Show Notes
AI Overviews vs AI Mode
- AI Overviews: Summarized answers with links below.
- AI Mode: Conversational answers with no links or ads — keeps users on Google.
- AI Mode launched June 27, not yet default.
Traffic & SEO Impacts
- CTR for top results drops from 7.3% to 2.6%.
- 70%+ of searches are now zero-click.
- Major sites report 40%+ traffic loss.
How to Adapt: EEAT Framework
- Experience: Real-world examples, case studies.
- Expertise: Staff bios, author attribution.
- Authority: Backlinks, brand mentions.
- Trust: Avoid spam, use secure hosting, update content regularly.
Optimize for AI Summaries
- Use headers, bullet points, concise text.
- FAQs, evergreen content perform well.
- Implement schema markup.
- Edit AI-generated content thoroughly.
New SEO Metrics to Watch
- Engagement rate, time on page, scroll depth.
- Keyword impressions = visibility.
- Backlink growth & domain authority = trust signals.
Future Outlook
- AI Mode may replace traditional search.
- Smaller brands may gain visibility through AI diversity.
- Google is prioritizing AI — expect more changes soon.
Episode Transcript
Carrie
Welcome to one quick question with infomedia, your source for answers to your questions about websites, digital marketing and more. I’m your host. Carrie Rollwagen, so on today’s episode, we’re sharing the recording of our most recent live one quick coffee event if you’d rather watch this presentation so that you can see the slides. The video of today’s episode is also available over on our YouTube channel. So that’s infomedia.com with the dotcom spelled out. And if you’re in the Birmingham area, we’d love to see you on the third Thursday of each month at these live events. We meet over at the sage in pepper place, right across from our office. We have free coffee and breakfast plus networking, so you can grab your free ticket in the show notes to this episode, or wherever you find infomedia, including our social media account, we’d love to see you there. And until then, enjoy today’s episode.
Pam
Thank you, everybody. So as Carrie said, I’m Pamela Darden. Thank you so much for coming. All right, is SEO dead? No, I could say yes and just walk and be like, bye, but I’m alright. So what we’re going to talk about today? So originally, I have to tell y’all, when I first started preparing this, it was all about AI overviews, but then Google, as it’s apt to do, launches a brand new update that changes my talk as I’m writing it, which has happened so many times in the last year. So today I’m going to expand this talk past AI overviews and also talk about AI mode. And so you’ll hear me mention both, and I’ll go through exactly what they are and the differences. But I want y’all to know it’s a little bit more expanded than what we initially thought. Okay, so AI overviews are AI generated answers at the top of your Google search results. They’re meant to give answers quickly and concisely without requiring the user to click off of Google onto your website. While this has already created a decrease in traffic to websites really engaged users still have the ability to click on links below the AI overview. And so while your traffic may be down, generally, your conversions may have stayed about the same. So think of it like this. You have the people that are just coming for easy answers. Maybe they’re not just clicking just on the website anymore, but the people that come that needed, like interact they’re still coming. So as far as your clicks on buttons, clicks on page, watching things actually engage users, they’re still there.
Pam
However, again, as I was preparing the Talk, Google launched the next iteration of AI overview is called AI mode. So Google’s AI mode officially launched in the US on June 27 of this year. It represents a significant shift in how search operates, profoundly impacting SEO strategies and web traffic patterns. It builds upon AI overview’s feature by delivering synthesized context aware answers directly within the search interface, but without displaying the links below the answers and without displaying, like local results, it’s really just the answer. So if you’ve not seen AI mode yet, it’s kind of hidden. It’s not the default search, but this is how you get to it. Over on the left, you’ll see another option that says AI mode next to all and over on the right, you’ll see, like a little beaker where you can click on it, and then that’s called Google Labs. You can get to AI mode that way too. If you use like Google workspace through your company, they may have to, like, turn it on for you, but most people should be able to see it now.
Pam
So what’s the difference between AI mode and AI overviews? So this is an AI overview. So again, you’ve got the answer at the top the links at the bottom. You’ve probably already seen this. It’s pretty much what it’s not on everything. It’s mostly on like questions you ask. So if you add, like Google, like a specific business, you may not see an overview, but if you’re asking, like, a question or how did this happen? When did this happen? Generally, you’re going to see it at the top, but AI mode different. You just have the answer right in the search, and it doesn’t give any links below the answer. If it gives citations, it’s kind of built into the content, so it’s not immediately clear where you would click. And as of right now, there’s no ads, there’s no local listings. It’s very clean, very minimal, and it prioritizes keeping the user on Google not sending them off to your website.
Pam
So the differences on the interface, it’s aI modes, very conversational chat bot style. If you ask a question, it gives you an answer. You can iterate on that question and keep asking. It’ll keep kind of diving into that same answer. Whereas AI overviews, it’s static summaries atop search results. Organic links are admitted, often admitted on AI mode. They’re there for AI overviews. Citations are embedded on AI mode. They’re provided with links to sources on overviews and then user interaction again. It supports follow up questions, whereas. AI overviews is just limited to that first question.
Pam
content variability. So this one’s important. On AI mode, there’s a 91% chance at that if you ask the same question twice, you’re going to get a different answer, whereas AI overviews is generally the same. So this changes a lot of things. We’re used to having very consistent responses in Google. Now it’s sort of opened up this world of a lot more diversity and answers. So what does this mean for your web traffic? So if AI reviews and AI mode is all about keeping people on Google, then what does that mean for you? How do you know when things are what is happening? So the first thing is reduce click through rates, so about from 7.3% to 2.6 for top organic links. So at the top of Google, those top few things that show under the ads, under the local listing, those top few links, those people, have had a huge decrease in clicks bottom. And that’s just with AI overviews and with AI mode. It’s obviously it’s gone way down. Next is zero click searches. So before, if you’ve been to one of these talks, I told you that over 50% of all searches never leave Google. Now it’s over 70% so it’s really shot up a lot, and then you’ve had traffic declines across the board. So major news outlets are reporting that they’ve had up to 40% drop in traffic just since all this started happening. So it’s a massive, massive change.
Pam
So why does it matter? Well, Google’s competing with chatgpt, but it’s still the number one search engine, and if someone is interested in what you do a service, you provide, a product you sell, You want to come up in AI overviews, and you want to come up in AI mode. Bottom line, people are more and more people are using AI every day, and you have to meet your customer where they’re at. doing the same things you’ve been doing forever is not going to work. Going forward, we have to kind of iterate on things. So what do we actually need to do? So in order to perform in AI overview AI mode, we have to follow the Eat guidelines, which I’ll go over. And if you’ve been to one of my talks before, you can be like, Oh my god, Pam again. But it’s very important. They are the Eat guidelines are there for a reason. It’s extremely important to Google. And there’s a part of it that’s even more important now, and that’s brand mentions, which I’ll go into next, is you want to optimize your content for AI summaries, so make it easy for Google to pull your content into those little snippets. You want to leverage structured data, and you want to monitor engagement metrics.
Pam
So eat, E E A T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Experience, firsthand, real life experience with the topic, expertise, a deep knowledge of the topic. Authoritativeness, recognition by others that you’re a source of truth and trustworthiness, that you are transparent, you are accurate, and you promote user safety. And I’ll talk about all that means.
Pam
But first, let’s talk about experience. So with experience, we want to show in our content, on our website, and not just in one place. When you hear me say this, don’t just not just in the blog or not just on your case studies, throughout your all of your content. You want to show examples of your work. You want information on specific services performed. So what I mean by this is, yes, talk about your services on a service page. But if you talk about like a portfolio item or a job that you did for a client, or whoever it may be, talk about the specific services that you provided to them, tie it to an actual event and time, actual work that you did with photos, with things that help kind of relate that this actually happened. You want to have tutorials. So evergreen content is so important now to Google, and what I mean by that is it’s content that’s not necessarily tied to a specific date, like a blog post. So think like resource content, content that if you publish it today or three months from now, are still going to be accurate and informational for your business. So look at your support teams. Look at your customer service teams. What are the questions they get asked all day long? Can we turn that content into resource, content that could live on your website? That content tends to perform very well, because if they’re asking the question to you, there’s people asking it on Google as well. Next show case studies. So case studies are great. They are a bit of a pain to write, but now we have AI to help us. But case studies are go into the very details of what you’ve done for a client. So not only here’s the work we performed, but here’s what happened, here’s the results they got, here’s the percentage profits they gained, here’s how many more people walked in the door because of this service that we provided give actual metrics tie it to real things that you’ve done. It should not just be broad. And then anything that shows you have real world experience on the subject you’re speaking on. So that may be videos where you walk through what you did on a project. It may be people on your team talking of. Out clients that they’ve worked with or their experience. It could expand to all sorts of things and all sorts of industries, but this is very helpful to not only show that you know what you’re talking about, but to give real world examples. This is the biggest things that is going to separate you from all the AI generated content that’s out there. AI is machine generated. It doesn’t have experiences. It does not, by default, inject its content with experience information. So this is going to set you apart.
Pam
So next is expertise. We want to talk about our years of work. You’ve actually been doing this work for years. AI hasn’t. So talk about that. Talk about the combined knowledge of your staff. If you have staff members that have been with you for a long time, put them on the website. Have a bio information about them. Put their credentials, put their education, put how long they’ve been doing this service. If you are putting out content, have bio content. So you notice on our blog here, on every single blog post, we have an author and we have an author bio that ties back to a bio page, that you can see more posts by that author. You can see their credentials. You can see how long they’ve been doing this. But more importantly, Google can see that it can see that there’s a well rounded knowledge of this topic. It’s not just in one place. It’s not just on a services page, and only there if we talk about a service, it’s talked about on our blog. It’s talked about on our case study, it’s talked about on these bio pages. Clearly, we know what we’re talking about, and I skipped over it, but attribute your content to a person, not just an entity. So if your blog content currently is by company name, change that. Change it that byline. Put it an actual person, someone on your team. It doesn’t mean they actually have to write the content. Anybody that knows me knows I am not a content writer. If you see a blog on infomedia website, I may have contributed ideas to it, but I didn’t write it, so it’s okay if they didn’t write it, whoever’s writing it can just attribute it to those different authors.
Pam
So then we have authoritativeness. Do others cite your content or link to it? Do you have mentions and backlinks that show Google that you are a reputable, reputable resource? It does not really. I mean, it’s great that we know we’re talking about, but other people have to acknowledge that too. So to get those back links and mentions to your content, we’re going to create link worthy content. Do not post bland, boring content and expect people to pay attention. They’re not build authority by getting featured or mentioned in trusted publications. Blogs or news sources contribute guest posts to authoritative sites in your industry, such as trade publications, chamber websites, niche blogs, whatever it may be, leverage your brand mentions. So even if there’s not a link back to your website, if another company, business entity, is talking about you, it still matters. That’s called a brand mention. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be a link. Google can still say, Oh, well, they’re talking about them. Even if they’re not linking to their website, they know who they are. They know that they’re a referral resource of content. So leverage those brand mentions. If you if there’s not a link, if they’re mentioning your name, that still works. So if you’re working with another company, if you’re partnering with them, if you whatever it may be, and they talk about you, that is great. So try to get more of that. In the old days. If you’ve been in part of these talks before, I may have said, Well, hey, if a news organization mentioned you, you gotta call and say, Hey, add a link to my post. That’s not as important anymore. The links are amazing. We still want the links, but if they’re just talking about you, it still works. We want to build authority through partnerships, so webinars, sponsoring events or charities. This is very important, having them link over to you, mentioning you that, hey, they’re a sponsor. Hey, they’ve done this. We want to support industry awards or associations. We want to participate in industry forums where they’re talking about your company, or that maybe I’m just a person. I work for infomedia, but I’m on the WordPress support forum and helping people answer questions, but I’m still Pam they know that I work in infomedia. That still counts. It’s still getting your name out there. If you’re using any of these methods to get backlinks, make sure that the information on your website, whether it be in the about the bio author pages, wherever it is, is correct to help establish that and confirm your credibility. So I could be on those forums, and I could say I’m the president of infomedia. I know what I’m talking about, but if the website isn’t backing that up, then that’s not helping you. We want to be trustworthy. We want to be honest. It matters. These things are checked. Expertise and authority are very much need to be strategized together. Think about them together. Work with a reputable digital marketing agency if you want to build back links, you want to ensure that the. Backlinks are linking back correctly, that they’re monitored. So these are people linking over to you that and you’re monitoring them, and you’re disavowing or saying, I’m not associated if they’re spammy or toxic backlinks that can hurt your credibility, not all backlinks are created the same. So if you’re trying to build your backlinks, you’re trying to build your authority, or you’ve done that in the past, it’s time to review that make sure that the back links coming to your website are real and authentic, because it will hurt you if they’re not. And again, a good, reputable digital marketing company can help you with that.
Pam
So next is trust. So trust is at the top of the pyramid, because since 2023 it is the most important. Your content should be transparent, accurate and safe. What I mean by that is, do not try to trick Google or AI. Be accurate with your content. Don’t steal or overuse AI. You can absolutely write with AI, but you should be a heavy editor to any content that you’re getting out of AI. Never just directly copy and paste that content to your website. And when you’re editing for AI, not only are you editing for context, you’re making sure it meets those eat guidelines. So you’re adding expertise, you’re adding that experience, but try to remove things that identify it as clearly AI. You may have noticed, if you use AI, there’s things that kind of make it look more AI uses emojis, way too much, especially that green check box that’s gonna it’s clearly that’s AI you want to remove that. It uses dashes instead of commas in a lot of places. Clean that up, anything that is very clearly, this is kind of an AI thing. Let’s remove that. Make sure it’s clean. It looks like it was written by your organization. You also want to provide a safe, user friendly experience on your website, so ensure you work with reputable web hosts that don’t just put your site on a server and leave it there. You want to make sure that your website’s updated, it’s secured with an SSL certificate, and you should avoid being spammy. So if you have a sub domain that has spammy ad content, I don’t know anyone in this room that has that, but if you do, don’t do that. If you have a web host that puts your site on a server with a bunch of other spammy websites that even if your website’s not spammy, that could hurt you too. So make sure you have a reputable web host, and that’s not just a sales thing for infomedia. Even if you don’t use infomedia, make sure you’re working with somebody that’s reputable.
Pam
Okay, so why is EEAT so important? So Google’s quality raters use eat to evaluate search results, so high EEAT improves the chance of ranking in AI overviews and AI mode Featured Snippets, and the people also ask so if you’re searching on Google, at the bottom, there’s a little section that says, People also ask if you want to be found there. That’s a great place. If you have high EEAT content, it helps you there as well. This is especially critical for what’s called YMYL content, so your money, your life. content about health, finance, legal and safety, very, very important that you have high EEAT content. So you can see an example here, a website that has high EEAT ranks at about a 1.8 so that’s a Google ranking. The lower, the better. Low EEAT content is 7.2 so much, much higher on the ranking, which is bad.
Pam
Okay, so we want to optimize for AI summaries. This is very important, and this is a good bit different than some of the things we’ve maybe done even in the past year. So other than EEAT, how can you pivot your strategy for AI? you want to structure your content with clear headings. This is the same if you’ve been in my talks before. I’ve been telling this for a while. You want clear headings. You want bullet points. You want concise summaries. The thing that might be a little different is, if you came to a talk a year ago, I maybe briefly talked about pillar pages, long form content, you should still have long form, informative blog posts. But if you just had pages on your content or on your website that were just long form content that linked out to other areas, that’s not as important anymore. We want concise summaries. Think about when you see those AI snippets, it’s a concise summary of what the item is, and then some more information below. So things like FAQ content performs really well. Question Answer, things like short form little answers, you broke it up on the page. Maybe on your website, it’s broken up with images. It looks really good. That’s going to typically pull in a little easier. So we’re trying to do concise summaries. We want to implement schema markup to help Google AI understand and accurately represent your content, so the schema market is what Google actually is looking at when they’re looking at the back of your website and crawling through your content. Again, working with a reputable marketing company or web host can help you with this. So if you’re an infomedia client, we are obviously doing things that we on the backend to make sure Google can index your content as easily as possible.
Pam
So. Yeah, so SEO isn’t dead, it’s just different. So if you talk to a marketing company like our sister company uptick, they’re going to tell you that if they’re talking to you about SEO, it’s not really Google Search Optimization anymore. It’s search everything optimization. So you want to look at if everything’s changing, like, how do we know that things are working? So if we can’t look at traffic and say, well, our traffic’s really high, we’re doing well, traffic’s not going to be super high anymore. What can we do? So we’re going to look at engagement metrics, things like time on page. So if you’re looking at your analytics and you’re looking at your pages and screens, there’ll be a little airy for time on page. So are users staying to read your content? on your engagement rate. Are they leaving immediately? Are they engaging? So are they clicking? Are they scrolling? Are they viewing a video? Are they interacting with a form? Engagement rate will tell you, on average, what the average engagement is of your user.
Pam
next is scroll depth. Are they consuming your full content? So there’s two things that go into play here. So one, are they scrolling all the way down the page, or are they at least scrolling past like the most important content? So if there isn’t, it’s a really long page, you want to make sure that the things they really need to see are in the top 50% or higher on that page. So don’t put your call to actions at the bottom of the page. This is something I see on so many websites at the very bottom of the page. Call us now. They never got there. Put your call to actions higher up on the page. Increase the engagement rate by making sure that it’s there. They don’t have to scroll all the way down, but it does help if they scroll. And the way to get people to scroll is to have engaging content, avoid walls of text, even if you put some bullets in there, put in images, put in videos, put in little content blocks that block it up, testimonials, whatever it may be, make it to where it’s visually interesting to scroll down that page, if it’s just a wall of text, no one’s reading all of that, it’s it doesn’t even need to be there.
Pam
Next is your conversion rate. So when people come to your site, are they taking meaningful actions, like, are they signing up for something? Are they purchasing something, or are they filling out a form, whatever it may be, are they actually converting? So this isn’t just a click on a button, which would be called an event. A conversion would be what’s be called a key event. So that’s something specific that you’ve set up to say, hey, if they do this item, that’s a conversion for us. That’s not set up by default and analytics. But if you again, if you work with infomedia, we can help you set them up. So are they taking those meaningful actions? And when you look at that, that’s going to tell you we’re actually we’re still doing well here.
Pam
okay, so if our things have changed, what are still KPIs or key performance indicators that say, okay, everything is still working. So organic traffic is still it still matters. It shows that people still click and visit your content from search or from Ai mode. If they’re clicking on any of those citations, they’re still getting to you. So that’s still important. Next are your keyword impressions. So keyword impressions, so if you look at for instance, search console in some places in Google, and you can see that for this keyword, I had 3000 impressions and I had 22 clicks, you might have less clicks now. again, Google’s not prioritizing sending them over to you, but those impressions still matter, because it’s people seeing your brand, it’s seeing what you do, and they’re likely seeing your information come up in that AI mode, even if they don’t click on anything. So keyword impression still tells you your content visibility, even without clicks. Next is backlink growth. So it indicates increasing authority, which has become it’s going to become more and more important. So if you’ve never prioritized backlink growth, if you’ve never prioritized brand mentions, now is the time this is going to become very important. And last is domain authority. So every website has a ranking called their domain authority. The age of your domain contributes to it. Content you put out, how many other people link to you? There’s a bunch of things that contribute to it, but it reflects your site’s trust level. Over time, the higher, the better. So if you don’t know what your domain authority is, find out. You can work with infomedia. You can work with our sister company. There’s things that you can do online, like services you can use, but you need to find out what that is and look how you can grow it.
Pam
Okay, so what’s the future of Google? We don’t know. I actually met with one of our sister company, or people at our sister company yesterday, and I asked a whole bunch of questions, as I do, about the future things that we’re seeing coming out of the pipeline. I’m like, what about this? What about meta descriptions, meta titles? What do we think is going to happen with this? And really, we don’t know. Google doesn’t tell us. We didn’t know AI mode was coming till they said, hey, it’s here. So it’s it’s one of those things that we’re looking at what we’ve been seeing over the last few years, and we’re thinking, Okay, here’s what’s coming. What we know is that over the last few years, Google has made a lot of changes to keep people from clicking off of Google. So now that they’ve released AI mode, it is probably very likely that that will become the default search for Google, and that over time, you’ll stop seeing the 10 links with the blue links and the local and the ads and all that stuff. Now, I’m sure ads are coming to AI mode. We just don’t know what that looks like yet. And you’ll you’ll be in the AI interface when you’re searching, and that’ll be the default thing. And that’s going to change a lot of things for a lot of people.
Pam
But it’s not all bad. The good news is AI tends to be more diverse than traditional, traditional search for years, there’s a lot of search terms out there that have been dominated by the same companies. And what I mean by that is a company, you know, this massive marketing machine, they’ll have the organic listings, they’ll have the paid listings, they’ll be in the local listings. They’re all over the place. But with AI, because again, those answers change as many times you ask it, you’re going to get different answers. It means that companies that traditionally did not show up high in search results have a better chance now of actually being mentioned in AI, especially companies that have done more than just market, market, market, not that marketing is not very important, but that have also prioritized content.
Pam
The other thing is, it’s a lot of the best practices for optimizing for AI are similar to what I’ve been preaching in these talks for years. Again, I mentioned pillar content, but if you’re putting out well thought out answers, high quality content, you’re you’re going to perform. You don’t necessarily have to put out just wrote like pages and pages of content like they were taking on a year ago. Now they have all their content for AI. They want to slow down a bit, but you’re still going to do well if you’re taking care of your user. I say this in every single talk that I give, if you are taking care of the person that you know is coming to your website, your user groups, if you’re not trying to trick Google or them, if you’re putting out high quality content that actually serves a purpose, we’re not talking about blog posts that talk about things that everybody else in the industry is talking about. We’re talking about things that actually about things that actually serve a purchase to your customer. What are the questions they’re asking? What are the things they need? What are the pain points in your business that you can solve with your web content? Because if you have them, likely other people have them too. So hey, we get this same issue over and over and over again, or our company uses this third party software that’s the standard of the industry, but we have this common problem that all of our customers have because they use it to put out a tutorial on that that stuff is going to perform because it’s useful. If you take care of people, you’re going to survive these massive ebb and flows of Google. Because we don’t know a lot what’s coming, but what we do know is it’s going to change and it’s going to change again and change again and change again. And used to you could expect about two to three giant updates a year. Now they’re coming all the time, so it’s hard for me. I struggled a little bit with this talk to come up here and say, Oh, here’s what’s happening, because we don’t know, but our best guess is they’re going to keep making changes to keep people on Google, and they’re going to keep making changes to promote AI, because it is the future. It’s here, it’s not going anywhere. So, yeah, take care of your user, and if y’all have any questions, I’m happy to answer them now.
Carrie
Thanks for listening to our live one quick coffee event. If you’re in the Birmingham area, we would love to see you on the third Thursday of every month at the sage. Free Tickets are available wherever you find infomedia, on our blog, on our social media or on our YouTube channel. One quick question is brought to you by infomedia. We are a web service company, so that means we can do whatever you need for your website, whether that’s shooting video, writing copy, incorporating digital marketing, or even redesigning your whole site. To meet with us, just head to infomedia.com and fill out the contact form we would love to help. One quick question is developed and hosted by me Carrie Rollwagen. You can find Show Notes including links to what we talked about on the podcast today at infomedia.com/quick question. Our producer is Alana Harmond. Our theme music is by Brad Davis, and our sound engineering is done by our in house media team, including Paul Bryant, who’s in the studio with us today. And I’ll leave you with this thought a real expert hopes to clarify, not confuse. So don’t take website advice from someone who can’t give you a straight answer.