You may have recently heard the news from this past week that Google is pulling back a bit from fully launching its AI Overviews, after the artificial intelligence-driven search results feature gave what the company even termed as “odd and erroneous” responses to people’s online queries. While a temporary setback for the company, it seems not likely to change Google’s overall evolution of the presentation of search results, which has long been moving in the direction of more directly answering customer questions.
Let’s break this down a bit more and what all of this means for you and your business, especially if you currently rank in search results for certain queries.
First, What Is Google Gemini and What Is AI Overviews?
Google Gemini is the equivalent of OpenAI’s GPT – a general pretrained transformer, essentially an advanced large language model (LLM) that can natively understand a prompt and then output a response. Both Gemini and OpenAI’s GPT were trained on text prompts and other formats of information such images, audio, videos, and code. For example, if you ask Gemini a prompt such as: “What’s happening in this picture?” and attach an image, and it will describe the image and respond to other additional questions asking for more complex information.
It’s pretty amazing stuff.
AI Overviews is powered by Gemini. Introduced at Google’s annual I/O developer conference in May, think of it as a kind of presentation layer in your search results. When people use Google Search to find information on certain topics, a box of AI-generated text (often in answer format for a question of some kind) appears at the top of the results, with links to external websites where Google pulled the information. Traditional results appear below the AI Overviews, marking a significant shift in how Google currently presents information.[1]
Here’s the rub: A study from last fall suggested Google’s new search experience could translate into anywhere from an 18% to 64% drop in traffic for published websites.
What This Means for Your Business Website
If you’re a publisher (such as a news site or information site), the impact on your business could be great. Indeed, many larger publishers have been outraged over the fact that such LLMs are basically trained on their sites’ content, essentially creating a competitive output of machine-generated content based on what they learn crawling the different sites.[2] Add to that the fact that now Google’s shift in presenting results may induce fewer clicks to publishers’ sites and, hence, fewer eyeballs for advertising, the impact could be much greater than other industries.
For the average small business, the impact of the changes in the presentation of results will most certainly vary depending on the particular business sector. For some businesses, the impact might be minimal. For others, it might be much larger. That said, two areas of emphasis are likely to become more important for small businesses as they consider Google’s AI Overviews presentation layer:
- Area No. 1: Google My Business (GMB). If you don’t currently have or maintain a local Google My Business listing for your company, it’s probably a good idea to start one. That’s because this is the way you’ll get listed on the local map of results when people search locally for a product, service, or a business “near me” or in their particular city. A few tips:
- Ask for lots and lots of reviews: For local “near me” searches, the map already appears, but AI Overview result is designed to give even more information including reviews, so make sure to ask previous/existing customers to review your business on Google.
- Make sure to your address, phone number, hours of operation, as well as photo/video or other updates: In addition to the basic information above, it’s always a good idea to mention and list sales or events, and keep your GMB listing up-to-date with the latest photos (include staff, team pictures etc.)
- Make sure to create a listing for each location of your business: If you have multiple locations, make sure to create a listing for each. Remember, part of the way Google displays local results is the proximity to a person’s current location. And, as above, make sure to ask for reviews unique to that location.
- Area No. 2: Add a Structured Data (Schema.org) to your site: Going forward, it’s a good idea, regardless of your business type, to add structured data to your site. What is structured data? It’s basically a standardized format (or schema) for providing certain types of data on your website in a way that search engines can both understand and pull/display in results. For example, if you ever see website showing up in Google search results with a rating, this is likely structured data. Similarly, when Google displays the cooking time from a recipe in results, this is because the site has taken care to develop a schema Google can read. When it comes to AI Overview, which searches for the best answer for a query, the more your data is provided to Google in a format it can understand, the better you’ll perform in the new world. You can see all the category types for standardized data at schema.org, which Google recognizes. This is one area to have your developer take a look at and implement on your behalf.
What Else Can Your Small Business Do to Make Sure Your SEO Is on Solid Ground?
At Marketing Nice Guys, we understand that, when it comes to AI, the pace of change is great. One thing you do is ask us for a SEO/Content Audit to make sure you either keep your current page ranking intact or identify ways you can improve, especially as we enter any AI Overviews world. Feel free to contact us for a free consultation as well. We’re happy to help support you.
[1] While this is a significant shift from current results and likely a direct result of the introduction of ChatGPT by OpenAI in 2022, Google has long been moving in this direction to try to answer more queries directly and maximize engagement with its search engine as much as possible.
[2] In December 2023, the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming that “millions of articles” were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.
