Archive for category: Deciphering SEO News

Summer 2024 has been one for the books in the SEO world. We’ve seen some wild industry developments that promise to bring more change to the SEO status quo than we’ve seen in a very long time.

If you keep track of SEO, tech, or digital marketing news, you’ve probably picked up on the buzz.

And you probably have a few questions, namely, “What does all this change mean for my brand and SEO strategy?”

In this SEO news update, we wanted to provide an overview of the biggest news stories of the past couple of months. We’ll cover the key developments, what they mean for you, and our overall take on the story that’s unfolding and the future of SEO strategies in the AI age.

• The Google Antitrust Case
• AI Overviews & Algorithm Updates
• SearchGPT
• SEO in an AI Environment: Our Take

Any questions as you read the guide? Reach out anytime—the Nexus team will be happy to help.

The Google Antitrust Case

We recently posted an explainer on our LinkedIn page (give us a follow!), but here’s a quick summary of what you need to know about this landmark legal case:

• On August 5th, 2024, a federal court ruled against Google in one of the first major antitrust cases in decades, with the judge stating that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.”
• The case hinged on Google’s exclusive agreements to appear as the default search engine on various web browsers, plus Google’s use of user data to reinforce its market dominance.
• The most direct implications will likely be on Google’s Ad products. A separate trial specifically about ads will begin in September, 2024.

This article from Search Engine Journal provides a helpful explanation of the ruling from an SEO perspective.

So what will happen as a result of this ruling? It’s unclear, and we won’t know for a while. Many options are within the realm of possibility, and there are already some reports that the court might move to take any of these actions:

• Break up Google Search, Android, and Chrome
• Ban default browser-search engine agreements
• Enforce data sharing between Google and other search engines
• Split Google Ads into a more fully separate company (We’ll know more on this front following the September case.)

What It (Probably) Means for You

What are the potential SEO implications of this case?

Regardless of the specific legal outcomes, we’re likely to see increased diversity in traffic sources. You may not think often about Bing or DuckDuckGo today, but there’s a good chance you will in the future. Other search engines use ranking systems very similar to Google’s, so the SEO best practices will remain steady.

OpenAI’s newly announced search engine, SearchGPT, will also likely shake up the landscape in the coming years—more on this below.

Key takeaways:

• An adaptive, user-centric (not just Google-centric) SEO strategy will be more essential than ever.
• The best practices aren’t going any where, but now’s the time to confirm you’re actually following them to ensure your performance translates across search engines.
• If your business relies heavily on pay-per-click strategies to generate leads, you need to stay tuned into the developments on that front.

AI Overviews & Algorithm Updates

In more Google news, we’ve seen many improvements and tweaks roll out in recent months.

Google’s AI Overviews have received some beneficial changes after a rocky rollout earlier in 2024. In terms of design and interface, here are the key updates:

AI Overviews now more prominently highlight their linked sources—this is huge news since the primary concern in the SEO world has been that the Overviews would obscure their sources and seriously dampen clickthrough rates.

Specifically, the updated AI Overviews include these features:

• Prominent right-hand link panels that cite the sources
• Citation links within the Overview indicated with link icons
• Save buttons for users so that the Overview won’t change if they search the query again
• Some limited rollout of in-text links, like normal anchor text (not pictured)

AI Overviews are also now being deployed outside of the US for the first time, and they will also display for users using incognito mode or who are not logged into Chrome.

What do these developments tell us?

• Google seems to be already responding to its early competition in the AI-driven search space. As we’ll see below, SearchGPT’s prototype prominently highlights linked sources. The lack of prominent links (and the assumed suppression of clickthrough traffic) was by far the biggest SEO criticism of AI Overviews upon rollout.
• AI Overviews are generally becoming more stable and reliable. Remember those wild stories about Google’s questionable AI advice at first? Now, one industry study found that 99.5% of AI Overviews cite content that already appears within the top 10 organic results for their queries.
  • This is a particularly positive sign. It reinforces the idea that robust, best practice-driven SEO will continue to deliver value in AI environments.

Something to be aware of: We’ve seen that for content linked in AI Overviews, some SEO rank-tracking tools report those pages as ranking in the first organic position. However, the link might be one of many within the Overview. In other SEO tools, rankings within AI Overviews are sometimes tracked inconsistently or incorrectly. We’ll see continued changes in the reporting and logistical impacts of AI Overviews, so keep an eye out.

Beyond the AI Overviews, we’ve seen a handful of other big developments from Google recently:

• Automated SEO and performance recommendations within Google Search Console (currently limited rollout, but we’ll keep you posted!)
• The August 2024 algorithm update currently mid-deployment is expected to smooth out many ranking issues and volatilities that sites have seen over the past year. The “Helpful Content Update” of September 2023, while beneficial for many sites, did seem to unfairly penalize some smaller publishers. This month’s update has been perceived as a fix to many of the issues it inadvertently caused.

What It Means for You

We have a few conclusions we can draw from these recent Google updates:

• Google is actively refining its use of AI and improving how it links to source content in AI Overviews. Again, this was the main initial concern in the SEO sphere, so it’s welcome news.
  • However, remember that AI Overviews are still expected to generally reduce the clickthrough rates of content—we’ll recap our take on how SEO strategies should adapt below.
• We’re going to see continued activity from Google as it makes improvements and tests new features. Competition in the search space is ramping up for the first time in a long time.

SearchGPT

Finally, the big news out of OpenAI earlier this summer: Its very own AI-infused search engine, SearchGPT.

We don’t know yet when it will be widely available, although the prototype is currently available to a small group of test users.

If you’ve seen headlines about SearchGPT and wondered how it will affect the SEO landscape, let’s first clear the air.

Does SearchGPT have the potential to dramatically change how we find information online? Yes.

Do you as a marketer or SEO stakeholder need to worry? No. SEO is not changing overnight. Your brand will still be visible online, just in new ways.

Should you up your SEO game (or partner with experts to handle it for you)? Yes, probably. 

There are still many uncertainties in the AI world. Economists have pointed to an “AI bubble” of investment funding that’s likely to burst (or at least shrink). New AI-based projects and developments will keep coming and going, and rapidly.

It’s just way too early to make any concrete predictions about what’s to come at the intersection of AI and SEO.

Here’s what we know about SearchGPT so far:

SearchGPT will work similarly to Google’s AI Overviews. Content identified as the highest quality and most relevant to a query will be used to generate an answer. You’ll be able to refine your search with suggested follow-up questions, although it is not a chat-style LLM like ChatGPT.

The SearchGPT interface very prominently displays links to the source content, seen in this example:

This example screenshot shows the generated answer for the query “What is AI.” On the right side is the AI-generated answer, including linked citations. On the left is a list of the source content, including domains, titles, publish dates, and meta descriptions.

SearchGPT will also proactively suggest follow-up questions and query refinements:

This response for the query “best email marketing software” includes a prompted follow-up question, “which ones are the cheapest?” The results show specific products with prices and citations.

(We pulled these examples from Go Fish Digital’s recent walkthrough of the platform—highly recommended if you want to learn more!)

One important note: You’ll notice that the source domains for these examples are all big-name players like BBC, Wikipedia, IBM, Forbes, and PCMag. Results are currently limited to a small set of domains that have opted into the prototype. It’s unclear when and how OpenAI plans to expand the pool of content it uses to generate results.

Key takeaways: 

• SearchGPT just looks plain cool and easy to use. It’s a tidy, ad-free experience that brings together many of the things that have worked well in Google’s AI Overviews so far.
  • The cleanness of this interface is likely to be a big differentiator for SearchGPT (assuming it launches publicly in this form). Google, however, has already explicitly stated that ads will be incorporated into AI Overviews (assuming these plans aren’t shaken up by the company’s antitrust proceedings).
• This new platform will also push the SEO industry forward and likely spur the evolution of technical and content best practices. But note the multiple assumptions mentioned above—it’s simply too early to concretely speculate about any specific impacts.

What It Means for You

Nothing, at least right now.

The one immediate conclusion we can draw is that competition is ramping up for Google if this product truly takes off.

In terms of your SEO strategy, SearchGPT is likely to work on a very similar system for analyzing and ranking content.

If you already perform well, we think you’ll likely do well on this more AI-forward search engine. If you make fundamental SEO improvements to your website and content, they should theoretically help you on any search engine.

Just keep in mind that we still don’t know exactly how SearchGPT will rank content and whether it will crawl the whole web or stay limited to smaller sets of domains. The answers to these questions will impact the specific technical best practices and steps you should follow to maximize visibility in its results. We’ll keep an eye on it and update you as we learn more.

SEO in an AI Environment: Our Take

First, what’s the throughline in all of these news items?

Competition and diversification are ramping up, and Google is now (we think) forced to make improvements to defend its dominant market position. AI is an integral component of all this change.

But if you’re worried that the dramatic infusion of AI into search engines will catastrophically disrupt SEO as we know it, think again.

We’ll walk through our thought process:

1. AI & search are old pals.

Did you know that Google Search has long included AI-powered systems that work to understand language by making connections between concepts?

The introduction of AI into SEO has been a long, slow process—not an overnight change, even though all the headlines have made it feel that way.

Google’s ability to parse language has become incredibly sophisticated over the years. Much of the “leaked” Google documents this year didn’t actually include any surprises on that front.

This means that SEO professionals already know how to adapt and drive results in an AI-infused environment. We just haven’t been explicitly talking about the evolution of search in terms of AI for very long.

Remember the study mentioned above? 99.5% of AI Overviews cite content that already appears within the top 10 organic results for their queries.

Users will always prefer human-centric content from trusted, high-quality websites. These will be the pages, sites, and brands that AI systems prefer to pay attention to.

In other words, users, search engines, and AI systems are all likely to define “good content” very similarly.

So even though it’s unclear exactly what technical processes will power SearchGPT, we think they won’t be radically different than those that power Google today. You’ll just need to stick to the fundamentals, learn, adapt, and grow like normal.

2. Technical practices change, fundamentals don’t.

Technical best practices have to evolve to keep up with changing technology. Surface-level content trends come and go, too.

However, the fundamental guiding principles of effective SEO do not change. What are they?

1. Create helpful, authoritative content for other humans.
2. Maintain the technical health of your site so that users and crawlers can access it.
3. Build your website’s and brand’s reputation over time to prove trustworthiness.

As the space evolves, we’ll undoubtedly see new best practices and technical requirements for achieving these fundamentals (but this would happen even if AI were taken out of the equation).

Our recommendation? Work toward achieving the fundamentals and stay on top of developments in the industry without making drastic overnight strategy shifts.

3. But we can count on a few new priorities.

All that said, there are a couple of new strategic priorities that you should keep in mind as the SEO world changes.

These are the same big-picture takeaways we first identified back when AI Overviews were launched:

• Pay attention to your site’s lower-funnel content. 
  • We can confidently assume that AI-infused search engines will reduce the clickthrough rates of top-funnel content. These are the broad, educational queries where AI is best poised to fully satisfy the user intent.
  • Full-funnel conversion journeys—rich collections of helpful content that guide users through the whole process of learning about your offerings—will perform best going forward.
  • What you should do: Double down on understanding user intent and implementing conversion rate optimization best practices.
• Brand-building will become increasingly important.
  • All search engines (AI or old-fashioned) want to understand who you are, what you have to say, and whether you can be trusted.
  • The modern concept-mapping processes used by Google and AI systems rely heavily on associating authors and brands with content.
  • What you should do: Attribute your content to specific, real authors. Attend speaking engagements to get your brand out there. Share partner posts with other authoritative domains. There are tons of ways to build your brand.

If you’re already achieving the fundamentals of SEO listed above, you have what you need to succeed with these strategic priorities.

We can help with everything, too, including executing full-funnel content strategies, implementing CRO improvements, partner posting, and other brand-building activities.

Have questions about anything we’ve discussed in this guide? Curious to learn more? Let us know!

Please contact us to learn more about our full range of digital marketing, SEO, 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.

The dust has settled after another big news story in the SEO world: a purported leak of internal Google data about how its ranking algorithm works.

If you’re plugged into the SEO sphere, you likely caught wind of the drama. But if it’s news to you, you’re not alone. Either way, you likely have some questions.

• What happened?
• What information did this leak include?
• What’s the controversy?
• What does it mean for my website?

Now that we have more context about the leak, the Nexus Marketing team wanted to offer a quick overview and our take on its implications for your organization’s SEO.

What happened?

On May 5th, 2024, SEO thought leader Rand Fishkin received news of leaked Google API documentation from a source claiming that it came from Google’s secretive Search Division. On May 27th, Fishkin published a full write-up:

Rand Fishkin: An Anonymous Source Shared Thousands of Leaked Google Search API Documents with Me; Everyone in SEO Should See Them

It immediately became the biggest topic in the SEO world in years—the buzz eclipsed even the very recent rollout of AI Overviews.

Since then, the leaked information has been a major point of controversy. We’ll dig into why it’s controversial among SEO professionals, but first, let’s clarify:

Was this a leak of the actual Google ranking algorithm?

No. At this point, it’s been pretty much disproven.

• The leak consisted of internal Google API documentation. (API stands for application programming interface—code shared between separate platforms—normal stuff in the tech world for companies to build cross-functionalities between their own or external tools.)
• While the original source claimed that the leaked documentation came from Google’s Search Division, this has not been verified. In fact, this does not appear to be true.
• This information is actually related to a completely separate Google product, Document AI Warehouse, a public Google Cloud platform for analyzing and storing data.
• However, it’s still fair to consider the leaked information potentially ranking-related. It details a wide range of rules and protocols that this particular Google product potentially uses to analyze and interpret data. It’s not unreasonable to assume that some or many of its features might also exist in the core Google Search ranking algorithm—but there are caveats.

Here’s how SEO expert, Eli Schwartz, put it in a recent newsletter:

“Google has said this information is out of context, which is an accurate way to describe it. At best, it’s a comprehensive list of definitions that Google could track in its ranking algorithms, but we have no indication that these elements are used, if they are, and how they are used.”

What information did the Google leak include?

So, what exactly did the leaked Google API documentation include?

It includes detailed lists of over 14,000 named protocols that Google’s Document AI Warehouse potentially uses to understand and sort information.

Some of the specific protocols that caught people’s attention include:

Based on this information, many SEO professionals quickly assumed that these or similar factors are used in the Google Search algorithms to understand and rank content out in the wild. The thinking is that if Google has supposedly built these systems and features, they’re likely deployed elsewhere.

Note how often we use “potential” in these descriptions—remember that we don’t know for sure whether these factors are actually included in Google Search algorithms.

Want to go deeper? This SearchEngineLand article explains more of the specific protocols included in the leak. However, keep in mind that this article was published before we learned more about the actual provenance of the data—take its analyses of the leak’s SEO implications with a grain of salt.

Want an even deeper dive? (Not highly recommended, but it’s definitely interesting!) Here’s a comprehensive table of all the protocols found in the leaked documentation:

Complete table of purported ranking signals

How did the SEO world react and why?

The news of the Google leak created waves immediately. First reactions ran the gamut from measured skepticism to frenzied anger to jaded dismissal.

Now that a few weeks have passed and we’ve learned more about the leaks, the buzz has calmed significantly.

But why the dramatic range of initial reactions?

First, some context. Whenever we get news of big Google shake-ups, algorithm changes, and hints about how the ranking algorithm works, a similar swarm of reactions occurs.

The SEO space is as diverse as the internet itself. When websites use released information to make assumptions about updated SEO best practices, not all of them will reap benefits. Some may actually see decreased SEO performance. No two sites will experience an algorithm update the same way or see the same impacts from making similar changes to their content.

This, understandably, can create frustration and blame-casting.

Some SEO professionals then assume that Google intentionally misleads them. Seemingly contradictory statements or mixed results from implementing assumption-based changes fuel the fire.

When the leaks landed, they were largely misinterpreted.

Many immediately thought the leaked information came directly from the core Search ranking algorithms. Many of the signals and features included in the leak do seem to contradict past statements from Google about how Search works. Confirmation bias set in, and we saw some angry and jaded reactions.

But fast forward just a few days.

A clearer picture of the leak emerged. Here’s how Search Engine Journal article put it in late May, 2024:

“Many SEOs [have come] to the conclusion that the alleged Google data leak was not a leak, did not contain ranking algorithm secrets, was five years out of date, and did not show anything new. While that’s not how everyone feels about it, SEOs in general don’t tend to agree about anything.”

The leak is complicated. And while some in the space distrust Google’s statements, jumping to black-and-white conclusions one way or the other is never the best move.

Why Does it Matter?

All this context might be confusing. We get it, so why are we sharing it?

We want to arm our clients and partners (and everyone else) with knowledge and a healthy dose of skepticism.

If you work in marketing and encounter SEO news and trends, you need to understand why we see a range of dramatic reactions to industry developments as they break. These reactions tend to die down after a few days, and then the real takeaways emerge after that (and we’ll tell you about them).

What does it mean for your website?

Honestly, not much.

If you follow tried-and-true best practices, create quality content for your users, build links to it, and maintain your website’s health, you’re already ahead!

But even if the leaked information did come directly from the Search algorithm, it wouldn’t have taught us much that we didn’t already know or couldn’t piece together.

If you pay attention to Google’s big-picture changes (like their Helpful Content Update, spam crackdown, and the rollout of AI Overviews), you can already infer that more deeply understanding the context and quality of content has been a big priority. It makes sense that Google would want to be capable of piecing together the full context of the language surrounding a link, for instance.

But if you’re already creating excellent, user-centric, well-organized content, this shouldn’t even be a concern.

Here’s our take:

When SEO professionals take leaks, rumors, clickbait strategies, and Google’s hints too literally, it’s no surprise when they see mixed results.

There’s a commonly held misconception that there’s some kind of exact formula for SEO success. This is not true.

Google’s ranking system is extremely complex, with thousands and thousands of ranking factors constantly in flux.

It’s not a checklist or recipe of exact measurements to get just right. And you definitely don’t succeed at SEO by taking dramatic swings at big strategy changes based on assumptions and expecting all-or-nothing results.

SEO success comes from building up your website’s quality, helping your users, and creating a respected brand. You’ll satisfy algorithm signals along the way, and Google will learn to recognize you for your hard work.

To sum it all up, we love this quote from SEO thought leader, Eli Schwartz:

“The user pays your bills, not the search engines.”

Learn from a balanced mix of sources—Google’s statements, firsthand trial and error, experts in the field, and your audiences’ needs.

This is exactly how we approach SEO at Nexus Marketing, and it’s served our clients well for a decade now. Want to learn more? We’d love to hear from you.

Have any questions or want to learn more about our approach to SEO?

Contact us or reach out directly to your Nexus points of contact at any time!

The big day’s finally here—Google recently announced that AI overviews (previously known as Search Generative Experiences or SGEs) will be broadly rolled out to the public after months of testing with small audience segments.

The SEO world has been buzzing and speculating about the impact of Google’s new AI features for a while now. There’s been a lot of excitement but just as much fear and anxiety. What do these changes mean for organic SEO? Will domains that currently rank highly see increased or decreased engagement? Will Google cite the sources that it uses in AI answers?

We put together this quick guide to help you understand what these AI results are and how they may impact SEO going forward:

• What are AI Overview results?
  • What kinds of search terms do they appear for?
  • Why AI Overviews are exciting
  • Why some are worried
• How will AI Overviews impact organic SEO?
  • Does it matter? Big-picture analysis
• How are we adapting our approach?
  • The key takeaways

What are AI Overview Results?

If you haven’t yet seen one of these AI results, here’s a quick overview:

In this SERP for the query “B2B marketing best practices,” Google serves an AI overview at the top of the page. Under it, we see the normal paid and organic search results.

Click the “Show more” button, and Google expands the AI overview to show the full AI-generated response, including suggested subtopics, the full list of marketing best practices, and citations of the pages used to generate this information (plus links to them).

What kinds of search terms do AI Overviews appear for?

Google has explicitly stated that “AI Overviews appear in Google Search results when our systems determine… you want to quickly understand information from a range of sources, including information from across the web and Google’s Knowledge Graph.”

In other words, AI Overviews will appear most frequently for educational and task-based top-funnel queries. Google wants to provide quick answers, suggestions, and sources, essentially guiding users through the first stages of their search or purchase journeys. Here’s an example for the query, “How do you clean a fabric sofa”:

Google also appears to be taking a careful approach to rolling out these changes so far. As of May 2024:

• Only 14% of queries return AI results automatically
• 28% of queries return AI Overviews when manually prompted (forced)
• 58% of Google queries have no AI results enabled (up from 9% in February)

We’ll definitely see these numbers evolve over time as the system is refined and improved, but remember that AI Overviews are not a drastic overnight change.

More context to keep in mind:

AI Overviews will impact paid Google Ads just like organic results. Ads are a massive revenue source for Google, so we can definitely expect more changes to the AI Overview system in the future for this reason alone—nothing’s set in stone!

Why AI Overviews are exciting

The Google Search experience is rapidly evolving to keep up with changing technology and user habits and preferences—it’s just plain cool.

We also expect AI Overviews to spur a lot of beneficial experimentation and improvement in how web content is created. At Nexus, this has been a huge topic of discussion since the rapid rise of ChatGPT, and we’ve been actively evolving, experimenting, and improving our content practices for a long time now. It’s an exciting time! (Skip ahead to learn more about the strategies on our mind these days.)

For your website, AI Overviews may create opportunities to gain increased visibility and clicks if pages don’t yet rank highly in organic results. This is because the AI-generated content does not necessarily draw from the top-ranking organic content (although it often does).

AI Overviews also appear to favor trusted domains that discuss topics related to the query (just like the normal organic ranking process). This means your excellent website full of optimized content should stay highly visible in this new format.

Why some are worried

AI Overviews represent a huge change for Google, so many in the field are worried about the impacts it will have on their SEO. It all boils down to the fact that for many types of queries, the AI experience shifts the focus partly away from organic results.

This anxiety is nothing new, though. Every new algorithm change and interface update that Google rolls out has been received with dramatic cries of “SEO is dead!” for decades now—usually amplified by panicked websites that use spammy strategies to game the system at scale. This is why Google’s anti-spam updates in March 2024 were met with such drama.

SEO is definitely changing (and has been steadily for years), but as long as people use search engines to find the information, products, and services they need, SEO will still be a crucial tool for reaching them.

The biggest lesson we’ve learned from years of Google algorithm changes and policy updates: Pay attention, learn, and adapt, and you’ll be fine.

Let’s take a closer look at specific SEO impacts that many are expecting as a result of AI Overviews:

Potential SEO Impacts of AI Overviews

The major potential SEO impacts of Google’s AI Overviews can be summed up like this:

1. AI Overviews disrupt the normal pattern of ads and organic results appearing at the top of results pages, potentially decreasing visibility.
2. This decreased visibility may lead to reduced clickthrough rates (CTR) for pages that previously appeared at the top of results pages.
3. Decreased CTRs may translate to lower traffic, meaning fewer users and leads engaging with the content.

In tactical terms, here’s what we’ve also learned so far:

• Google claims that “the links included in AI Overviews get more clicks than if the page had appeared as a traditional web listing for that query.”
  • This claim has been widely disputed by SEO professionals, but we’re still in very early days.
  • It’s important to remember that the actual CTR impacts are incredibly specific to the query and the user’s intent. We’ve seen similar concerns around Google’s Featured Snippet features (functionally a precursor to AI Overviews): In some cases, they dramatically decrease CTRs of lower-ranked content, and in others the effect is minimal. It all depends on the full context of the search.
• Google will provide impression and click data for pages cited in AI Overviews in Search Console reports.
  • However, it will lumped together with the rest of the organic engagement data, not tracked separately.
  • We can likely expect more developments on this front in the coming months, and SEO reporting practices will evolve to keep up.

Does it matter? Big-picture analysis of the SEO impacts of AI Overviews

Will AI Overviews decrease clickthrough rates?

Yes, CTRs for content appearing for educational, top-funnel search terms will likely generally decrease, leading to less overall traffic to those pages.

Does this matter?

For most websites, not really. (Unless the primary purpose of your website is to generate ad revenue—which is why spammy websites get so upset about algorithm changes.)

Raw traffic is not a particularly valuable SEO performance metric for most brands’ websites. Even less so when it arrives through top-funnel content.

Why?

The goal of a brand’s website is to generate qualified leads. Broad search terms that generate a lot of traffic aren’t good at this. They instead build your awareness and visibility, funneling a tiny segment of visitors towards converting. Most visitors, if they’re actual potential leads, will engage with other parts of your website, sign up for emails, download a resource, or simply return at a later date to learn more.

Remember the old B2B marketing “Rule of 7” — it takes, on average, 7 interactions with your brand before a lead is ready to convert. If anything, today’s internet has made the average journey even longer. Accenture found that most buyers are already 57% through the buying process before they’re ready to engage with a sales representative.

The entire journey before that point matters. AI can handle the very first stages of the sales funnel, then you should put your energy into what matters more: Attracting and engaging more qualified audiences.

What does this mean practically speaking?

Full-funnel content strategies are increasingly important. This means:

• Producing and maintaining high-quality content to ensure visibility and awareness across search results (including in AI Overviews).
• Putting a greater emphasis on your middle- and bottom-funnel content strategies. Create unique content that truly answers their questions and addresses their concerns.
  • Remember, these are the audiences you want, and the terms they’re searching are less likely to generate AI results.
• Building multiple engagement options into your website—email, video, downloadable resources, and more—to retain the attention of qualified audiences.
• Increasing your brand’s visibility in other ways, like public thought leadership opportunities and cross-blogging.
  • These activities build awareness of your brand among both your audience and Google, making it more likely to prioritize your brand in search results.

TLDR: Brands that prioritize raw traffic above engagement from qualified audiences are likely to be hit hard by the AI evolution.

Brands with holistic, focused content strategies are not likely to be heavily impacted.

If you already follow SEO best practices and have a thoughtful conversion strategy, you’re already winning.

How is Nexus Adapting to AI Overviews?

The Nexus content team has been talking about AI Overviews (or SGEs as they were previously called) for months now.

Our standard content practices already set us up well to compete on any search results page—your Nexus-created content is already leading the way.

But with the widespread rollout of AI Overviews, a few points in particular are on our radar. We’re specifically prioritizing:

• A deeper understanding of the user intent, funnel position, and how to best address them in the content.
  • If you’re a Nexus client and have helpful sales collateral or customer interviews, please share them with us!
• An increased emphasis on organic “topics” rather than just straightforward keywords.
  •  AI systems understand language more naturally, looking for concepts and related phrases instead of just discrete keywords.
  • Longtail “How do I…” and “Why should I…” queries are also more likely to receive AI Overview results—we’ll make sure you show up for them!
• Writing more directly and concisely than ever.
  • This will ensure we’re providing the quick answers that both users and Google want.
• Creating true “information gain”—content that AI can’t replicate.
  • Look for more statistics, trends, and case studies featured in your content.
  • Your copywriter might even reach out to you for some direct stories and opinions. Google loves content that takes a specific position!

In addition to beefing up our content strategies, the Nexus team has also been improving and developing a full range of other service options that can help your brand build its overall awareness and authority. These include influencer marketing, video production, public thought leadership opportunities through NXUnite, and more.

Please contact us to learn more about any of these services or to chat about your brand’s overall digital marketing strategy.

Key takeaways from this article

• As long as people use search engines to find the information, products, and services they need, SEO will still be a crucial tool for reaching them.
• Google algorithms and processes have always changed. Pay attention, learn, and adapt, and you’ll be fine.
• Remember the most important goals of your website: leads, not traffic.
• If you already follow SEO best practices and have a thoughtful full-funnel conversion strategy, you’re already winning.

And if you’re already a Nexus client, we’ve got you covered. We think about Google’s changes and how to stand out in a changing online world all day. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you want to learn more.

Have any questions or want to learn more about how we’re thinking about AI changes in the search landscape?

Contact us or reach out directly to your Nexus points of contact at any time.

Sources and Additional Resources

• Search Engine Land: Google rolls out AI Overviews in US with more countries coming soon
• Search Engine Journal: Google Rolls Out AI-Powered Overviews To US Search Results
• Search Engine Journal: Google’s AI Overviews Documentation: Key SEO Insights
• Semrush: What Is the Future of SEO in 2024? 9 Critical SEO Trends to Know