SGE is about to shake up our search results in a big way.
For those of us who haven’t been living under a rock, SGE (short for “Search Generative Experience”) was the big earth-shattering takeaway in the SEO world during last Wednesday’s Google I/O conference.
This new search interface is an experimental (but likely-to-be-rolled-out) experience that blends search engine results pages with ChatGPT-like generative AI above the fold for select (mostly long-tail) search queries.
See below:
What does this mean for SEO programs?
A lot of things. Much more than I’ll be able to cover in this post.
Here, I’d like to focus on how we might want to think about preparing for the future rollouts of SGE because I do think that SEOs and teams need to future-plan before SGE goes into effect.
The three main SEO implications as I see them are:
- Organic traffic benefits from SGE links to organic sources (thank god).
- Organic traffic risks due to SGE replacing featured snippets.
- Organic traffic risks due SGE pushing down organic results.
These are predictive in nature, which of course means that I may be wrong.
Let’s talk about each in order:
#1 SGE Links to Organic Sources
The first SEO implication of SGE is primarily positive. Google is going to link organic results into the generative AI experience. Judging by the reactions I saw on Twitter, it looks like SEOs are breathing a huge sigh of relief.
This does look really promising for every SEO who is worried about AI plagiarizing their content and taking their jobs, but it poses an entirely-new keyword tracking problem. How difficult will it be for tracking tools to keep up with SGE’s dynamic link insertions?
#2 Featured Snippet Attrition from SGE
The second implication is even more important to prepare for in my mind. Featured snippet acquisition has been a core tenant of SEO programs, pretty much since their inception in 2014.
For many brands, featured snippets drive a large percentage of non-branded organic traffic. If I had to guess, I might suggest that somewhere in the realm of 10-20% of non-branded organic traffic is a realistic range for mature SEO programs.
This traffic, in my mind is at risk.
Yes, it’s possible that some of this traffic could be replaced by links in SGE, but I suspect that brands will lose more FS traffic than they gain in SGE links.
Plus, Featured Snippets have been somewhat attainable through testing and optimization, whereas SGE appears less controllable on our part.
While I hope for the best, I think brands with a large presence in featured snippets should prepare for the eventual attrition in FS traffic.
#3 The “10 Blue Links” Move Further Down to Make Room for SGE
Just looking at the snapshots from Google I/O’s previews, SGE’s above-the-fold real estate looks even more sizeable than a featured snippet.
Then, if search ads are to be displayed below SGE, our ten blue links could see even less traffic than is presently available to the same organic ranking positions.
This, coupled with Featured Snippet attrition, might realistically pose organic traffic risks to companies that don’t adapt quickly.
Once again, I might be wrong, but I do believe that marketing teams would be wise to prepare for these traffic risks now, before the experimental rollouts go into effect so that we can prepare our teams for the future world of Generative AI search experiences.
5 Actions I Recommend to Prepare for Generative AI in the SERPs
#1 Educate your clients & leadership teams
No executive wants to be caught off-guard if or when traffic drops hit the fan.
Granted, right now is far too soon to know exactly how much organic traffic is at risk. Like most rollouts, I’m anticipating Google will test out SGE experiences slowly, and on mostly long-tail queries before possible expansion toward more popular keywords.
Passing this knowledge on now will ensure that we’re not caught with our proverbial SEO pants down.
#2 Run a quick inventory of your featured snippets
Your owned featured snippets today should be a relatively good benchmark for tracking future attrition.
Of course, featured snippets do fluctuate without SGE rollouts, but if you’ve got 500 featured snippets today and one year from now, your count drops to 400, that seems like a sizeable enough impact, so you may want to check in on the 100 or so snippets that were lost to monitor any that may get displaced.
Again, these are all unknowns as of today, but I personally would definitely want to track this attrition.
Both Ahrefs and Semrush have powerful filters for checking the current counts and keywords for your owned featured snippets, so check out these tutorials if you need a how-to:
#3 Monitor your Organic traffic
This tip almost goes without saying, but you are definitely going to want to monitor the overall organic traffic performance of your site over time, while SGE experimental rollouts go into affect.
I’ll be especially interested to see how traffic sources change in GA and GSC to reflect and identify traffic from links inside of the SGE interfaces.
#4 Grow & strengthen organic “money page” traffic now
Once again, we don’t have crystal balls to predict how much organic traffic is at risk, but I do think we would be wise to estimate for attrition levels in the short-term to be close to 5%, and longer-term attrition to reach anywhere between 10-30%. Just my guess.
If you can grow you organic traffic levels ahead of time, and especially if you can grow money-page traffic on bottom-of-funnel or high-conversion-intent search queries, your team will likely feel far more prepared and you’ll be able to maintain high confidence levels in your Organic Search programs.
A few ideas I’d be testing out:
- SEO title testing to raise keyword positions before the ten blue links are pushed down.
- New keyword expansion, focusing on high-conversion-intent opportunities.
- Tightening your site’s messaging and conversion funnel to maintain pipeline on lower overall volumes.
- Shifting some budget and resources away from long-tail keywords and toward “chunky middle” or “big head” keywords that are within reach and less likely to to feature SGE. Only do this if these search terms are realistically attainable.
#5 Optimize your images
Several major changes appear to be under way in terms of AI’s impact on images. For starters, Google will be placing stronger emphasis on metadata and image watermarking to curb the misinformation dilemmas surrounding AI-generated images. For most of my SEO career, image optimization has been very low on my list of priorities, but we may soon find more reasons to optimize our images.
Summary
Backfilling now for future attrition doesn’t guarantee you’ll be able to maintain the same growth trajectory with SGE rollouts. You may successfully grow 30% now and lose 15% from SGE attrition. Make sure that your team understands that this is a future preparation strategy where organic traffic may still be subject to shifts in Google’s expansion of AI experiences.
Bonus: Can you optimize for more traffic from SGE links?
Thinking like a CMO, this question is going to come up a lot.
Right now, it doesn’t look to me like we have any concrete and predictable ways control which links the Generative AI forces will cite, so I’m venturing to guess that our best option will be to lean into EEAT practices to make our content helpful, unique, and authoritative in a way that generative AI may find most-valuable for plagiarising (I mean rewriting).
It’s possible that “SGE optimization techniques” could emerge, but I don’t think we should even be asking ourselves how to optimize for SGE.
