Setting The Stage For AI Search

Meredith's Husband 0:00

I've mentioned this the last couple of episodes, and that is the update that came out from Google recently at their annual developers conference, specifically the updated guidance that Google is now providing about how to optimize your website for search, just organic search in Google, and for AI search in Gemini and chat. Because remember when AI bots search the web for live information, they are just using Google. AI learns stuff in two different ways, basically. They are pre-trained on a bunch of data, but that typically is stuff that's information that doesn't change over time. That's not things like the best photographer in Boston say. That's things like medical studies. Once a medical study is done, it's done. So when AI bots, AI models are pre-trained on data, that's the type of stuff that they are pre-trained on. The other way that AI bots get information is they go out and they search the internet. And in order to search the internet, they can only do it a couple different ways. You provide them specifically a URL to go visit and they look at, or they use a search engine to find URLs. They do not have their own search engine. They do not have their own index. And I know people, especially Meredith, says, well, yet, they don't have it yet. Well, I got news for you. They have all announced that they are going to do it in the past. OpenAI has announced it. Zuckerberg has announced it for Facebook and Instagram. I think even Elon announced it. They're all going to build a search engine so they don't have to rely on Google. And guess what? They all stopped that. They made a big announcement. And then I don't know whether it was three months or six months or nine months or 12 months later, they very quietly stopped. They realized, oh, Google has been doing this for now over 30 years, and they are really, really, really, really good at it. And no matter how good our technology is in terms of AI, it's not a search engine. It's very different. And guess what? There is a perfectly good search engine there we can already use. And that's fine with Google. Google's not going to shut down access to AI bots. Google has their own AI bot. They know that AI is the future. But right now, they have the engine that is underneath the hood. I know I've said all this before. It's probably not news to you if you've heard any of my other podcasts. But I just want to set the stage for why that's important, why this information coming out of Google is important, even if you think that the future of search is with AI and not with the traditional Google. And if that's what you think, you're correct. It is very much. The future of search is AI, not the Google box. The Google box is going to be replaced very shortly with a more chat-like, just a fancier box, basically. So Google now has updated their guidance on how to optimize your site for these things. I'm going to summarize this information here. I'm not going to go, I can't go into total detail about it, but I'm going to summarize the important points. And if you want to go deeper, on my website, I have an AI plus SEO crash course. It has been there for about a year now. And since I released it, I have been making updates to it now. And it's paid.

Why AI Bots Still Use Google

Meredith's Husband 3:12

It's currently $39. The people who have purchased it, they get the updates as it rolls out. I don't want to release an AI plus SEO crash course. And then every time there's something new about AI, tell people they got to buy a new course. So everyone

AI Plus SEO Crash Course Update

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who has bought it will have act will continue to have access to it now. This latest update from Google is going to mean a bigger update for that course. I am going to take it offline at the end of this month and I am going to update it. And the revised version will be released on August 1st. At least that's the plan. Now, like I said, the current version is still online. I'm not taking it down till the end of this month. It's $39. If you want to buy it before I take it down, the cost is still $39. And it's going to be replaced very soon with a completely updated curriculum. So I don't recommend buying the current course and going through it. But if you want to buy it so that when the new version comes out, you already have access to it, that you can do. If you prefer to wait, the price is going to go up. To be honest, I don't know exactly what the price is going to be yet. It's going to depend on how long it gets, how much time I put into creating it, how comprehensive it is. But it's going to be somewhere in the range of $50 to $100. If you're interested, but you want to wait and check it out at that time and pay that price, that's totally fine. If you're like, no, I am pretty confident I want that, but I want it for $39, go get the current course now. And like I said, don't go through it, but just keep it. And when the new one comes out, you will automatically have access to it. Now, with that, let's go through some of what Google has released. So I have this open in front of me, and I'm just going to go through it top to bottom, telling you what I'm not going to do it in detail, like I said, but each section I'm going to tell you what it's talking about, give you a couple examples. I will provide the link below if you want to look, and or follow some of the links that are included here, because this will link out to

Walking Through Google’s New Document

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other additional resources provided by Google. The name of this document is Optimizing Your Website for Generative AI features on Google Search. And like I mentioned earlier, they are going to be specific here in this article to AI search on Google, but AI searches the web the same way whether it's Gemini or ChatGPT or Cloud. So obviously Google cannot claim to say how those work and how search works on those platforms, but they are basically the same. So the first section here, and there are a handful of sections, I'm going to go through them. The first one is titled, Is SEO still relevant for generative AI search? And the answer is basically a thousand million, hundred billion percent yes. I added those numbers, but literally the answer is yes, and then it links directly to best practices for SEO. Those are all still valid for search in AI. And they give a couple examples about something called retrieval augmented generation, that's R-A-G

SEO Relevance For Generative Results

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and query fan out. And it describes a little bit about what those are. And then this section concludes with a section that is has a little light bulb next to it and says, what about quote, AEO and quote G-E-O? These are these AI terms. And if you've listened to this podcast, you've heard me talk about these. These are the terms that you know people are saying, oh, SEO is dead. It's not about SEO anymore. It's about AIO or AEO or GEO. And we do that. If you're doing SEO, you're behind the times. You don't need to do it anymore. And like I said in those other, I've said now in many podcast episodes, those are scare tactics. Those, when you see somebody saying something like that, 99 times out of 100, it's because they are trying to sell you something. They are trying to sell you their services and they're trying to stand out from other people offering something similar. What Google says here is that all those things are just SEO. It's all the same thing. It's all search. Inside my industry, what we do, we refer to this as search. We don't refer to it as SEO or search engine optimization. It's search, whether that search is on old school Google or new school Chat GPT, wherever you are searching, that's what it is. And that's what Google is saying here. And they link to a guide that they provide on how to review and evaluate third-party SEO advice. And it's again, mostly if you've been listening to this podcast, it's that link is going to take you to an article that says a lot of those same things. But of course, it's coming directly from Google. So just so you know, I'm not just talking out of my ass. Okay, the next section is how to apply foundational SEO best practices to generative AI search. And again, if you've been listening to this podcast, you've heard me say lots of this stuff. Number one, provide a unique point of view. In other words, don't just create generic content, create something that really only you can create, i.e., unique. Number two, create non-commodity content that's helpful, reliable, and people first. Okay, and then it links to an article about what that means exactly. This is what I have, I feel

Unique Helpful Content That Ranks

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like I have always said to the point where you're probably tired of hearing it. You need to create helpful content. It needs to be helpful to someone for some reason. If it's not helpful to anyone, why would Google want to send anyone there? Okay, that's number two. Number three, organizing your content in a way that helps your readers. Hopefully you see the word or you notice the word help in here again. It's all about being helpful. In this case, you want to create your navigation so that it is helpful and easy for people. That's number three. Number four, add high-quality images and video. Now, this has been true for a long time. It's going to become even more true with AI. Right now, AI cannot go to a website and play and look at a video and analyze the content of that video unless it's coded in a very specific way. And that's because AI cannot go to a website and press a play button like you and I can. Now, again, you can code your way around this, like YouTube, for example. AI can go to a YouTube page and know the contents of the video that's there because Google, who owns YouTube, has gone out of their way to code that in a very specific way. For most of us, if we just embed a video on a page, the content of that video is not available to AI, at least not yet. That probably will happen in the future at some point, but it has not happened yet. Images, however, are a different story. AI can go to a URL and view the images that are there. So that is important now for AI, but simply having quality images and videos on your webpage has helped search for a number of years, probably a decade. And there are two links here: one to image SEO best practices. So that'll be things like doing your image alt tags and another link to video SEO documentation. And that's going to be a little more technical, but best practice for including video on your website. Okay, that was number four. Number five, focus on what your users want and avoid overdoing it. This is some this is reminds me of keyword cannibalization, and this, which is a huge, huge problem. Like pretty much every client I can remember for the past 10 years has had some level of keyword cannibalization. And that is basically they're overdoing it, they're putting their keywords everywhere they can, they're trying to do too much. And Google doesn't want to reward websites that try to do SEO really hard. Okay. If you were Google with in and you were looking at two sites, and you could tell that one of them was like really, really, really trying to do SEO, and the other one was just focused on, like I said, providing helpful quality content. Which one do you think you're going to rather send your visitors to? You don't want to pick out websites that are great at doing the latest SEO tricks. You're your Google, you're always looking for the helpful content. So don't, don't overdo it. Okay. That's what Google means basically by overdoing it. And it links out to a couple articles. One about the the spam team and the spam policy. That is, if you're overdoing it, that is what Google, that's how Google would refer to it. They would say that you're becoming spam. And the other link is too about page relevancy. And that is one area in particular where AI has advanced SEO. AI is a little better at determining relevancy when looking at content. Okay, so that is number, what is that, number five, number six is about what to do if you are using generative AI to assist you in creating content. There's a few different links here: spam policies, essentials, and guidance on AI-generated content. I'm going to summarize it for you. Again, as I have said many times on this podcast, do not rely on AI to generate content for you. AI should be helping you to generate content. If you are relying on some sort of AI tool and you just give it a keyword and it writes a blog for you, that is spam. Google will define that as spam. And that is not what you want to do. Okay, the next section is about building and maintaining a clear technical structure. Okay, that's those are not my words. That's a quote about what this section is about. And it just says things like the first point is meet the search technical requirements. Again, this is SEO. It's what SEO has always been. In fact, number the point number two is follow crawling best practices. Crawling means when Google goes out and looks at your website. The technical, I guess I don't know how technical the term is, but what we call that is Google

Technical Structure That Enables Visibility

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is crawling your site. Point number three, if you are using JavaScript and pretty much every website nowadays is be sure to follow JavaScript SEO best practices. Again, hasn't changed. Best practices. Number four, provide good page experience. Again, nothing new. You are creating a website for the visitors who come there, for the people who read it. You are not creating a website for Google. So focus on creating a good experience for those visitors, for the people who are reading it. And then the final point here, reduce duplicate content. Okay, this is a huge one. I've mentioned it probably not as much as some of the other things I've mentioned on the podcast, but duplicate content, bad, bad, bad for CEO. Okay, for a number of years. I won't get into the details now, but again, this is similar to keyword cannibalization and overdoing it, rewriting the same blog 10 times. If you're a children's photographer in Boston, writing 10 blogs about children's photography in Boston, that's essentially duplicate content. And then this section links out to a technical guide for SEO, a uh link about a link that leads to how to verify your site using Google Search Console, and another article about maintaining website SEO. And then it has a section about uh local and e-commerce business, and it links out to things like the Merchant Center and tools that basically help you sell stuff on Google. But then it also links out to your Google business profile and what to do there and how to manage those details so that it's best for search. Now that section is pretty short, it just links out to other resources. And then the next section is myth busting. Myth busting generative AI search, what you don't need to do. Now I like this one. And this talks, again, I don't mean to brag, I'm not trying to pat myself on the back, but again, I have talked about a lot of these things. One of them, chunking content. Oh, that is a great myth. We did a full episode on that about semantic chunking and what absolute bullshit that is. If anybody ever tells you they're gonna help do SEO or any sort of optimization

Myth Busting Chunking And LLMS.txt

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on your website by semantic chunking or chunking, you know that they don't know what they're talking about. Okay, another one, a second one, rewriting content just for AI systems. Like we just said, we we don't want to create content for Google. We're not writing, we didn't create our web page, we're not writing our content for Google. We also are not writing our content for AI systems. We are creating content for people. So that's a myth. The next one, seeking inauthentic mentions. What this means is basically it's another way of saying don't overdo it. Don't try to have your website linked everywhere. And in doing that, what happens is you're gonna get it linked from websites that are either low quality and or not relevant. And that's a spam signal to Google. So when I say things like links are important, links are massively important for SEO and for AI search, but link quality and relevancy are important. Okay, the next point, overfocusing on structured data. This is kind of technical. And I'm glad to see, I don't remember this from the previous guide. I'm glad to see that they mentioned this because structured data is something that a lot of us can't really do. And if your site is on Squarespace, you can't do it at all. There's nothing you can do. And unfortunately, Squarespace messes this up a lot of times with most of their themes. They create invalid, what Google, what Google literally calls invalid structured data. And there's nothing you can do about it. And even if you're on WordPress and show it, structured data can get a little tricky. So Google's not going to penalize you if you're not a technical genius, here is how I read this. And then the final point here is about the LLMS.txt file. Now we've talked about this. We d I think I did an episode that really kind of focused on this. And what Google is saying here is it's absolutely fine if you have one. It does not do any harm. But Google specifically does not rely on it. It's not going to help your visibility inside Google, which is kind of what I'm what we are seeing in the industry. A lot of times having an LLMS file is not, we haven't seen it to dramatically affect your your visibility, especially in Google. But there have been cases where it does seem to affect visibility in other AI bots, on other AI models, rather. So, and Google is saying if you have it and you want to maintain it, that's 100% fine, but Google does not rely on them. Okay. The next section talks about, quote, exploring agentic experiences. And this is another short section. It basically just links out to a couple other articles, one about building agent-friendly websites. And this is, I think this section is short for a reason because this area is pretty rapidly still developing. Even Google has, you know, just released their own agent. So if you don't even know what agentic experiences are,

Agentic Search And Next Steps

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that's fine. If you are curious, then I would recommend following this link to quote, agent-friendly website best practices. And then finally, the next steps, what to focus on. And it basically summarizes the article into four different points. Number one, follow SEO best practices. Probably the single most important thing you can do if you want your website showing up in AI searches. Number two, create helpful, reliable, resourceful, people-first content. That is the type of content that is and will continue to be surfaced by Google and every other AI model. And those models are only going to get better at finding that type of content. Okay, point number three, prioritize effective SEO strategies over AEO, GEO, AIO hacks. Google is using the word hacks there. And then it again points out again in quotes, chunking. So I'm glad to see that Google has also recognized what a bullshit term chunking is. And then the fourth point is about the agentic experiences. And it and it just says stay in firm, stay informed about emerging technologies. It doesn't actually give any guidance here. It just says this is going to be basically something that continues to develop. So stay informed. All right, so that is it. That is top to bottom. There's, like I said, there's a bunch of links within this article that lead out to other resources. I can't cover all of those here. If you do want a more in depth explanation and exploration of those things, check out the AI plus SEO crash course that I mentioned earlier. You can find it on meritushusband.com. I hope this helps.