You Ask, I Answer: Google AI Answers and SEO Impact?

In today's episode, Pam asks, how are Google's changes going to affect SEO? What should we measure? So this is in reference to AI summaries or AI answers, Google's new uh summarization where it essentially generates summaries of uh search results. And yeah, it's gonna have an impact on SEO. It's gonna have an impact on unbranded search.

So there's really two fundamental types of queries, right? There's informational and then there's intent. Intent queries are searching for Christopher Penn or searching for trust insights. You have a clear intent of what you want to do. You want to hire trust insights to be a consulting firm.

So far, Google's AI answers don't seem to be interfering with too much of that. Where they are interfering are on the informational queries, like what are some good consulting firms in the AI space? Or uh how how much uh salt should I put in my guacamole? All sorts of things where we know that the root data these things are based on is not always a great experience. If you go to any food blog, you you know this beyond the shadow of a doubt.

There's like 14 pages of stuff about this person's mother's grandmother's roommate's second cousin's dog's best friend, uh, who's like, oh yeah, here's the recipe from you know 1922. Like, nobody cares. Just is it a quarter teaspoon or an eighth of a teaspoon? How much salt goes in the quack? In those cases, AI summarization is a better experience for the consumer because they don't have to scroll all 14 pages.

They don't have to go past all 33 ads and the pop-ups and all the stuff. They just get the answer. So informational queries and unbranded search are at risk. So there's two things you need to do. Number one, you need to go into your Google Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console, uh, Bing Webmaster Tools, and look at the percentage of search traffic that you get for unbranded search and look at the percentage of search traffic you get from branded search, people searching for you by name, your products, services, your company officers, etc.

The unbranded search, that's going away, or at least a good chunk of that. So if that is the majority of your search traffic, you're you're in trouble because Google's going to eat that. So what do you do? Well, it comes down to two things. Number one, if your content is legitimately and truly amazing, people will share it.

People will share it without needing prompting. Um, if it's really good, people naturally just share good content. They're like, hey, this is a really good read. Two, this is something that has been a cornerstone of good SEO strategy for 25 years. And that is, how would you market if search engines didn't exist?

If there was no Google, there was no Bing, there was no DuckDuckGo, how would you market if no one could discover you through search? What would you do differently? What does it look like to market without a search engine anymore? Because the search engine is not going to send any traffic anymore. What do you do?

One of the most important things you can do, build brand. Invest very heavily in brand, in branding, and in being known. My friend Mitch Joel says this all the time. It's not who you know, it's who knows you. When someone needs an answer for how much uh uh salts they should put in their guacamole, if you are a world famous Mexican cuisine chef, people will ask you.

People will ask you that depending on how well you're on, people will ask you that even when you don't want them to. But it's a good indicator that you've got that expertise and that authority and that trustworthiness that means people will find you no matter what. And that all comes down to brand and how you build your brand. So you've got to have content that people want to share and they they will share without needing a search engine to direct them to. And you want you need to build a brand that's strong enough that no matter how Google or any other service tries to summarize around you, people will still want it from you directly.

People will still want information from you directly because they trust you, they trust you, they like you, they believe in you, they want specifically what you have to offer as a person or as a brand. That's really hard. That's really hard, but it is also not out of reach for pretty much any size company. And I would argue that probably small companies have an advantage over larger companies because when you're a small tiny shop, it's you. And people are working with you for that specific interpersonal human benefit.

Right? You don't you don't go to uh a massive hairstyling chain. You go to your hairdresser because you value the personal relationship you have with your person. Um you go to your doctor, you go to your lawyer, you don't go to any random lawyer. Once you find someone you'd like to work with, you tend to stick with them.

You know how you know how upsetting it can be when a trusted advisor retires, right? Yep, I'm I'm going off to you know my my beachfront retirement home or whatever, and you're like, oh now I gotta go get a new accountant or I gotta get it go get a new uh physician or whatever. You know how troubling that is because it's the personal value that matters. The personal value is part of the brand. So if you're afraid of AI's impact on SEO, it might mean that your company's content isn't good enough to attract and retain audiences, uh even in an environment where there was no search engine.

But make that the cornerstone of your plan. What would you market? How would you market if there was no Google at all? That's gonna do it for this episode. Thanks for tuning in.

Talk to you soon. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button, subscribe to my channel if you haven't already, and if you want to know when new videos are available, hit the bell button to be notified as soon as new content is live.