How Google’s New ‘AI Overviews’
Will Impact SEO and Marketing
In 2023, Google released Bard, their own generative AI model and subsequently revealed that they were adding AI search overviews to Google searches. This came as little surprise to any marketers who had been paying attention – as from the earliest days of ChatGPT the combination of search and AI seemed like a logical next step.
However, what was initially unclear was how radically AI would reshape search results – and what, if any, impact it would have on SEO. Now that Google has had time to roll out their AI generated search summaries, we have a better idea of how AI has altered the landscape of online search.
This article offers a brief overview of how Google is currently implementing AI, our predictions for how AI search results may impact the future of digital marketing, and suggestions for how to get the most out of your digital marketing efforts.
The AI in Search That We’re Not Talking About
When we talk about AI in search, it is important to realize that artificial intelligence has been baked into Google search for many years and powers both natural language processing and visual search technologies. These tools, while powerful and worth knowing about, are not at the heart of the current conversation.
AI Improves Natural Language Processing
One of the earliest uses for AI in search was for improvement of natural language processing (NLP). This allowed Google to provide relevant search results for conversational search queries.
This type of AI has been implemented in search for over 5 years, with Google introducing BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) back in 2019 to aid in NLP. Some people might notice the word transformer hiding in the acronym – and T of ChatGPT fame is the very same sort of AI.
Check out our article on the state of AI to learn about different AI systems.
Google Lens: Using AI to Power Visual Search
Another way AI has been changing search for longer than many people realize is visual search. Google released Google Lens back in 2017, and this tool allowed users to take a picture to direct their Google search. This could be anything from taking a photo of a particular car part and finding a part number, or taking a picture of a point of interest and learning about its history. In addition to these more clearly AI-powered features, Google Lens also provided optical character recognition (OCR) and real-time translation features, making it a quite versatile tool.
Recently, Google has introduced the “circle to search” feature for newer Android phones. This feature essentially allows users to activate Google Lens by holding the Home button for a few seconds and then selecting the part of the image they want to learn more about.
However, visual search still lags well behind traditional search volume. In 2023, users performed 144 billion Google visual searches – a staggering number until you consider that Google reported that they exceeded 2 trillion annual searches as far back as 2016! They no longer report annual search volume – but it is easy to assume that it is much greater now.
Circle to Search screenshots taken from:
https://blog.google/products/search/google-circle-to-search-android/
AI Overviews: The AI-Powered Tool that May Disrupt Search
While NLP and visual search are absolutely AI-powered, this type of artificial intelligence sits behind the scenes, isn’t readily apparent to users, and has been around for a long time. However, the new AI-powered summaries, or Search Generative Experiences (SGE) as Google calls them, are immediately recognizable as the products of powerful neural networks and bring with them the promise (or threat) of disrupting search results. These AI overviews provide a condensed answer for the search query with the answers largely drawn from the top organic search results. If a user wants to learn where the content is drawn from, the “Show More” button expands the results and includes links to the source material that the AI overview is generated from.
When Google first unveiled this feature as many as 84% of all Google searches included an AI overview – causing many in the marketing and publishing spheres to worry. However, Google has since dialed back the number of searches that include an overview to just 15% of searches. The reason for this huge reduction is multi-faceted, and in some small part relates to Google’s initial release being plagued by gaffs such as recommending people put glue on their pizza or eat rocks.
However, another possible reason for the reduction is that Google found that on many topics its users weren’t yet ready to engage with AI generated content.
On the other hand, with literally trillions of annual searches, even 15% of searches receiving an AI overview means hundreds of billions of search engine result pages are going to have an AI generated summary sitting proudly on top of the page. One study suggested that upwards of 36% of organic traffic could be lost due to SGE and this could lead to billions of dollars of lost ad revenue.
How AI Overviews Will Impact Home Service Business Marketing
For some industries, the addition of SGE to search is a very scary prospect, but the story actually looks very different for local search in general, and home service businesses in particular. During the first several months of SGE’s implementation, AI overviews could be found for nearly any type of search, but beginning in April 2024 they began to disappear. In June 2024, search result pages that included a map pack were among the least likely to contain an SGE.
Here at Cut Throat Marketing, we have noticed that our clients’ (who are almost exclusively within the home service industry) service pages’ most lucrative keywords almost never contain an AI search overview.
Now, this is not to say that every aspect of their online presence is unaffected. The type of questions that blogs have historically answered are quite likely to get an AI overview. However, blog posts are generally not a strong driver of leads so this change doesn’t significantly impact revenue.
Nor does the addition of SGE mean that home service businesses should change their current blog publishing strategies, as blogs exist primarily to demonstrate your business’s expertise to Google (boosting your service page’s organic rankings) and they continue to do so even with AI overviews.
What the Future of AI-Powered Search Holds
At present, AI-generated summaries are not playing a major role in local search, and based on Google scaling back their deployment of SGE in local search, we can expect this trend to continue for some time. Accordingly, the best digital marketing strategies for home service businesses have not changed dramatically.
The best way to reach your customers is still to take a holistic approach which ensures your company is visible across the entire SERP. Local guarantee and PPC ads put your business front and center, a well-optimized GBP helps you rank on map packs, and a search engine optimized website keeps your organic rank high. Even if a customer doesn’t engage with your PPC ads or map pack listing, by the time they reach your top ranked organic result, they will have had multiple exposures to your brand and be more likely to click through.
If your current marketing efforts don’t already include all of these components, then you are missing out on leads. Want to learn how much revenue your current marketing strategy is leaving on the table? Schedule a discovery session with Cut Throat Marketing and see how much better your marketing could perform!