It’s not your imagination; AI summaries at the top of search results in Google and Bing are reducing your organic search traffic. But there are digital marketing steps you can take to make the best of this ongoing change.

The precise magnitude of the impact that artificial intelligence (AI) results from Google’s Gemini and Bing’s Copilot (or whatever they’ve renamed it by the time you read this) will vary greatly across websites. Per Bounteous, “Early testing has concluded that AI Overview could lead to an 18-64% decrease in organic traffic for some websites, particularly involving Informational-type queries.”

The impact will likely be closer to the low end of that range for most B2B websites, depending on a variety of factors from brand strength to content type and format. A few more stats worth noting:

• AI summaries currently appear in about 15% of all searches, per Search Engine Land.
• On average, sites could see about a 30% decline in organic search clicks, and “every single website is going to feel the pain.”
• That 15% figure is volatile. While Search Engine Land noted that AI summaries were appearing in more than 80% of all search queries at one point in the spring of 2024, The Verge reported that “AI Overviews dropped from appearing in 11 percent of queries on June 1st to 7 percent of queries on June 30th.” Advanced Web Ranking placed the figure at about 12%.
• Results also vary across industries. Per Swipe Insight, in an analysis of nearly 1,700 health-related searches, AI summaries “appeared in 42% of cases, significantly higher than in ecommerce.”

How can digital marketers respond? Here are five key strategies to keep in mind. The first four come from Christopher Penn, the last is my addition.

Invest in Web Presence Optimization

Per Chris Penn, “Using ‘AI optimization’ tools to determine your ‘AI SEO’ is a bit of a fool’s errand because AI models do not work the way search engines do. If you want to influence AI models, the best thing you can do is publish very high volumes of very high quality content – in other words, traditional SEO. The main difference is that instead of links as the gold standard of measurement, it’s appearances around the public web.”

As much as “traditional” B2B SEO still definitely matters, it’s broader than that. Web presence optimization (WPO) is about getting your brand, message, and content everywhere online where your buyers may be looking for information about what you offer, including social media. Find out more about the past, present, and future of WPO.

Keep Doing SEO

“Those sites and pages that do well in legacy, traditional search will be the points of reference for AI models that are checking their own work, which is a polite way of telling you not to fire your SEO team just yet.”

Penn notes that “optimizing your content for search engines is still vitally important. Showing up in search engines means that when an AI model is unsure about its answer, if the model has the ability to call tools (like web searches), it’s going to ask the nearest search engine.”

That means the components of SEO like keyword research, high-quality original content, backlinks, and on-page SEO are still vitally important.

Stay on Top of Public Relations

“Instead of chasing inbound links as we used to in SEO, now we’re just chasing placements, period. Believe it or not, this is where public relations (PR) firms and teams could make a huge difference for their companies. The best firms and teams excel at getting media placements, so their strategy just has to pivot from ‘we want top tier media’ to ‘we’ll take any media we can get’.”

PR and influencer marketing have always been important elements of WPO strategy, but are possibly even more crucial as AI impacts how your prospective customers find information online.

Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams

If you haven’t nailed this already, improving alignment between your sales and marketing teams is even more essential as AI impacts search.

Per Chris Penn, “You can’t reasonably measure AI brand strength…However, you can absolutely measure the impact of AI on your business using the gold standard of measurement: asking people how they learned about you. There is no substitute for this, there never has been, and when done properly, will always be a timeless, valuable source of marketing attribution.”

The better aligned these teams are, the more effectively marketing can focus on creating content that sales people will actually find valuable to use, and the more insightful customer-level intelligence sales can feed back to marketing to hone their market understanding and messaging.

Build Your Brand

One point I would add to the points above is that branding matters perhaps more than ever. Tying your online content to your brand increases the odds that your brand name will appear in AI search summaries, making you look very savvy.

While SEO for generic (non-brand) search terms related to your business is vital but challenging, your website will always appear at the top of results for branded searches—queries containing your company or product names. The stronger your brand, the more branded organic search traffic you’ll generate.

Solid branding will also increase direct traffic, and getting your branded content spread across the web using WPO tactics will increase referral visits to your site.

The bottom line is that while you can’t stop Gemini and other AI tools from impacting your organic search results, you can take steps to optimize your overall digital marketing impact in this new environment.

ICYMI, previous articles here on the intersection of AI and digital marketing generally and SEO specifically:

How to Make Your Website “The Answer” in ChatGPT Queries

How Will AI Search Impact SEO? Chris Penn Provides the Best Answers Yet

The Role of AI in Marketing – And the Critical Importance of HI, CI, and GI

 

The post How AI Results are Impacting Organic Search Traffic and What You Can Do About It appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog | Webbiquity.