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In its early days, SEO was a game of keywords and link-building. Today, that’s not the end of the SEO story since artificial intelligence (AI) has radically transformed organic search. Google’s transition toward AI-driven results has fundamentally changed the way people interact with the search engine. Most recently, its newest AI mode feature, Search Live, has reimagined the way people interact with Google.

For anyone who cares about where their webpages land on search engine results pages (SERPs), you may be wondering what this means for your SEO efforts. In short, Google Search Live doesn’t take away SERP real estate—it just presents a new way to obtain it.

We wanted to break down the basics of Google’s newest development so you could see how it works and what implications it has on your SEO strategies moving forward. Here’s what we’ll cover:

• What is Google Search Live?
• How Does Google Search Live Affect SEO?
• Partnering With Nexus to Maintain SEO Rankings

What is Google Search Live?

Google Search Live is a real-time, conversational interface that allows users to conduct searches through voice prompts and live camera feeds. This new feature was integrated into the Google app on Android and iOS in September 2025.

Searchers can verbally ask Google a question and receive an AI-generated audio response. From there, users can click on links generated by the Search Live feature to learn more, or can view the transcript of their conversation with the AI tool.

On the backend, Google Search Live is built upon an advanced “query fan-out” technique. Google’s Vice President of Product, Robby Stein, explained it like this in a post on X (formerly Twitter):

AI Mode in Search introduces new reasoning and tools under the hood with a custom version of Gemini models. For any question, it makes a plan, breaks it down into related subtopics, and runs multiple Google searches to find the most helpful and reliable info.

With this query… pic.twitter.com/64HIzm2qoD

— Robby Stein (@rmstein) April 15, 2025

In other words, Search Live does more than just process a single query when a user asks a question—it explores a multitude of angles and nuances of the user’s intent. Then, the system synthesizes its findings into a concise, easy-to-understand audio answer.

Furthermore, Search Live leverages contextual understanding to refine its responses. If a user follows up with a related question, the AI remembers the previous conversation, building upon the existing context rather than starting from scratch. This allows for a more natural and fluid conversational experience, mimicking how humans interact.

The integration with live camera feeds also adds a visual layer to this contextual understanding, allowing the AI to interpret visual cues and incorporate them into its search process, particularly for object identification or scene analysis.

The Major Differences

There are a few obvious differences between traditional search and Google’s newest feature, starting with Search Live’s mobile-only application. Google Search Live is exclusive to the Google app on iOS or Android devices, meaning the feature is strictly for mobile users (who account for 63% of Google searches in the U.S.).

The functionality also changes the way users interact with Google, and the responses they can expect to get in return:

 

• Input:
  • Traditional searches use single, isolated queries
  • Google Search Live uses a multi-step, conversational thread
• Output:
  • Traditional searches return 10 links to webpages
  • Google Search Live returns an AI-generated audio response
• Goal: 
• • Websites previously aimed to rank for a high-priority keyword.
  • While keyword optimization is still important, there’s a new emphasis on earning citations in Google’s AI response.

For example, let’s say someone wants to learn about graphic design for nonprofits. Using traditional search capabilities, they type something like “nonprofit graphic design services” and scroll through the results that appear.

With Google Search Live, the same search might look something like this: A user opens the Google app and asks, “How can I design a fundraising flyer for my nonprofit?” or “What’s the easiest way to design social media graphics for nonprofit marketing?”

In turn, Google’s AI uses contextual understanding to recommend online tools, professional graphic designers, and other resources that answer the user’s question.

How Does Google Search Live Affect SEO?

Insert yourself into the above example. The question is, how do you make sure Google references your website when formulating its response?

There are multiple ways to incorporate Google Search Live into your SEO strategy:

• Study user intent. Consider the underlying intent behind search queries and the various stages of the buyer’s journey that users are in. This understanding can help you identify potential follow-up questions and related searches, so you can create nuanced content that effectively addresses users’ needs.
• Employ an answer-first content strategy. Instead of simply covering a popular topic, structure your content to comprehensively answer user queries. Provide definitive answers to questions whenever possible, ensuring that your content isn’t only cited but also viewed as the most authoritative source of information.
• Summarize content thoughtfully. Make it easy for Google to reference your content by using clear headings, bullet points, and concise summaries. Also, incorporate conversational headings, such as questions that mirror natural spoken language, to help Google’s AI easily extract key information and present it efficiently within its own interface.
• Strategically cover topic clusters. Remember, Google Search Live doesn’t just respond to isolated queries anymore. Each search is conversational and nuanced, meaning for each core topic your content covers, it should also cover related sub-topics.
• Showcase deep expertise. The idea that Google prefers credible and high-quality information is not new, but it’s especially important for this new format of search responses. Go beyond surface-level information to demonstrate your content’s expertise and trustworthiness. Also, highlight your content creators’ credentials in author bios or links to their professional profiles.

An SEO strategy that implements these approaches improves your content’s chances of being cited by Google’s Search Live tool and ranking highly on traditional SERPs. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel to get Google to pick up your content—view this new tool as an opportunity to build upon your existing efforts and make your content more well-rounded overall.

Partnering With Nexus to Maintain (or Boost!) SEO Rankings

The world of search is changing big time with Google Search Live, and it’ll take more than just a few tweaks to keep up. You need a partner who really gets the delicate balance between classic technical SEO and the exciting new world of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).

The Nexus team knows all about establishing your brand’s authority among people and the AI systems that are now driving search. Our complete plan for helping you succeed is built on a few key ideas:

• Getting your content ready: Nexus uses content scorecards to assess your readiness for AI visibility and determine what your next steps should be to improve it.
• Connecting SEO and GEO: We follow a proven content creation process to make sure your website’s main content isn’t just informative, but completely designed to show up in all types of evolving search results. This entails a comprehensive approach, encompassing keyword research, GEO readiness, and technical considerations such as Schema Markup and page accessibility improvements.
• Measuring results over time: In this new age of AI-driven search, we know that success goes beyond clicks. Along with traditional metrics, like keyword rankings and average session duration, the Nexus team is also dedicated to tracking your website’s success in terms of AI visibility. We conduct regular audits over time to monitor your progress and implement new activities as needed to make sure your content stays on top.

While Google’s latest developments are always on our radar, we offer a full range of services to help increase your brand’s visibility. Whether you’re looking for SEO and GEO support, digital marketing, or lead generation services, the Nexus team knows how to optimize your online presence for maximum results.

Video creation and promotion have always played a key role in search engine optimization (SEO), but in 2025, they’re no longer just important—they’re essential. Search behaviors are shifting, and platforms built on video have become the new gateways to discovery.

Instagram recently partnered with Google to allow the search engine giant to index Instagram content from businesses and individual creator accounts. Meanwhile, YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine after Google, with over 2.5 billion monthly active users.

The takeaway is clear: prioritizing YouTube and Instagram in your SEO strategy is no longer optional. If you want your brand to stand out, compete, and capture attention in search-driven environments, video SEO must be at the core of your approach.

This guide and strategy playbook will help you optimize your YouTube and Instagram content for discoverability, engagement, and conversions. We’ll cover:

• Why Video SEO Matters in 2025
• How Video SEO Works
• Preparing Your Video SEO Strategy
• How to Optimize YouTube and Instagram Videos for Search
• How Nexus Marketing Supports Video SEO

Why Video SEO Matters in 2025

What’s the response you always hear after asking someone a question they don’t know the answer to? “Google it.”

But in 2025, the search landscape isn’t so straightforward anymore. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube are rising up to compete with traditional search tools. These platforms have gone beyond providing entertainment to providing the answers to questions that today’s searchers want to know.

“What are spring fashion trends for 2026?” and “What were the highlights from the recent gubernatorial debate?” are both questions that can just as easily be answered via YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram as they can on Google.

What’s causing this new trend? For one, younger audiences use social media as their primary search tool. 41% of Gen Z prefer to discover new products on social media via short-form video.

Plus, video content is useful for helping searchers find products they’re interested in. According to Bazaarvoice’s Shopper Experience Index, 53% of consumers use YouTube and 41% use Instagram for product discovery and research. Wyzowl found that 87% of people have been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a video.

Additionally, videos are highly visible in Google AI Overviews. According to data from BrightEdge/GoDataFeed:

• Product queries that include videos in results see 64% higher click-through rates.
• YouTube citations appear in 78% of AI Overviews for product comparison searches.
• Video content is 3.1x more likely to be cited than text content for the same product information.

These trends highlight the importance of incorporating video SEO best practices into your overall SEO and social media marketing strategies.

How Video SEO Works

You might be thinking: “My business already has an SEO strategy. We include high-value videos in our content when it makes sense. Do we really need a separate strategy just for video SEO?”

It’s true—many of the tactics that help blog posts and web pages rank can also give your videos a lift in search or on social platforms. However, a dedicated video SEO strategy ensures your content isn’t just visible, but fully optimized to drive engagement and reach new audiences across multiple channels.

Let’s examine how people actually discover your video content, whether they’re searching on social media platforms or using Google.

YouTube Search Ranking Factors

Google has owned YouTube since 2006, so many elements that help YouTube videos perform well also boost Google search performance. However, there are some key distinctions to keep in mind when it comes to YouTube search rankings.

The YouTube algorithm prioritizes these elements when ranking videos:

Metadata

Your video metadata, such as titles, descriptions, and tags, should contain relevant keywords based on the video’s content. For example, take a look at this video from Double the Donation. It’s optimized for the keyword “matching gift challenges.”

The video includes a brief, optimized title that includes the main keyword:

The description also includes the keyword “matching gift challenges.” It’s not too long, but it includes crucial additional information about the Double the Donation brand.

Engagement signals

YouTube is more likely to showcase videos that receive higher audience engagement, measured by data such as watch time, click-through rates, likes, comments, and shares.

Video structure and closed captions/transcripts

Using features such as Chapters, captions, and transcripts helps enhance both accessibility and indexing.

➡️Here’s the bottom line: YouTube SEO is about aligning metadata with user intent and maximizing engagement signals.

Instagram Search Ranking Factors

Because Instagram posts, Reels, and videos are now indexed by Google, you can use content shared to this platform to extend your reach to new audiences (beyond your existing followers).

On-platform factors that can help improve search ranking include:

• Including keywords in your Instagram captions
• Using hashtags to boost discoverability both on Instagram and on Google
• Providing descriptive alternative text for better accessibility and to provide Google with greater context
• Using aesthetically pleasing, keyword-aligned video thumbnails
• Increasing video engagement on Instagram through audience interaction

➡️Here’s the bottom line: Instagram videos now contribute to Google Search visibility, making optimized captions, hashtags, and alt text even more important.

How Google ties everything together

YouTube and Instagram videos can appear on Google’s search results pages in multiple ways:

• Optimized YouTube videos often appear as rich snippets with thumbnails and timestamps.
• Google’s new AI-generated search results increasingly feature YouTube videos—as mentioned, videos are 3.1× more likely to be cited than text in product-related AI Overviews.
• With Google now crawling Instagram content, optimized captions, hashtags, and alt text can help your videos show up for broader keyword searches.

➡️Here’s the bottom line: Google is pulling videos from everywhere—especially YouTube and now Instagram—to satisfy users’ demand for visual, quick, and engaging answers.

Preparing Your Video SEO Strategy

1. Conduct Keyword Research

Keywords perform a similar function in video SEO as they do in any SEO strategy. They help ensure your video content gets discovered by a wider audience.

• YouTube autocomplete: Head to YouTube and start typing phrases in the search bar that are relevant to your video’s topic. The autocomplete function will automatically suggest topics that users search for the most.
• Instagram search bar: Similar to YouTube autocomplete, you can type topics related to your video in Instagram’s search bar and see other similar terms that users are looking for.
• Seodity’s Free Instagram Keywords Finder: This tool provides valuable keyword insights such as search volume, user intent, and keyword difficulty—a metric that shows how competitive a term is and how hard it may be for your content to gain visibility and traction around it. The higher the difficulty score, the more effort (and stronger optimization) it will take for your video or post to appear in Instagram search results.
• Semrush: This platform is a robust tool for tracking keywords and assessing SEO success. You can find high-traffic keywords and build a video content strategy around them. You can also evaluate the effectiveness of your organization’s backlinking profile and run technical audits to spot and fix mistakes quickly.
• Google Trends for YouTube: Use the YouTube filter on Google Trends to discover popular topics users are searching for and their interest over time in specific trends. You can focus on keywords that are currently trending to capture attention. However, it’s not sustainable to be constantly trend-chasing, so prioritize keywords with sustained interest over time.

Focus on long-tail keywords for niche discovery. These keywords are often easier to get traffic for because there isn’t as much competition from other brands. Plus, you can use these keywords to capture the attention of more qualified audiences.

For example, if you run a nonprofit consulting business with a local focus, you’ll likely generate better leads by targeting a keyword like “nonprofit consulting for healthcare organizations in [your city]” rather than a broad term such as “nonprofit consulting firms.” The more specific phrase may bring in fewer searches overall, but the people who find you will be far more aligned with your services.

2. Create High-Quality Videos that People Want to Watch

When it comes to video SEO, keyword optimization will only take you so far. Your videos have to be engaging, informative, and watchable. Focus on quality content over quantity of videos.

Keep these key considerations in mind when planning out your video content:

• Use professional equipment. For formal, branded videos, your lighting, camera, and microphones should be professional-grade equipment. You may post some videos with a more off-the-cuff feel that are filmed on a smartphone, but you should ensure that even those videos have clear audio and footage.
• Keep videos brief. Shortform videos work much better for Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and LinkedIn posts.
• Ensure your videos are useful and on-topic. Every video should have a clear goal, whether to inform, entertain, or inspire your audience to take action.
• Feature subject matter experts in your videos. Sound bites or interviews with experts will make your content much more compelling and credible.

Your videos don’t have to be scripted, but they should be polished. For example, a video clip from a webinar wouldn’t be scripted, but it should have a professional feel, with good lighting and straightforward points shared by the speaker.

If you’re not sure where to start when it comes to filming, editing, and posting high-quality videos, the experts at Nexus Marketing are here to help. We can help you build a portfolio of high-quality videos to support your SEO and brand strategy and amplify your reach. Work with us to create explainer, product, demo, and SEO-support videos.

3. Measure Success

Use tools such as YouTube Analytics, Instagram Insights, and Google Search Console to monitor your video results and identify high and low-performing videos. Track key metricssuch as:

• Impressions
• Click-through rates (CTR)
• Watch time
• Retention
• Search-driven views

Run frequent metrics reports to keep track of video engagement patterns. Note which videos perform well and which aren’t as popular to maximize what’s working and adjust what isn’t.

How to Optimize YouTube and Instagram Videos for Search

Take your video SEO strategy beyond the basics by using these optimization checklists to ensure you’re following best practices for each platform.

YouTube SEO Best Practices Checklist

✅Compelling, keyword-driven titles.

✅ Brief, keyword-rich video descriptions (200 characters or fewer are ideal).

✅ Accurate tags and categories to support a better user experience.

✅ Customized, branded thumbnails that convey the essence of your video.

✅ Accurate subtitles or transcripts to support both accessibility and search visibility.

✅ Playlists to organize your videos by theme.

✅ Chapters to divide longer videos by key themes.

✅ An interactive engagement strategy that makes use of calls-to-action (CTAs), comments, likes, and the community tab.

Instagram SEO Best Practices Checklist

✅ Engaging captions with clear keyword placement and engaging storytelling.

✅ A balance of broad and niche hashtags to achieve max visibility while avoiding looking spammy.

✅ Descriptive alt text with keywords included.

✅ Branded, clickable thumbnails/video covers.

✅ Reels-specific optimizations, such as using trending audios or memes.

How Nexus Marketing Supports Video SEO

Here at Nexus, we offer more than just video creation services. We can fully integrate client videos into search-optimized distribution channels, including YouTube and Instagram, to maximize visibility and discovery.

We offer upload kits to clients that include the following optimized video elements:

• Engaging optimized titles
• Concise and effective descriptions
• Relevant hashtags
• Branded thumbnails

With these elements, you can create an intentional video SEO strategy based on core ranking criteria. We offer this service for both newly produced videos (integrated during production) and historical/self-produced content (retroactive SEO uplift).

If you’re ready to invest in the success of your video SEO approach, your Nexus account manager can lay out a customized strategy no matter where you’re starting from.

Not yet a Nexus client? We’d love to hear from you! Contact us to tell us about your video SEO and other digital marketing needs.

Wrapping up

In 2025, video SEO is critical for connecting with your target audience. YouTube and Instagram are just as important for brand awareness as they are for search discovery. Proactively creating a video SEO strategy will set you up for success as Google continues to deeply integrate social media and YouTube into its algorithm.

Videos are the hot new marketing format, especially since the rise of TikTok. Nowadays, videos can be found everywhere, from posts on social media platforms to embeds in blog content to directly on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).

While most marketers are aware of video’s benefits, not everyone is aware that videos can significantly impact search engine optimization (SEO) results. With the right approach, you can turn videos into a multi-dimensional marketing tool that improves promotional outcomes from many different angles.

Let’s discuss how videos support SEO and why you should create videos for your business.

The Benefits of Videos for SEO

When most people think of SEO, they think about keywords and how to incorporate them into their on-site content. However, there are plenty of other factors that play into SEO, which videos can help you with.

Here are some of the ways videos help your search engine optimization efforts:

• User engagement: If people watch the videos you’ve embedded on your website, they spend more time there. Increased dwell time is a positive signal to search engines and video platforms like YouTube, indicating to them that your content is valuable to web visitors. Since these platforms prioritize showing high-quality, authoritative, and trustworthy content to visitors, this can lead to better SEO results.
• Click-through rates: Google has a dedicated video search tab that users can leverage to find videos related to their keyword. Additionally, depending on the keyword’s intent, the search engine will sometimes serve a dedicated video carousel directly on the usual SERP. If you embed video content into your website, you increase your chances of being discovered through these elements, increasing your click-through rates.
• Prioritized content: Since search engines prioritize content that matches user intent, videos are highly featured on certain SERPs. “How-to,” review, and tutorial keywords are just a few examples of keywords for which Google serves video results. Videos provide engaging answers to these keywords, resulting in Google favoring them for these queries.
• Better backlink generation: If your videos are visually appealing and contain useful information, other websites may feature them in their content to educate their viewers. They may embed these videos directly into their content or simply link to them as a reputable source. This results in more backlinks, which improves your site’s domain authority and SEO results.
• Additional opportunities for metadata optimization: Videos allow optimization via metadata, structured data (also known as schema), and transcripts. These elements help search engines understand your video content and the rest of your on-page content better, leading to higher rankings and increased features in video carousels.

Videos also have other digital marketing benefits, namely increased visibility and reach. These types of media are more engaging than others, which means they’re more memorable. Having valuable video content on your channels leads to improved brand awareness and even more conversions—84% of people say they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video.

Types of SEO-Friendly Videos

Here are a few types of videos businesses might make for SEO or digital marketing purposes:

• Explainer videos discuss how a product or service works or explain an educational concept.
• Product or product use case videos showcase a business’s specific product in depth.
• Brand or company videos explain a company’s mission and vision, general services, and values.
• Social media videos are generally short-form videos specifically made to condense information into an easily digestible format.
• Promotional videos highlight a brand’s products and values to sell more to potential customers and employees.
• Customer testimonials and case studies discuss how a business’s products or services helped a customer or organization.

As you can tell, videos are an extremely versatile media format that can be used in many different ways. To determine what type of video to create for your brand, consider your most immediate marketing goals and how videos can support those.

For example, if you’re an association trying to showcase your value to potential members, you would create a brand or company video or a promotional video. On the other hand, if you’re a business trying to gain consumer trust, a testimonial or case study video might be more impactful.

Short-Form Videos vs. Long-Form Videos

With the rise of short-form video-based social media platform TikTok, digital marketers have quickly started distinguishing videos in terms of their length. Although you might think that duration is the only thing that differentiates short-form and long-form videos, they actually have different implications for your marketing and SEO strategies.

Here’s a quick comparison between the two:

	Short-Form Videos	Long-Form Videos
Duration	15 seconds to 2 minutes	5 minutes or longer
User Intent	Increase awareness and brand recognition, or provide quick tips or eye-catching visuals	Provide detailed information, ideal for educational content, product demonstrations, or deep storytelling
Engagement	High engagement due to attention-grabbing nature and longer on-page dwell times that improve SEO rankings	Higher watch times, positively impacting SEO rankings
Distribution Channels	Social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts, Facebook Stories, and LinkedIn	YouTube, Vimeo, websites, and learning platforms
SEO Value	Boosts SEO by increasing brand visibility and social shares through engagement on social media platforms. Can also appear on SERPs, be optimized for search with metadata like titles, descriptions, tags, and video schema.	Impacts SEO by appearing on SERPs and can be optimized for search with metadata like titles, descriptions, tags, and video schema
Best Use Cases	Product teasers, brand awareness, social media challenges, quick tips, behind-the-scenes clips, customer reviews	Detailed tutorials, educational courses, product testimonials, webinars, interviews, case studies

With attention spans shrinking, short-form videos are generally more appealing to web visitors, as they provide valuable information in a small package. However, that’s not to say that long-form videos have no place in your marketing strategy; if you want to provide in-depth information, they can do that much better than shorter videos.

Video SEO Best Practices

Whether you’re already creating video content for your brand or if you’re interested in getting started, follow these best practices to maximize your results:

• Use keyword-rich titles and descriptions. To maximize the number of clicks on your video and ensure that people can find it through search engines, incorporate the keyword you’re targeting within the video’s title and description.
• Add accurate transcripts and captions. For accessibility purposes, add transcripts and closed captions to videos so all users can understand them. They also help search engines crawl your video content and index it.
• Implement video schema markup. Schema markup helps search engines recognize what on-page elements are. In the case of videos, your schema should include the video’s name, description, duration, upload date, and content URL.
• Create compelling thumbnails and CTAs. Visually appealing thumbnails encourage viewers to click on your video and watch it, resulting in longer dwell times and better SEO results. Calls to action (CTA) that direct readers to watch your video are also helpful and ensure your video is viewed by plenty of web visitors.

Additionally, be mindful of which video platforms you host on. Many businesses default to YouTube for discoverability, though others prefer to use platforms like Vimeo. Regardless of which option you choose, once you make your video, embed it into your onsite content and other marketing content to maximize views and engagement.

How to Integrate Video Content into Your Overall SEO Strategy

When it comes to SEO, much of the focus is on blog content and web pages. This means you might not be familiar with integrating video content into your overall SEO strategy. Luckily, it’s not as complicated as it may seem.

When a business establishes its SEO strategy, its marketing team usually performs keyword research and determines which keywords to try to rank for. You simply have to align your videos with that keyword research.

For example, let’s say you’re a mobile pet grooming business. Through your keyword research, you identify that many people are searching, “What is a mobile pet grooming business?” Alongside drafting blog content, you can create short-form video content that addresses the same question! In the video, you can quickly explain the difference between mobile and traditional pet grooming businesses and go over the pros and cons of each. You might also create a supplemental promotional video about your specific services and encourage viewers to book a grooming session.

From there, you’d embed these videos into your on-site content (such as the blog content you just made or even your services page and homepage) and then cross-promote them through social media and email campaigns. Then, you’ll monitor your video process with analytics to refine your strategy and ensure that it’s delivering the SEO boost you desire.

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Creating videos for your brand is difficult if your staff members lack experience in developing polished visual products that immediately grab attention. At Nexus Marketing, we offer services designed to unite video marketing and SEO to boost your reach. Our offerings include:

• Video Production: We’ll create custom short-form videos that enrich your web and social media presence, create a professional impression and engage audiences, and support your sales, product, awareness, or event goals!
• Repackaging Webinar Footage: Does your business already host webinars or educational livestreams? We can repackage the footage into bite-sized short-form videos that you can spread through social media and post on your website to boost your brand’s visibility and authority and generate more leads!
• Lead Generation Campaign Packages: We’ll plan, promote, manage, and host custom webinars on your behalf. You bring us the idea for the webinar, and we’ll market it to your list and ours. Then we create a range of deliverables you can use as fresh lead capture, lead nurture, and sales enablement assets—including short-form videos!

Interested in working with us to create videos? Please reach out to explore how Nexus Marketing can assist you with your business’s marketing priorities.

Already a Nexus client or partner? Please send a message to your Nexus Points of contact—we’d love to discuss how we can help.

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Google’s new AI Overviews offering presents businesses with an exciting new opportunity to increase brand visibility, website traffic, and more. It’s essential that your organization puts AI Overviews on its radar to maintain an effective organic digital presence, especially as Google continues to roll out new AI updates.

Let’s explore top insights and key details that might inform your SEO marketing strategy going forward!

The Evolution of SERPs

Gone are the days of Google delivering a simple list of 10 blue links. The modern search engine results page (SERP) now features a variety of elements that can dominate the screen, including:

• Rich snippets
• Featured answers
• Knowledge panels
• Image packs
• Video carousels

And, of course, AI-generated overviews. These AI Overviews are a game changer, as they provide users with direct, succinct answers to their queries—often pulling content from the top-ranking websites for that keyword.

How AI Impacts Traditional Metrics

This shift in search engine features means less space for traditional organic listings. This change can directly impact click-through rates (CTR), as users may be more likely to interact with AI-generated responses rather than clicking through to traditional links.

While traditional metrics like clicks, impressions, and average position are still vital, they don’t fully capture the impact of AI Overviews. Search Console data provides insights into performance, but it doesn’t yet account for AI’s role in diverting attention away from traditional search results.

SEO Fundamentals Are Still Essential

Since Google’s AI Overviews generally pull from the top 12 pieces of content on a SERP, your content must rank well if you want it to be featured. Look over your content and make sure that it meets the fundamental principles of SEO, such as incorporating keywords naturally and creating high-quality content.

In particular, long-tail keywords phrased as questions are more likely to trigger an AI overview. This is because long-tail keywords are generally more specific, aligning better with the intent behind AI responses, which are designed to answer direct queries efficiently.

What You Can Do to Improve AI Search Visibility

You may be wondering, what do these takeaways mean for my SEO strategy? Here are a few best practices that will boost your AI search visibility:

• Focus on high-quality content: Ensure your content is relevant, engaging, and optimized for both human readers and AI tools. Use schema markup, create clear headings and subheadings, and break up large chunks of text with images, bullet lists, or tables.
• Improve your brand identity: For AI tools to understand that your organization is an authority in the space, you must establish a clear brand identity reflected across all your marketing channels. Additionally, utilize author bios to highlight team members’ expertise and incorporate social proof from customers to build your authority.
• Strategically leverage crawl budget: Bring your most important pages to the top of your hierarchy and ensure they are indexable, allowing search engines to crawl and rank them more efficiently. Remove any unnecessary content and focus on page load speed to help search engine crawlers do their jobs efficiently.

Keeping your marketing strategy current and adapting to the newest AI trends is not a one-time project. It’s an ongoing process that requires you to regularly revisit your practices and ensure you’re staying up to date.

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Here at Nexus Marketing, we’re constantly evolving our offerings to address new trends in the SEO marketing landscape. If you want to boost AI visibility and get your content featured in AI Overviews, we provide the following services:

• AI Audits: We leverage generative engine optimization (GEO) scorecards to evaluate your readiness for AI-driven visibility. Our team will also identify actionable steps you can use to improve your brand’s visibility through AI.
• Ongoing AI Support: After we’ve conducted an AI audit, we’ll finalize an action plan to get your brand in the right place to be seen by AI. Plus, we’ll monitor your AI visibility by conducting regular audits, implementing new activities as necessary.

If you want to learn about how new AI SERP features will impact your visibility and discover how to leverage them to your advantage, work with Nexus Marketing. Please contact us to learn more about our full range of AI visibility, digital marketing, SEO, GEO, and lead generation services.

And if you’re a Nexus client or partner, please contact your Nexus points of contact—we’d love to chat.

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AI-powered tools like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews are transforming how users access information—and much faster than anyone expected just a year ago.

Success in search engines does not necessarily guarantee success in the LLM arena.

For marketers, this presents a new challenge.

How can your brand and its thought leaders stand out in AI-generated answers? How do you ensure that your company’s expertise, identity, and messaging are not only recognized but trusted by LLMs?

It’s time to prepare your brand for the future of search. We’ve developed a solution to help you lay out a roadmap for success in AI search results: GEO (generative engine optimization) Scorecards.

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• What is GEO?
• Why is GEO Important?
• Why We Developed GEO Scorecards
• Using the GEO Scorecards

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What is GEO?

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the process of optimizing a brand’s or thought leader’s digital presence to ensure it is accurately recognized, represented, and prioritized by large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and others.

While both GEO and traditional search engine optimization (SEO) work to improve a website’s visibility GEO takes a broader—and in some aspects, more technical—approach. Here’s how they differ:

• Purpose
  • SEO: To improve a website’s rankings in search engine results and drive visibility among target audiences.
  • GEO: To ensure a brand or thought leader is accurately recognized and perceived as authoritative by LLMs, resulting in greater visibility across AI-generated responses.
• Scope
  • SEO: Primarily domain-focused, usually emphasizing the optimization of a single website’s content and backlinks.
  • GEO: Encompasses the overall brand’s digital footprint and authority as a recognized entity across the various data sources that LLMs reference.
• Practices
  • SEO: Combines on-site, on-page, and off-site strategies to maintain site health, create high-quality content, and build backlinks.
  • GEO: Builds on SEO fundamentals while emphasizing technical elements like schema markup, consistent entity data, and a strong off-site presence (on other websites, LinkedIn, Google Business Profiles, etc.)

GEO gives brands a framework for ensuring their digital presences mesh with how LLMs “think” and process information.

Remember, these systems don’t just list websites; they create summaries, comparisons, and narratives based on the data they encounter. Your data—your brand’s story, expertise, value proposition, and more—all need to be highly legible. For marketers, this means focusing on the bigger picture of how the brand itself is understood in a generative-first world.

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Why is GEO Important?

A successful SEO approach (like the holistic, targeted, and quality-backed strategies we recommend) can give you a solid footing for GEO success. But it’s not enough.

AI search tools don’t operate like traditional search engines because they don’t rely solely on indexing and ranking web pages.

Instead, they synthesize information from diverse sources, including structured datasets, knowledge graphs, and even user-generated content. They operate heavily on the concept of entities—distinct identifiers like people, organizations, and products—and use these to construct the web of knowledge that powers their outputs.

While advanced search engines like Google have incorporated more sophisticated systems like entity mapping in recent years, LLMs go a step further. They generate more context-rich narratives and insights based on how entities are related, rather than just delivering a ranked list of links. The integration of this technology into search engines (like Google’s AI Overviews) will blur the lines between the two types of search going forward.

GEO practices help ensure your brand and its thought leaders are properly recognized, understood, and prioritized in a more dynamic and interconnected information environment.

Fail to establish your brand as a strong, recognizable entity, and you risk being overlooked.

After all, Google AI Overviews are extremely visible, front and center in search results for millions of users. ChatGPT has experienced unprecedented traffic growth, already ranking in at the 8th most visited site on the internet:

Generative AI tools are quickly becoming integral to how people learn about and engage with brands. It’s estimated that over one-third of organic traffic to B2B sites could come from chatbot-style generative AI search engines over the next three years.

Optimizing your brand for these platforms will be an investment in staying competitive online.

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Why We Developed GEO Scorecards

We saw the need for a structured way to help our clients navigate the changes brought by LLM-driven search platforms.

Our GEO scorecards allow businesses evaluate their readiness for the generative AI era and identify actionable steps to improve.

On a more technical level, they help you audit your brand’s legibility as an entity (how easily LLMs can identify you) and its salience as an entity (how likely LLMs are to prioritize your brand and thought leadership).

We’ve developed two distinct scorecards:

• Brand GEO Scorecard: Focused on your company’s overall digital footprint.
• Author GEO Scorecard: Tailored to individual thought leaders, ensuring they’re recognized as credible experts online.

These tools don’t just identify gaps—they guide you toward better visibility, stronger authority, and long-term relevance in the AI-powered search landscape. Plus, they make the whole process easy. We recently completed a GEO audit and round of improvements to help a client increase their AI visibility by 300%. Check out the case study to learn more.

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Using the GEO Scorecards

Next, let’s walk through the technical, content, and offsite elements that the scorecards evaluate, starting with the Brand GEO Scorecard.

Brand GEO Scorecard Criteria

The Brand GEO Scorecard’s criteria are broken down into three core categories and several subcategories, starting with technical, in-site elements:

In-Site GEO Criteria

In-Site Elements cover the technical elements and tags in your website that support its legibility to LLMs. This group includes:

• Schema Markup: Bits of code that explicitly define the entities on your website and how they relate.
  • Organization schema directly tell search engines and LLMs that your brand is a particular type of organization. This markup should include additional properties that help more clearly define your brand as a reputable, real-world organization.
  • Content schema like Article, BlogPosting, and Report markups directly tell search engines and LLMs what the various pages on your website are. These markups should also include additional properties that lend the content extra credibility.
  • Other schema like FAQ and Product markups explicitly define other key elements of your content and offerings so that LLMs can accurately understand them.
  • Video schema helps ensure that any embedded videos on your website are properly understood and shared with users.
• Metadata: Tags applied to individual web pages that explicitly define what they’re about.
  • Title tags and meta descriptions are the most important meta tags and should be present on all pages.
  • These tags should also adhere to length best practices to ensure maximum effectiveness.
• Internal Linking: Links between the pages on your site that help clarify their purposes and subject matter to LLMs.
  • We use a proprietary site crawling tool to gauge the quality of internal link networks and identify improvements.

On-Site GEO Criteria

On-Site Content includes the quality, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of the material published on your website. This group includes:

• Clear Brand Bio: A clearly articulated explanation of your brand, its offerings, value proposition, and more that LLMs can learn to associate with your brand name very closely.
  • A dedicated About page should serve as the central location for information about your brand and your clearly-written brand bio.
  • The brand name should be used consistently on your About page to reduce any confusion.
  • The brand bio should provide rich, meaningful details about the brand beyond slogans or vague phrases.
  •  The brand bio language should also be exactly repeated or closely echoed on other core pages across the website.
• Social Proof and Authorship: Content on your website that demonstrates your real-world impact and reputability.
  • Social proof material should be used across the site to back up claims and reinforce the brand’s reputation.
  • Author bios should be published for all key staff to whom blog posts and thought leadership are attributed.
  • These author bios should include rich details that demonstrate real-world expertise.
  • The attributed authors should also be real people in your organization—use our Author Scorecard to bolster the entity strength of your brand’s key thought leaders.
• Security and Compliance: The website should be technically secure and compliant to ensure trustworthiness.
  • HTTPS protocol is essential for maintaining trust and performance today.
  • Privacy policy and compliance statements also show LLMs and search engines that your brand is responsible, proactive, and trustworthy.
• Content Quality: The content on your website must simply be worth sharing in order to gain traction in AI search results.
  • We use our own On-Site Content Scorecard to gauge the quality of content and identify actionable improvements.

Off-Site Visibility

Off-Site Visibility refers to all the ways that your brand is referenced on other websites and platforms, particularly those that LLMs are known to frequently reference when generating responses. This group includes:

• Search Engine Presence: The brand should have a robust presence on multiple key search platforms.
  • An active Google Business Profile is among the most important places to directly provide up-to-date brand information to search engines and LLMs.
  • The Google Business Profile should include essential contact and description information as well as other rich details that further demonstrate the brand’s reputability.
  • The website should be indexed by Bing, which is the underlying search index used by ChatGPT.
  • Any critical errors flagged by Bing’s Search Console tools should also be resolved to ensure consistent visibility on that platform.
  • A presence on Wikipedia will further boost the brand’s visibility as a known entity in its space.
• Social Media Presence: LLMs take note of social media platforms to inform their understandings of brands as active entities.
  • Social profiles should be linked directly from the brand’s website.
  • Social profiles should include consistent contact information.
  • LinkedIn is particularly important for business brands.
  • A brand’s LinkedIn profile should closely echo its core brand language, include rich details, link back to the website, and actively engage on the platform.
  • Any other brand social profiles should also clearly echo the brand’s core language and identity.
• Industry/Network Presence: Brands should actively engage with other players and publications in their sectors to demonstrate authority and trustworthiness.
  • Brands should have active industry presences, which can take several forms.
  • Any official technology or marketing partners should link to the brand’s website.
  • Other industry peers, collaborators, and events should also link to the brand’s website.
  • Brands should ideally receive links from the top industry websites and publications that LLMs rely on to generate responses.

Author GEO Scorecard Criteria

The criteria in Author GEO Scorecards are broken down into two key categories and several subcategories.

On-Site Presence

On-Site Presence refers to how well-represented the author is on the brand’s website. This is where LLMs will first learn about the author as an entity and relate them to the brand.

• Author Bio: Dedicated pages or sections of websites clearly labeled as author bios serve are the most effective tool for putting authors on the radar of LLMs.
  • The author needs a dedicated bio page with a unique URL.
  • The author bio should contain rich details that convey expertise and experience.
  • The author bio should ideally link out to one or more social profiles.
  • Author bio pages should include ProfilePage and Person schema markups to clearly explain their purpose to LLMs and search engines.
  • The Person markup should contain rich details that further enhance LLM’s understanding of the author as a distinct entity.
• Attribution: Content on the brand’s website should be clearly attributed to the author as a thought leader.
  • Blog posts should be explicitly attributed to the author in a way that’s legible to both users and web crawlers.
  • The author should be listed on a meaningful number of blog posts to increase LLM awareness.
  • Author sections or bylines should link to dedicated author bio pages.
  • Blog posts should be reinforced with appropriate content schema to ensure LLMs understand their purposes.
  • The brand’s website should ideally allow readers to easily see all posts attributed to an author.

Off-Site Presence

An author’s Off-Site Presence demonstrates their position as a reputable (and cite-able) thought leader to LLMs and search engines.

• Social Media Visibility: LLMs take note of social media platforms to inform their understandings of authors as active entities.
  • B2B authors should have dedicated LinkedIn profiles.
  • LinkedIn profiles should contain rich details that convey experience, link back to the brand’s website, and actively engage on the platform.
• Industry/Network Visibility: Authors should be cited as active thought leaders on other relevant websites in their sector to prove their authoritativeness.
  • Brands should have active industry presences, which can take several forms.
  • Any branded guest articles published on other websites should clearly attribute the author.
  • The author bios provided to partner websites should clearly echo or repeat the author’s core bio on the brand’s website.

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Generative AI and LLMs are reshaping the future of search. GEO scorecards provide a clear roadmap to ensure your brand—and its key voices—are prepared for this shift.

By improving both the legibility and salience of your organization or thought leaders as distinct entities, the scorecards will help you build lasting relevance in the AI-driven digital landscape. They should give you a clear structure for identifying improvements and laying out solutions.

Are you ready to optimize your digital presence for the generative era? Please contact your Nexus account manager to ask about assessing your AI readiness with our new tools.

Not yet a client? We’d love to hear from you! Check out this GEO case study and drop us a line to tell us a bit about your digital marketing needs.

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