Optimizing for AI Overviews

Now, as I mentioned, there are caveats when it comes to optimizing. It is appearing. It’s like the featured snippet where you want to appear in there, but you’re not necessarily going to show up in organic down below. There’s that risk that if
you mess with your relevance, that might impact your rankings.

So the other caveats, they’ve been rolling it back. There’s no reliability in terms of how Google is playing this out. Initially, they rolled out all over the place; they got all sorts of
really controversial, AI-generated results, they got a lot of bad press, and they rolled it way back, like all the way to 1% of queries. Now, over time, I do anticipate them rolling out more, but right now, it’s not there.

The second part is limited appearances. Like I said, it only shows up in 1% of queries at this point. So, is it worth spending your time on? That’s part of your SEO strategy and how valuable those keywords are to you. If you are not ranking in the top five, maybe it’s worth it for you to try to optimize if you’re going against the big brands that you really have no chance of getting up there.

And then you also have the changing features. We’ve seen things like the follow-up questions, which used to exist. They were removed. We haven’t seen them. I expect them to come back because that was a big selling point, because it’s all about the context of the journey, taking you from one AI Overview to the next, but they’re gone. They might come back, we don’t know.

There’s also volatility. Just because you show up one day doesn’t mean you’re going to be there tomorrow. It’s AI-generated, so it’s every time is going to be unique. In theory, you’d be the one, but it’s a little risky in that respect.

And as I mentioned, the unintentional consequences of messing with it you could be messing with other aspects of your website.

So, AI Overviews, it’s tricky for SEOs. We always want to rank number one and show up at the top, and there’s a ton of value when it comes to brand visibility, but if it ultimately hurts your rankings, and they don’t show up, and they take it away, and they give it back, is it worth it? That’s for you to decide to play with to test for yourself.

My name’s Garrett Sussman. Find me on Twitter or LinkedIn, wherever you prefer your socials. I’m not on Instagram, so let’s stick to LinkedIn. Peace.

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