optimize your site and your content for AI/SEO effectiveness

It’s important to regularly audit your content and site for AI-driven SEO effectiveness. This includes a thorough look at your content relevance, the navigability of your website and overall user experience – as well as technical factors like loading times, broken links, etc.

Optimizing for AI-driven SEO includes adjusting your link strategies, the way topics are clusters on your site, the length of your content and webpages, and the way you structure content and headings for readability. Your efforts will be informed by your audit and, fittingly, there are AI tools that can help with parts of this.

That said, expertise and experience in SEO optimization can go a long way to improving search rankings and CTR; you may want to enlist someone practiced at navigating both the strategic and tactical aspects of SEO.

Portal vs. destination: Reconsider the customer journey

AI-driven search is turning search results from a portal – a springboard for further investigation and engagement – to a destination with an answer. With such rapid and sweeping change, it’s time to rethink the customer journeys that precede and follow searches. The evolving space begs for more dynamic journeys and new ways of thinking about brand health.

Material can help you build new journeys and reframe your content strategy for the AI era. We can audit, optimize and personalize your content and website, as well as develop a comprehensive AI strategy for boosting discoverability in AI-powered answer engines.

If you’re interested in learning more, reach out today and let’s start the conversation.