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Google’s AI Overviews create challenges, opportunities for news content SEO

By Paula Felps

INMA

Nashville, Tennessee, United States

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During a recent Webinar presented by INMA’s Readers First Initiative, SEO analyst and consultant Rich Sanger walked members through the intricacies of Google’s AI Overviews.

Sanger, who is based in Boston, Massachusetts, said he started researching the AI-generated summaries even before they were released in the U.S. on May 1. Since then, Google has been rolling AI Overviews out to other countries, including the U.K., India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil.

Google AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries powered by the Gemini large language model, or LLM, and the goal is to “provide quick answers to users without needing to scroll.”

And that, Sanger said, is where the challenges for news media organisations begin.

Rich Sanger provided insight into how Google AI Overviews operates.
Rich Sanger provided insight into how Google AI Overviews operates.

“By providing answers directly on the search page, Google is keeping searchers within its own ecosystem. So they’re trying to reduce the need for users to click through to external sites and it’s likely going to impact the click-throughs to your sites.”

“The AI Overviews also take up a lot of prime search real estate on the search results page, which will push news sites farther down on the page and affect organic visibility. A further challenge is a lack of transparency, as Google does not provide specific data for AI Overviews in the Google Search Console. This makes it challenging for publishers to measure their impact accurately.

How AI Overviews works

Sanger walked through the process behind AI Overviews and explained the steps it uses:

  1. Query analysis: When a user enters a query, Google’s system examines the top-ranked documents that match the query.
  2. Content diversity: The system seeks diverse content from these top results. If the top results are too similar, it expands its search to related queries and topics.
  3. Summary creation: Using its training data, Google Gemini creates a summary from the gathered information.
  4. Link integration: After generating the summary, links to relevant sources are added. However, Sanger noted that the documents used to create the summary might not always be the same as those linked in the overview. “That definitely creates an issue,” he said. “It’s not looking linearly at the top 100 results. It’s looking at, say, the top 10 results and then fanning out to related queries.”

AI Overview has its own system for determining which links to use.
AI Overview has its own system for determining which links to use.

How to optimise content for inclusion

To be included in the AI Overview search results, Sanger recommended news organisations work to rank on the first page for a target query. His research with Authoritas found links in the first position have a 53% chance of being linked in an AI Overview. By the 10th position on the page, the odds dropped to around 37%.

“You’ll also want to offer unique information that is not covered by other top-ranking documents,” he said, emphasising that “the system is looking for diversity in the content.” If the first two results on a page have the exact same information, AI Overviews will search for related queries for different information.

When the top results for a target query are too competitive to grab the top-ranking spot, Sanger suggested getting into AI Overviews through “a side door”— looking at less competitive related queries.

“When we did our study for related queries, we [found that] people also searched for the queries. So you can look at that and optimise your content based on that,” he said.

“If you find a less competitive related query, you could rank in the top two, then you have a good chance of being in that AI Overview.”

Understanding what AI Overviews is looking for can help news media companies align their content with its search.
Understanding what AI Overviews is looking for can help news media companies align their content with its search.

Knowing what AI Overviews is looking for can help companies align their content for inclusion. This includes covering the core topic, making sure the content stays fresh and updated, and that it answers the key questions users would be asking Sanger said.

“AI Overview is going to prefer more recent, frequent, more updated, recently updated content,” he said, adding this is nothing new in the world of SEO.

“AI Overview’s preference for top rankings in the search results tells us that the search engine optimisation is the key to visibility,” Sanger said. “So you still have to rank top of the page, be as high-ranking as you can to get in there — with maybe a little fairy dust sprinkled on there to make it more palatable.”

For the time being, Sanger assured, “your SEO is not going anywhere.” While the processes and practices will likely change over time, and transactional commercial queries could likely start triggering AI Overviews in the future, the actions Sanger suggested news organisations take now can aid them in this new search environment.

About Paula Felps

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