Implications of Google AI for SEO?

May 28, 2024 8:30 AM

I have spent some time consulting a friend on SEO for her website, and laid out a longterm strategy for her. Now, with Google's AI answers, it seems like the whole thing was a waste of time, and I'm wondering if we should even still continue with that type of blog content.

She is an EMDR therapist, and we were writing articles explaining what EMDR is and how it can be used for various types of trauma. Now all the targeted searches we were writing for just get an AI answer at the top of the page--why would anyone click through to her website?

I know the feature is very new, but I don't have a good feeling about how it will affect business. I'd appreciate some guidance from people who are marketing/SEO specialists specifically and not speculation from people who are just interested in the subject.

posted by BuddhaInABucket to Technology (9 answers total)

Well the simple answer is we have no idea what is going to happen with SEO. I asked my friend (who works in SEO at a large company) about this recently and he said all the recent "best practices" for SEO are changing because we can't predict what will work in 6 months as Google is constantly changing things as they try out AI.

But at the basic level you are using, AI answers are not much different than the snippets and extracts Google has been showing for a few years. Those already mostly came from SEO farming articles on large sites with lots of links instead of from individual sites like what you are trying to to make. Individual blogs on medical-related topics have not been showing up on the front page for the last few years, unless they were old with a lot of established links in. The main difference now is that instead of using a single website as a source, it combines several together (often very poorly) so some people would be less likely to click any page.

I would recommend focusing on good content and posting it different places instead of relying on Google. For instance you could help them make a version to post on Medium. I'm not an expert on what makes sense specifically, but independent blog posts are very hard to find with Google search right now.
posted by JZig at 8:43 AM on May 28

One other thing, SEO for small sites is still relevant if there is something that people would use to dramatically specialize the results. For medical providers the obvious one is location, so people searching for "EMDR Cityname" would be much more likely to find any site that prominently mentioned it was in that city. When I tried that with my city I did get several individual blogs, and having well-written content will make it more likely to show up there. Google is probably going to save the AI answers for general topics like "EMDR techniques" but very specific searches should not be changed much from how they are now.
posted by JZig at 9:03 AM on May 28 [4 favorites]

Best answer: Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo wrote about Google's new AI feature, and how it fundamentally breaks Google's implicit contract with content creators. He is mostly focused on news sites, but the same would apply to your situation. He doesn't have any conclusions, other than things are in flux and it's a potentially a big problem for a lot of organizations.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 9:29 AM on May 28 [3 favorites]

Best answer: The best she can do right now is publish accurate, helpful, and original content, and position herself as a subject-matter expert in her field. If applicable, she'll want her credentials featured prominently on the "about" page and in her author bio on articles. Google takes medical claims seriously (or at least they claim to) so it should be obvious to readers and Google's algorithm that she's a medical professional. As JZig mentioned, local SEO (i.e., location-specific articles) and specialized content are much more likely to gain traction than the generalized content that everyone is writing about.
posted by Woodroar at 11:17 AM on May 28 [1 favorite]

There's been a lot of talk about this in SEO spaces, and the short answer is there's no clear answer yet. The recent updates Google has been making haven't been like the previous ones where there was a clear path forward, and there a lot of people asking similar questions. This AI announcement is just one is a long series of updates google has made since last year that are screwing small publishers; your friend isn't alone, not by a long shot. A lot of people have thrown in the towel, some are trying to pivot but guessing on what will be successful, and a lot are just hanging out to see how the whole situation shakes out.

The last one, waiting to see how things shake out, is the path I'm personally taking. I'm not putting in a lot of effort the moment until it's clearer what that effort needs to look like. I suspect it's going to be a mix of alternative traffic sources (ie social) and video content in addition to blog content, but right now we're all just guessing as it's clear there's more changes from google to come.
posted by cgg at 11:20 AM on May 28

Pre-AI I had heard that working on your Google Business presence, with posts and up to date info, was a very good way to win top spots in Google natural search, but who can say if that is still true in 2024. Something to consider as part of a larger strategy maybe?
posted by fiercekitten at 4:52 PM on May 28

Best answer: Via Casey Newton:

On Tuesday, people who work on search engine optimization raced to read about thousands of pages of documentation regarding the company’s search engine algorithm that appear to have been accidentally published online. Google closely guards information about search ranking, both for integrity reasons (to prevent bad actors from manipulating results) and competitive ones (to maintain its edge over rivals). And so the SEO experts who got an early look at the documents are calling them a bonanza.

No one has yet fully digested the contents of the leak, and Google has not commented on the documents’ authenticity. Some of the systems referenced may no longer be operating. Assuming the documents are real, though, I was struck by the first conclusion drawn from them by Rand Fishkin, who published the first report on the leaks. Surveying the documents, he concludes that Google’s organic search rankings have come to favor large, dominant brands over everything else.

“They’ve been on an inexorable path toward exclusively ranking and sending traffic to big, powerful brands that dominate the web [over] small, independent sites and businesses,” he writes.

posted by Winnie the Proust at 8:09 PM on May 28 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Gosh, I feel like all I do on MetaFilter is recommend podcasts, but today’s episode of Better Offline might genuinely be of interest. I’m about 2/3 through, and Ed Zitron is interviewing an SEO expert about exactly this topic.

The episode title is AI Is Breaking Google and the description is:

On May 14th 2024, Google introduced their Search Generative Experience, a service that uses hallucination-prone artificial intelligence to generate answers to queries rather than just presenting links, all so that they could Wall Street that they're innovative and future-forward. The result is an even-more-broken search experience, and in this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through the rotten state of Google, and speaks with Lily Ray, a 15-year veteran of the search engine optimization industry, about how Google abandoned the web.
posted by Suedeltica at 10:11 AM on May 29 [1 favorite]

Some of this Gizmodo article may be of interest to you.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 1:02 PM on May 30