Keeping these impacts in mind, how should you prepare your website for AI Overviews?

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jewameb621
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Joined: Sat Dec 28, 2024 6:33 am

Keeping these impacts in mind, how should you prepare your website for AI Overviews?

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5. EDGE queries
YMYL queries refer to Your Money or Your Life queries. These are generally lifestyle queries where people are looking for advice (typically around health or financial issues). For example, “home remedy to treat poison ivy rash”.

EDGE query
Although AI Overviews displays the expected AI-generated text, it also contains a disclaimer: “This is for informational purposes only. This information does not constitute medical advice or diagnosis.” This is because people may decide to act based on the results they get to their YMYL queries. In some cases, Google wants people to seek medical advice instead of utilizing the result. It has trained its model to add this disclaimer with these types of queries just to help protect people.

The limitations of AI Overviews
At first glance, AI Overviews is very powerful and impressive. However aeo service the more familiar you become with it, the more you’ll start to realize its limitations.

Here are some notable issues:

The results are not always correct. (These are known as ‘hallucinations’.) Generative AI is still in the testing phase, so it’s inevitable that it’ll make mistakes. Also, the errors in search results are sometimes reflections of errors in the web content itself. The output can only be as accurate as the input.
Data voids: Sometimes, AI Overviews doesn’t return any results. This may be because it doesn’t understand your query, or it may have decided that there’s no quality or reliable information available.
Contradictions with other search results: AI Overviews results are not always the same as results from traditional Google search. For example, the information in the organic featured snippet might differ from the AI-generated text.
Lack of SEO data: It’s unclear what data will be shown in Google Search Console. And it’s unclear how AI Overviews decides what thumbnails or text links to display.
" We've built in strong protections to mitigate against inaccuracies, but like all LLM-based experiences, generative AI in Search is experimental and can make mistakes… It is trained to corroborate responses with resources from the open web, but sometimes responses may reflect inaccuracies that exist on the web at large. We've launched this as an experiment in Search Labs to start, and we'll continue to improve and fine-tune the experience. "
- Google
8 likely impacts of AI Overviews
It’s clear that AI Overviews is having a significant impact on both paid search and SEO.

Organic results pushed down the page: The AI-generated text occupies a lot of valuable real estate at the top of the SERP. This pushes down the organic results, and this in turn is likely to lead to less SEO traffic.
People not visiting websites: In some cases, the AI Overviews text will give the searcher enough information, so (as mentioned before) they may not progress beyond the SERP. This, again, will lead to less SEO traffic. (However, any SEO traffic that does occur is likely to be more qualified. These searchers have decided to visit your website to get more information.)
Paid ads still display at the top of the SERP: For now, it looks like paid ads will continue to display at the top of the SERP, above the AI-generated text and the organic results. This will likely continue to be the first content that searchers see on the SERP.
Increased competition: Competition for top information results will increase. This will lead to higher levels of ranking difficulty.
Easier to compare products: AI Overviews makes it easier for searchers to compare similar products. This leads to a better customer experience, but makes it harder for brands to get those conversions!
More long-tail keywords: Searches are likely to be increasingly phrased in natural language, rather than traditional ‘search engine’ style. Websites need to be optimized to these more detailed, long-tail queries.
Greater promotion of UGC: AI Overviews is likely to promote user-generated content (UGC) on the SERP. This is especially the case with customer reviews.
Metadata is still a factor: Metadata, such as your title tag and your meta description, continues to be important. After all, the title and description are what entice the searcher to click the link!
5 tips to prepare your site

Start preparing by following some timeless SEO tips. Google has always said that content is king, so the more quality unique content you write, the higher you’ll rank. Those who do this really well will benefit most from this new way.
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