How Search Engine Artificial Intelligence is Changing the SEO Landscape
With digital channels now so vital to success, online search engines play an increasingly pivotal role in the world of business, as their results influence which brands, products, and services consumers see first, at what is often a critical point in the online buying process. Like most other lines in life, being among the first comes with its advantages. In this case, it gives brands at the top of the list first crack at earning a click, pitching their wares, and making the sale.
If you own a business or work for one, you want your brand’s website and other online platforms to place as high as possible in search rankings in order to increase traffic to your site, which means that you need a strong search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.
Over two decades, marketing departments and SEO strategists developed best practices to maximize and keep up with Google and other search engines’ changing algorithms. Today, as digital technologies evolve, those responsible for SEO have a new variable to contend with — artificial intelligence (AI).
In early 2024, Google, easily the biggest dog on the search engine block, unleashed its new multimodal AI model Gemini, the first model to outperform human experts on MMLU (Massive Multitask Language Understanding). Not long after, Google began incorporating Gemini into its search engine, using a search generative experience (SGE) to create a brief AI overview (AIO) related to some queries that take precedence over the usual list of URLs.
This introduction of AI like Gemini into search engines has obviously caused businesses and marketing professionals to reassess their SEO gameplan, as the rules have changed. If you have a business, Gemini and other AI will have a substantial impact on how consumers engage and interact with it and discover your products and services online.
Unfortunately, direct influence or input on information about your business into Gemini AI is not possible as it is with a database. To maintain and improve your SEO, you need a better understanding of Gemini and other AI-powered searches so you can create an effective, comprehensive SEO strategy.
Search is More Multimodal
Multimodality refers to the use of multiple modes or methods to convey information or engage with an audience. According to technical documentation, Gemini is “a family of highly capable multimodal models, trained jointly across image, audio, video, and text data for the purpose of building a model with both strong generalist capabilities across modalities alongside cutting-edge understanding and reasoning performance in each respective domain.”
Replacing ordinary text searches, Gemini and its multimodal queries will offer superior responses with more value by incorporating modals and data types, including PDFs, JPEGs, MP4s, pasted media like lines of code, and more. Whether typing questions or speaking them aloud, Gemini-powered search’s multistep reasoning can answer more complex questions and suggest items to users based on their behavior. Images will have more traffic potential which means brands should put a greater emphasis on image SEO through such things as alt text, captions, image sitemaps, unique images, and more.
User Interaction Over Traditional SEO Metrics
Gemini AI perceives your brand as a dynamic entity shaped by a vast array of variables that revolve around data, customer experiences, market trends, and more. Gemini analyzes various data sources to understand how your brand is perceived in the market, including:
- Customer interactions
- Sentiment (e.g. feedback, reviews)
- Social media mentions
- Sales patterns
- Content consumption patterns
- Competitive landscape
- Differentiators (e.g. USPs)
- Target audience insights
- Brand consistency
- Trends and innovations
SEO is becoming more user-centric, and Gemini allows Google to better understand a searcher’s intent and behavior across websites, advancing SERP personalization. Consequently, pages with the highest domain authorities or other usual SEO ranking factors won’t necessarily place highest in searches, depending on the searcher. Instead, websites that they visit more often will, which means the clicks and interactions you earn to your pages from existing or potential customers, along with the above factors listed above, are likely to be more influential in how Google views your brand.
Responsive Design is Essential
With user interaction playing a greater role in searches, responsive design is more critical than ever. To optimize for Google, you have to focus on something called core web vitals — “a set of metrics that measure real-world user experience for loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of the page.” These factors that improve the user experience, such as quick loading, mobile optimization, easy navigation, and image/graphics layout and formatting, must be responsively designed for Gemini and Google to view your digital assets more favorably.
Shifting Customer Journey
Gemini can facilitate instant AI-powered answers to queries at the top of a search engine results pages (SERP), including reference links, thus influencing searchers from the get-go and potentially bypassing the website suggestions altogether. This means that the customer journey is changing, at least when it comes to searches. To be considered and selected for AOI/SGE snippets, your pages’ crawlability and scannability must be optimized.
Context Taking Precedence
Whether typed or asked, queries are now more conversational, and AI-powered search has adapted to that. It has the ability to understand the context behind queries. The concept of keywords will continue to transform into something called “entities” — distinct, singular, and well-defined things or ideas that search engines recognize and understand — which may be a brand, person, place, organization, event, or other concept.
Context and how well an entity is captured within your online content will define the quality of a page instead of keywords and keyword density. Brands now have to work more on contextual coherence for their online assets so that Google will consider it as a reliable modal for an answer. This shift to entities affects how you and your brand should create content, making it more natural, and less reliant on the usual SEO metrics, like keywords. Keeping your business listings accurate and up to date and your content fresh, consistent, and on-brand are among the key things you can do to improve how Google and Gemini AI views your brand.
At M:7 Agency, we believe in a customized approach that emphasizes proactive management and optimization of your website and online presence, focusing on creating valuable content and leveraging SEO — all while continuously monitoring performance and adapting strategies as necessary. To discuss how we can help you adapt to the ever-evolving SEO environment so you can see more traffic, engagement, and ultimately conversions, reach out to us today!