Search is changing. Is ranking #1 on Google something we still need to focus on?

Google is rapidly experimenting with different search interfaces in a bid to catch up with OpenAI's ChatGPT.  Their new AI Mode is being rolled out and gives an AI summary relating to your search query at the top of page one.

Unfortunately this is causing almost a 44% drop in clickthrough rates (reported by The Daily Mail) with users now getting what they need from the summary before they even reach the ads and organic search results.

The risk of your site listing being buried on some of the lower results pages due to how Google is restructuring search results is a concern.

Some are even moving away from Google as their go-to search in favour of the more tailored answers from ChatGPT, ClaudeAI or Perplexity.

A fresh approach is going to have to be taken to stay visible and instead become a 'trusted source' with AI.
Getting seen in the overview on Google or in dedicated AI clients is now an important consideration.

Although Google has just announced that it's monetising the AI overviews going forward with paid advertising, this leaves companies who rely on organic search ranking worried about how this could adversely affect their business.

While we enjoy ad-free ChatGPT at the moment it just seems a matter of time before they also introduce paid advertising, similar to how Perplexity AI is evolving in the U.S.  With the massive running costs associated with AI, this looks to be the first port of call in an attempt to monetise the platforms.

AI features and improvements are being introduced almost on a daily basis at the moment, so the landscape is changing fast.
Optimising your site for AI is becoming increasingly more important and now with a focus to help you become a trusted source for AI rather than how high your site ranks.

As with traditional SEO, well structured content, good metadata and a decent Core Web Vitals score is still relevant, but there are AI specific optimisations that are starting to emerge that can help, such as evaluating how your firewall is blocking bot traffic (you may be inadvertently blocking an AI bot from crawling your site) or ensuring you have a fast hosting platform as AI bots have very short timeouts for loading your content.

Emerging AI powered search engines such as perplexity.ai and andisearch.com allow us to see how visible our sites are at the moment to AI and give a new kind of search result with summaries and detailed explanations as well as the traditional link to your site pages. 

There are an ever increasing number of AI bots crawling the web including OpenAI (ChatGPT), Google (Gemini), Anthropic (Claude) and Perplexity.
All are roughly adhering to the same standards which means that we're in with a fighting chance of making ourselves visible to all these platforms with some refinements to our existing sites.

Traditional search strategies need to change and companies that adopt Generative Engine Optimisation right now will be the one's that get a head start on the rest. Whether you want to look at optimising your site for AI or integrating new AI tools to help productivity, it's something Nzime can help you with and keep you ahead of the game.