How Sge Will Impact SEO Strategies

2 years ago, SEO for professional services was simple: Rank high, get clicks, win clients. But 2025 has changed everything. Google's Search Generative Experience (SGE) flipped the game on its head. Here's what happened to one of my law firm clients: Their top-ranking page stopped getting clicks. Why? Because Google now answers their prospects' questions directly. - No clicks. - No website visits. - No leads. But here's the interesting plot twist: While search engines got smarter, Winning at SEO went back to basics. The firms crushing it in 2025 aren't just chasing rankings. They're building real authority and trust. Because here's what most firms miss: - 76% of buyers start their search online. - But they're not just looking for answers anymore. - They're looking for expertise they can trust. So we changed our approach: Instead of fighting AI summaries, we started creating content that AI can't replicate: - Real client stories - Unique insights - Expert perspectives The result? Our professional service clients like law firms are getting over 200+ qualified leads every month. My point? SEO in 2025 isn't about outsmarting Google. It's about being the expert voice your clients trust. Even AI can't replace that.

Forbes estimates 60%+ of organic traffic is being effected due to the introduction of AI summaries, the adoption of LLMs, and ultimately the changes in SEO. I recently spoke at Affiliate Summit East on the emergence of AI and the impact to eCommerce. I touched on SEO and the move to SGE (search generative experience), the issues facing identity capture and noise created by bots as well as AI-generated content, and how content goes viral with changes to TikTok & Meta's algorithms. Sharing some of the learnings (and slides) on AI summaries and rankings: Impact - Google's AI summaries can take up to 3 full mobile scrolls or 2 desktop scrolls (1500 pixels) - LLM search went from 0.25% of traffic to 2.25% in <12mo - 60% of organic site traffic is impacted meaning the CTR drops aka people do not end up landing on your site. How to adapt - SEO & SGE are underpinned by the same recipe: content. - How to show up as the featured AI summary or authority? 1. Create unique content and lots of it 2. Build contextual content At Checkmate we get 1.5M+ unique visitors/week to our public-facing product pages. We also are featured on 1700 ChatGPT pages. How we were able to do that is by pulling in long-form structured content for the products we help sell as well as using LLMs to generate some unique content. For those in eCommerce I featured Stanley 1913 with what I think as a really strong product pages that rank well for SGE. If you look at any of their products they have extremely rich, unique content. They leverage product descriptions, product specs, related other products, reviews (not hidden or collapsed) & FAQs. For SGE shorter isn't better, the more unique content the generally better the indexing. Stanley 1913 also has a really strong formatting structure with clear H1, H2 tags, and containers. You have to remember if a bot can't make sense of the text then it won't surface in AI summaries. This will also be extremely important in the future of agentic commerce. 2. Building contextual content The way people are searching is moving from "black shoes" to "best shoes for running a marathon". Context is key. To be able to show up in LLMs or AI summaries, you need to associate your products within that context. 3 easy ways to do that: 1. Create and leverage a PR strategy 2. Build your own written contextual information in a blog on your website 3. Contribute/invest to review sites If you are able to both create unique content with a strong structure and build contextual content AI summaries and LLMs can be a great source of traffic. It is early days so investing in content and structure is a must. Drop me a note if you have other tips you see working or other brands doing it well!

The Google I/O 2025 announcements weren’t a huge surprise yesterday and it’s all anyone is talking about today. But what do some of these changes actually mean for SEO? Here are a few of my thoughts and how this will impact SEO: 👉 1. AI Overviews & AI Mode Search real estate is changing fast. Google has been heading toward "zero-click" results for a long time now, having already monopolized industries like Flights and Hotels. It's been a long time since a search results page looked like “10 blue links.” With AI mode, we're likely to see a few changes. Users will be asking longer, more complex questions and will expect citations to ensure the information is trustworthy. What does this mean for content? Well-structured, comprehensive content will be key. (This is also what Perplexity favors, by the way.) 👉 2. Multimodal Search This has been a long time coming. Remember the “voice search” era? And then image search? Discovery will now be multifaceted. It’s not just about optimizing your content anymore, elements like images, captions, and alt text need attention too. Make everything accessible. Context is everything, which is why structured data will become even more critical than it already is. 👉 3. Google’s Deep Search Search is going deeper, and trusted resources will be more important than ever. Citations, trust signals, and brand recognition are going to matter even more. Heads up Digital PR & link building teams. 👉 4. Agentic Search This could be one of the biggest shifts we’ll see in terms of impact. It's going to become harder than ever to accurately track ROI for campaigns. eCommerce sites will need to adapt - UX must be usable by AI agents and people. Model context protocol data will be necessary. Leveraging tools like Merchant Center and structured product data will be absolutely vital. Many sites are already doing this, as Google has introduced features like Organic Shopping over the past 12 months, but we’re going to need more. 👉 5. Personal Context This marks the end of tracking singular keyword rankings (thankfully, many of us moved on from that years ago in favor of focusing on organic visibility, which is far more accurate and measurable). The privacy implications here are questionable. It'll be interesting to see whether Gemini or AI Overviews accidentally pull in emails or other personal data during the early rollouts. (Keeping an eye on Lily Ray's social feeds for this!) 💡 Summary We’re almost circling back to an era of optimizing for bots rather than users, which is an interesting twist for SEOs. (Though users should always come first!) But the fundamentals remain the same. It’s just no longer about solely being visible in search engines, but about being visible everywhere.

Traditional SEO is no longer enough. Search is evolving fast, and AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and Google’s Search Generative Experience are now generating answers instead of simply showing links. That means your content needs to do more than rank—it needs to be trusted by AI. This shift is called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). It’s the process of creating content that AI tools understand, trust, and summarize in their answers. If you're not optimizing for GEO, your brand risks getting left out of conversations entirely—even when people are searching for exactly what you offer. Here’s what you need to know about GEO: - It’s about being cited in AI answers, not just ranking in search results - AI pulls from authoritative, structured, and fact-based content - Schema markup, clear headlines, and comprehensive topic coverage are essential - E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) now directly influences visibility - Zero-click search is here—AI often answers before a user clicks anything GEO isn’t a trend—it’s the new standard. If you want to stay visible in the AI-driven future of search, your content needs to evolve today. #GEO #GenerativeEngineOptimization #DigitalMarketing #SEO #ContentMarketing #AIMarketing #AI #SearchEngineOptimization #MarketingStrategy #OnlineVisibility #MarketingTrends #BrandAuthority #ContentStrategy

“Future of Search” - new cartoon and post (link in comments) The future of search is ask. The future of results is answer. I like how Carl Holden at Zellus Marketing described the shift in how we’re all going to be navigating the Internet: “Since the turn of the millennium, the verb "search" has dominated our interaction with the internet—inputting keywords into a box and sifting through a list of results. In the last year, AI has catalyzed a move towards a new verb that will redefine our digital experience: ‘Ask.’” This shift in verbs from “search” to “ask” has major implications (and downstream consequences) for anyone using the Internet. “Ask” is different for everyone, so it implies a deep understanding of user-intent, personalization, predictive analytics, and contextual filtering. I think it also risks contributing to what Ian Whitworth described as “The Great Same-ening.” Some of this shift has been underway for a while, with the rise of zero-click search — where users use search engines to surface an answer, rather than clicking through to a website. In 2022, Semrush found that 25.6% of desktop searches and 17.3% of mobile searches were zero-click searches. This was a year before ChatGPT shuffled the entire playing field and Microsoft and Google kicked off a new search engine arms race. Some predict that web site traffic will drop 15-25% in 2024 as the search engine landscape changes and directs fewer people to individual web sites. Insight Partners recently demoed what Google Search Labs is calling “Search Generative Experience (SGE)” for a preview of the next evolution of search. While the current Google results page gives a majority of real estate to organic links, the new SGE has far less space for organic results. One of their takeaways: “It is likely that organic traffic will be fighting for space in a world where there is much less available than in the past.” What’s more, Insight Partners found that only 57% of links cited by Google’s new Search Generative Experience are from the current first page of organic results. So sites that currently perform well in SEO won’t automatically get traction in the new world. Marketers have learned to weather every algorithm change at Google. As I drew in a cartoon once, “the algorithm giveth, and the algorithm taketh away.” Yet this shift feels different. AI Optimization is becoming the new Search Engine Optimization and no one really knows how this will play out.

Google's recent March Core update states that they are reducing "low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40%". What does Google actually mean here? Some believe Google is implying "plagiarized" content. Others believe Google is implying AI content. After some investigations and research, I think originality is penalizing queries that see a lot of SERP Content "Similarity" and Google's imminent release of SGE. This is why Google isn't decreasing originality by 100%. Here's what is happening: 1. Topics have varying degrees of SERP similarity. 2. Featured Snippets are produced when almost all content agrees on the answer 3. Legacy Google algorithm focused on serving content from authority site that focused on answering standard questions 4. What's AI and LLMs (and SGE) good at answering? Questions where there's already a high amount of information similarity 5. Does it surprise you that Helpful Content Update decimated a bunch of content that looked similar? 6. If the new Google model has an SGE sitting on top of the SERPs, and the goal of that SGE is to answer the highly agreed upon questions.... what's the future of Google need to look like to stay useful? 7. First-hand, experience-rich content. Yes, that's why you saw a rise of discussion boards like Reddit and Quora. Yes, that's also why Google inked a deal to capture that 8. Manual Search Evaluators with updated Page Quality Ratings to include "Experience" because SGE / AI expected to cannibalize a ton of "similar" content queries 9. So what's one to do about it? - Create Engaging, Experience-rich, and Entertaining Content - Build a brand that's searchers trust in the industry / space - Prioritize content strategy that offers new perspectives Agree, disagree? Open to thoughts here as I'm still workshopping this theory!

Can you optimize for SGE? Yes. You can. Is it foolproof? No. You can prepare for SGE with an understanding of content relevance and content format. Like SEO, it's the dance of science and art. I’ve conducted some experiments. Check out my approach… Some SEOs have strong opinions on Google’s experimental AI snapshot. Many marketers don’t know it exists. But once it’s deployed, it’s going to influence how we search, organic traffic we earn, and the way we approach SEO. At iPullRank, we’ve written at length about innovations around LLMs and Retrieval Augmentation, the technologies behind AI powered generative search. There are more questions than answers. Based on the mathematical relevance of content chunks (see Michael King’s article on RAG link in comments), I was able to isolate targeted keyword outputs and improve the content cosine similarity for a set of keywords. Days later, my content appeared in the SGE output. I used Scott Stouffer’s SGE Visualizer (link in comments) to check my similarity scores against the competition to have a quantitative benchmark goal. The experiment was focused on Informational queries and based on the 3 types of generative text content types that exist: • Paragraphs • Breakouts • Bulleted lists Sometimes my placement was in Follow Up searches. Other times, I lacked success altogether. Sometimes it hit where I wanted days later. Shopping and Local are completely different animals. The results are incredibly volatile. Halfway through the experiment, Google tested SGE without a carousel. So it’s helpful to monitor changes as we experiment more. I created a checklist and performance tracker for the article that you can snag. Read the entire article, let me know what you think. I’m confident that generative AI will be added to the SERPs at some point in some form. What that looks like is anybody’s guess. Article link and references in the comments:

I’m not an AI expert, or an SEO expert. Far from it.  But I’ll admit that the recent claims of “adopt AI or you’ll become extinct” and “seo is dead” have piqued my interest. And after spending some time using AI search tools from Perplexity, Bing, and Google SGE, I’m starting to see some new opportunities for brands to get discovered. There are two interesting features that these tools share: 1. Include citations & reference sources along with their responses 2. Offer “follow up questions”, allowing you to dig even deeper with the click of a button As for the reference sources - I’ve seen everything from LinkedIn posts, to Reddit threads, to blogs from brands I’ve never heard of.  On top of that, Authoritas (an SEO software) tested Google SGE results for 1k commercial keywords and found that 94% of the links were not page 1 rankings.  𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲’𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗺𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀: 𝗔𝗜 𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝗹𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗳𝗶𝗲𝗹𝗱 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝗘𝗢 𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗱𝘀𝗰𝗮𝗽𝗲. And here’s how to take advantage, without spending a dime: 𝗚𝗼𝗼𝗴𝗹𝗲’𝘀 𝗦𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝗚𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗘𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 This product is currently in beta, but it’s changed the way I utilize Google within 1 week's time. It offers direct and conversational responses to your google queries within the SERP. Like if Google and ChatGPT had a baby.  The real opportunity here, is in the follow-up questions. You might have be struggling to rank for popular search terms. So instead, focus your content strategy around the follow-up prompts.  These are often iterations or deeper dives into the original query, but the results and sources differ from the original. Through a marketer’s lens, this tool is spoon feeding us content topics to take advantage of. 𝗭𝗲𝗿𝗼 𝗖𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗸 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 I’m a huge proponent of this content strategy, made famous by Amanda from Sparktoro.  In short, you’re creating content to be consumed within the channel you’re distributing it on, without the expectation or inclusion of a link.  While this strategy should be unanimously adopted across social media and email, it’s also relevant for SEO.  If you’re creating content that is succinct, directly addresses FAQs, and isn’t stuffed with keywords & backlinks, you’re putting yourself in a good position to have that content included within the results of an AI search engine query. 𝗦𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗺𝗮 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗸𝘂𝗽 Here’s where I could potentially get over my head, with my limited experience in SEO.  Schema markup is a way to structure your website content to be easier for Google to understand it’s context.  There’s like 30-40 different types of schema markups and it made my eyes glaze over when I began reading about them.  So do your own research (SEMRush has a great guide on this topic), and take the time to update your site content accordingly to have a better chance of your content being scraped and included in an AI search query.

BLAST OFF: AI Overviews (formerly SGE) is here! 🚀 I remember when featured snippets entered the game in 2014, and the buzz then was "how unreliable" and "awful" those results were. And don't get me wrong—Google didn't always get it right, even years later (see my search for putting a pizza box in an oven and Google's woeful answer in 2021! https://lnkd.in/dN89Rpnw). However, it made searching easier over time, leading to more searches and more people on Google. That's Google's same promise (and objective) today. 🤔 Contrary to many SEOs, I believe AI Overviews will be a better experience in the long run than the mishmash of entering slow, ad-bombarded sites for answers today. Featured snippets took years to fully "roll out," starting with only 4% of keywords, and I expect the same intentional approach from Google here for AI Overviews (source: https://lnkd.in/dUvE_Tyt), with the ability for many searchers to "generate an AI overview" so they opt-in to the experience. 📈 How can you prepare as a brand? 1. *Aim for AI Overview Slots* It's worthwhile for brands to take their shot at owning a spot in the AI Overview. Just like with featured snippets, this will be possible. And, I suspect, just like with featured snippets, many brands will sleep on it for years before realizing the influence they can have if they win top AI Overviews spots. Be a first-mover! 2. *Embrace Multimodal Content* The writing is on the wall: multimodal content and searches—of images, audio, and videos—will increase over time. This will be far less competitive in the short run, and we need to cozy up to our brand and social media friends to create robust strategies inclusive of multimodal content! 3. *Utilize all of Google's Features* Focus on all of Google's features available to you: local listings for brick-and-mortar, Google Shopping for retailers, Google Flights/Hotels for travel brands, and variations of schema to show your content and products better. 4. *Track & Forecast the Impact* Closely track impressions, clicks, and CTR through Google Search Console so you can understand the impact to specific keywords and pages on your site. ⁉ Questions remain: 1. If AI Overviews is the better experience, how can brands best take advantage of it? (We are currently engaging in testing to help answer this!) 2. If brands aren't rewarded for monetized site traffic (either through ads or affiliates), how does Google reward new content creation so its AI doesn't get dumber over time (as is typical of LLMs—https://lnkd.in/d6adAyBn)? 3. If AI pulls and fine-tuns the algorithm levers, how does Google maintain space for smaller brands or new entrants? Consider this a new era of SERPs. The only constant is change—now let's go SEO! 🧠

How is #GenAI changing the SEO landscape and what to do to be SEO relevant? A few weeks ago, Google announced Search Generative Experience (SGE) - a new search results page that shows content generated by an LLM first followed by sponsored posts and then the rest of the ranked pages by keyword relevancy. What does this mean for startups and teams working on SEO? Although the content is being generated by LLMs, the Search Engines are still crawling and indexing content from websites and providing context to LLMs in real time (using RAG, it appears). This means it is even more important now to have good quality content that is both human and LLM-friendly. LLMs are also going to look at images as context so it is still important to have webpages that are fast-performing and have images with good meta and alt tags. But what can we do differently? Given that OpenAI also announced a new bot User agent (GPTBot), my take on this is to have a FAQ page for your entire website that mimics questions likely to be asked by users with responses you would like the LLM to "learn" from. This is very similar to how you fine-tune LLMs. There is no official doc on this of course but I feel this is currently the best way to feed content into LLMs without using vectors. By the way, you can use LLMs and automation to generate these FAQs (a topic for future post). SGE is available on Google Labs and if you are interested in getting access to test, let me know in the comments and I will post the steps.