SEO has changed dramatically with modern AI. If you have a website, it’s crucial to quickly update your strategy for drawing traffic and growing your brand online.
At Cantilever we take care of our clients’ websites, and have been working to ensure they stay successful in the age of AI. This article contains our latest insights, which we hope you can apply to your own site. And if you need help, send us a message and we’ll be happy to set up a quick consultation, free of charge.
What Has Changed?
Zero-Click Search
Google’s Generative Search Experience is a new addition to the classic search result page. Above the regular ads and list of links will now be an AI-powered summary. It feels like a deeply-connected ChatGPT, able to synthesize information from multiple sources to attempt to serve the user a rich and helpful result. GSE includes links to related web pages, but many queries can be answered entirely within the AI response, meaning that the user won't need to click on a web result to get the answers they need.
So far the AI results generated by Google have tended to be pretty poor, and even dangerously false in some cases. But these models improve every day, and I’m confident that Google will get it right and that the AI responses will become a genuinely useful starting place for most queries.
Google has been using rich results like the weather widget to intercept searches for years. This approach has already put low-quality sites with basic information out of business, and Google will only keep expanding it. These search experiences, known as “Zero-Click,” mean users get their answers without leaving the search page. It’s crucial to anticipate this trend and optimize your web presence to thrive in a Zero-Click world.
Alternative Search Experiences
Many users are already used to using ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI tools as alternatives to their normal searches. Personally, I’m going to Google less and less. To do research for this article, I used around 80% Perplexity and 20% Google search. A year ago I was still doing 10-20 queries in Google per day; now I’m down to just a handful.
With additional tools like Microsoft Copilot and Apple’s upcoming AI-powered Siri, we are now firmly in a world where search is a part of your daily toolkit, not the center of it. These platforms stand in the middle between the user and the websites and resources they draw information from, reducing the amount of users who will reach websites specifically to find information.
Semantic Search
All of these platforms are powered by “Large Language Models” which are adept at processing natural language. This means that using keywords in website copy is much less important now.
Before, it was important to use specific keywords and phrases in your content, so that search engines could recognize when your site matched the search term a user used. But now, the search engine can match the meaning of the user’s query with the meaning of your site, so using the exact same words is not as important. This is known as Semantic Search, and it has been on the rise for a decade, but has reached new heights in the last year or two.
This means that spam content is even less likely to receive traffic now. Better AI makes it easier for search engines to detect low-quality content and avoid sending users there.
AI-Driven Content
It used to be that by publishing wide volumes of content, sites could establish authority within a niche, particularly for long-tail search keywords. AI makes it easy to automate the creation and publishing of infinite content. Content creators won’t win by being first anymore. They can only win by being best.
If you are publishing content that could easily be replicated by an AI, you will get mediocre results. To succeed, you need to go beyond the norm and provide insights that AI can’t yet deliver.
The Implications
Google Still Cares About Supporting Websites
Google’s search product is so successful because users are able to find high-quality content through it. This means that Google has a strong incentive to ensure that sites continue to receive significant organic traffic from search, because if users are happy with Google’s AI summaries and don’t click through to websites, the websites will not be able to make money, which means they will stop being able to publish high quality content.
The search & web ecosystem has a delicate balance, and Google is well aware how important it is to ensure that content publishers on the web have a sustainable business model. Neil Patel and I agree: Site owners can bet that Google will design its interface in a way that encourages users to end up on websites, not just looking at AI responses.
You Can Help Write the Search Result
Since Google, Perplexity, Siri, and ChatGPT use websites to feed their knowledge bases, organizations now have the opportunity to affect how their niche is discussed by writing compelling content that affects how the AI “thinks” about that topic.
This is particularly true of topics with few authoritative sources, such as information on your own company. For example, searching for my web design firm Cantilever within Perplexity returns a lot of language that is lifted directly from our website:
Google has continued to say the way they will identify which content is “right” is using their classic EEAT formula (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). By being the most authoritative source on a given topic, your content will be more likely to be paraphrased within the AI results, so you have a direct influence on the answers that the AI provides.
A huge part of SEO is now making a convincing argument to AI tools (through your content) about what the right answer to the user’s question is. You can imagine the AI tools now as a more active agent between users and sites, and we need to write our content as if you are speaking to that agent, in addition to users.
Google has claimed that they are going to update Google Search Console to allow site owners to see how frequently their website is cited within the AI search results, but this feature is not yet available at time of writing. Once this is available, you and your website team should check on this metric frequently to judge the success of your site.
Zero-Click Is The Norm
Search is about to get wayyyy easier and more useful. The current model of having to carefully construct a search term and then spend time considering which link to click next is difficult for many users. I predict that users will search more, because they will be getting really good answers. At the same time, each search will have lower odds of a click-through.
I’m confident that this will result in less net traffic to websites. However, I believe the drop in traffic will mostly affect low-quality websites without unique content or experiences. High-quality sites can continue to be successful and even become more effective by adapting quickly to the age of AI. For decades the web has been expanding at exponential speed, particularly because search engines incentivized any firm that could capture a niche search keyword. Those days are over; the web is about to get a lot smaller.
Zero-click search can sometimes answer a query fully, but more frequently it still leaves the user wanting to click through to websites for more information.
Here are some example queries and how Zero-click affects them:
In most of these examples, the user is still likely to want to click on a website after seeing the AI summary result. So, website owners should focus on these two approaches:
- Create authoritative, fresh, timely content on your niche, and infuse it with an honest promotional tilt towards your brand or point of view.
- Create a rich on-site experience that distinguishes your site from the AI result’s text and media approach. In particular, make your site social, distinctive and interactive so that it can’t be summed up by a few words.
Site owners should try to carve out a “niche of one” – unique content that can’t be found anywhere else, experiences that go beyond anything that can easily be summarized or condensed. If your website is unlike any other, AI can’t replace it, but will still rely on it as a source. That’s a good position to be in.
The Future of Paid Search is Unclear
Google’s search empire is based on the model attracting some users to ads instead of the organic results. This model is now broken in the age of AI search, and it is not yet clear how Google will react. I believe they will accept that search is now much less profitable, and will develop new products and services to capture that value instead.
It’s likely that AI tools will begin allowing advertisers to pay for preferential treatment within the AI search summaries, though given the challenges for AI in crafting sensical responses without this bias, this won’t happen overnight.
It may be a good time to pull back on paid search spending. AI results are going to be increasingly prominent, and it is unclear how this will affect click-through rates.
What’s Next?
AI summary results are just the start. We’re about to see a big shift in how the web works. Many of the functions that individual websites offer are repetitive, and can be streamlined into consolidated services using Google and others.
For example, in the eCommerce space, AI will allow companies to build aggregated product “malls” where a user can search for any kind of product and purchase it without actually going to the underlying website. This would work like the Facebook/IG shops that already exist, but with even more products available and even easier integration between brands and shoppers. While native shopping may always provide a superior experience, this kind of consolidation will be good enough for lots of situations.
The FTC may also have a few things to say about Google moving in this direction, but you can bet that firms will push the limits. New players will also emerge, and become household names overnight.
To date, the web has been a technology of disaggregation, allowing people and organizations to control and maintain their own bespoke independent platforms. Search engines were a critical tool to allow the user to find the right independent platform to use for a given need. With AI able to aggregate and comb through the web way better than people can, we will see a return to aggregation, whenever it provides a superior experience for the user. Your job as a website owner is to best position your brand as a trustworthy and credible source, to be presented favorably within those aggregated worlds, to integrate eagerly and cleanly with them, and to fill in their gaps, providing a richer bespoke experience that differentiates your brand.
Start Here
If you are a site owner…
- First, get a solid sense of your site’s SEO situation using traditional keywords and ranking factors. Tools like SEMRush can help. Ask your website team for help with this if you are not familiar with the basics of SEO.
- Get rid of any content on your site that is not really good. If it could be written by an AI, it’s not going to add much value for your brand these days. As always, focus on EEAT as a rubric content.
- Continue to focus on building links to your site (a.k.a. backlinks) by writing content for other sites, building partnerships, and becoming well known. These links are just as important as ever.
- Look at the top keywords currently driving people to your website. Test them in Google and in Perplexity. Compare the language within the summaries to the language you use on your website. If the two are pretty close, this indicates that your site is trusted by that tool as an authoritative source of information for that keyword. If not, you should work on your brand positioning so that your brand is better known as an expert on your niche, and get specific backlinks to that content.
- Ensure that your robots.txt file is configured to allow any AI crawler to scan your site, not just Googlebot.
- In the coming months, keep a close eye on how organic traffic to your site is changing. Consider building new interactive or social features that help your site continue to provide value beyond what can be summarized by AI.
If you want help managing the AI transition, Cantilever is here to help. We are an expert web design and development team that takes care of your site, so you can take care of business. Send us a message and we’ll be happy to set up a free consultant to talk about how we can help you build your business in the age of AI.