The Truth About AI Overviews with SEO Expert Emily Gertenbach

Know that AI-generated answer at the top of your Google search results? Curious about whether you should adjust your search optimization techniques to show up in that space? Well, those answers, called AI Overviews, are changing everything about how people find businesses online. 

Today, SEO expert Emily Gertenbach joins me on Talk Copy to Me to break down what AI Overviews actually are, how they differ from traditional search results, and whether showing up in them is even right for your business. We'll cover the pros and cons for product-based versus service-based businesses, how AI Overviews are changing user behavior (spoiler: people aren't clicking as much anymore), and the practical steps you can take to optimize your existing content.

If you've been panicking about whether you should try to show up in AI Overviews or how to even make that happen, this conversation will give you the clarity you need to make strategic decisions for your business.

__________________________________________

EPISODE 165.
Read the show notes and view the full transcript here: Coming Soon

______________________________________________

Get to know our guest expert, Emily Gertenbach
Emily is a search engine optimization consultant, freelance writer, and AI skeptic who has spent the past 15 years creating readable, relatable SEO content for B2B that ranks highly … and stays at the top of search results (and in LLM chats). Her clients include small, hyper-local agencies and internationally-recognized brands alike. She believes, and proves, that every brand can connect to their ideal clients in search using human-centered, well-written content that transcends changes in Google algorithms and search technology. 

When you're done listening to this episode, I highly recommend you check out Emily's Gertenbach's guide, A Very Simple Stress-Free Guide to Artificial Intelligence. She has a great way of explaining in-depth topics in an easy-to-understand way. 

Click the link above or copy and paste what's here: https://www.egcreativecontent.com/books-and-guides/

Here's info on your host, Erin Ollila
Erin Ollila believes in the power of words and how a message can inform – and even transform – its intended audience. She graduated from Fairfield University with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and went on to co-found Spry, an award-winning online literary journal.

When Erin’s not helping her clients understand their website data or improve their website copy, you can catch her hosting the Talk Copy to Me podcast and guesting on shows such as Profit is a Choice, Mindful Marketing, The Power in Purpose, and Business-First Creatives.

Stay in touch with Erin Ollila, SEO website copywriter:
• Learn more about my VIP intensive options or just book a strategy session to get started right away
• Visit Erin's website to learn more about her business, services, and products

Transcript

0:00

What are AI overviews. So AI overviews are the AI generated answer that appears at the top of a lot of Google search pages. So in the past, when you'd go to a Google search page, a lot of times at the top you'd see images or a list of videos, or maybe a one paragraph summary of. The answer to your question now, it is a dynamic ever changing AI generated rundown of you've been searching for, and it includes both summary, usually bullet points and links to websites that contain more information about that topic. So I think if this is a new topic to you like, or if you're just really learning about a. I overviews for the first time. Maybe you're thinking to yourself like, oh, this is kind of like being the first spot on Google, right? Which everyone, if you, in the past like 10, 15 years, everyone was like,"how do I get to the top of Google?" Like how do I get to page one? This is slightly different, right? Because there is still a spot one when you get that search result page. AI overviews is just like spa. Would we call it 0.5? So traditionally the content that was in that spot, like the one paragraph that was staff. Didn't change the images or videos. Those were called Position zero. So this has essentially taken the spot of position zero, meaning that it's appearing before ads, before the list of questions that people also ask. And before the true spot one, the very first link that is just there because it's relevant, not because someone paid for it, it was picked up in a tool like the AI overview, but it's not quite the same thing. So in the past, if you wound up in position zero, like at maybe one of your videos did, or your website was like that one paragraph, they called it the featured snippet that came at the top of the page. If that was pulled off of your website, put your, a link to your site and sometimes only your site at the very top above everything else, even above the people buying ads. So that was usually a great way to get more clicks to your site. People don't wanna scroll down, generally speaking. aren't gonna go past the second page on search results. A lot of times they don't go past the first. So in the past we always wanted to appear at the very top 'cause it was what people saw before they even had to scroll down the page. if you appear in the AI overview, it's a little different. You are technically in that position zero. But you can't see the whole AI overview at once. You have to click to expand it. So you can only actually see one of the sites that are cited by the overview before you click to expand it. two, it is the AI overview takes pieces of content from your site and from other sites, usually your competitors, and smushes them together into its own answer. There's a lot less incentive for people to click because they feel like. They're getting the answer from the AI overview. Even though sometimes that answer is actually wrong, people are taking that at face value., And so a lot of companies are seeing that yes, their position is going up. In theory, they're appearing in the AI overview and that position zero, their clicks are going down. You know, it's so funny 'cause right after I asked that question of you, I was like, okay, if you don't know what AI overviews are, even if you. Don't know by name, you probably just don't search the internet at all because I think at this point everyone sees it in their results., But I love how you described it'cause it actually brings up two questions that I already had for you. I liked how you talked about user behavior. I think that's really a key to understanding. Why you want to be in AI overviews or maybe even don't. Right? And because I think it's changing how people search, and I do want to come back to that, which is why my a DD brain is bringing that up. But before we do. I think if people are still kind of on the fence of is this a good or bad thing? Do you think we could kind of cover a pros and cons of being in the AI overview specifically for the smaller to medium business, because you know, again, if it's spot zero, it seems really exciting'cause it's like I've made it, you know, like they're coming for me. I'm gonna be making like my website's perfect now and I'm gonna be making tons of money. Not necessarily. So maybe just the pros and cons of whether people want to end up in AI overviews. That's a good question, and in my opinion, it's kind of divided to a point on whether you are a. Business or you're selling products. So if you're selling products, a lot of times, not always, but a lot of times the people who are doing the search are ready to buy. Sometimes they're just seeking information and if they're just seeking information about. Maybe like, you know the best products for new moms say, and you have blog posts on that. Sure. It can benefit you to be in the AI overview because people will read that answer and they will see your brand name or they'll see you linked and it'll, even if they don't click, it'll get in their head as a resource, as a brand they've heard of before. So later when they're ready to buy, they might have that brand recognition. In that case, it's helped you, if the is ready to buy something. They're kind of met with the a IO review, or maybe they're met with some product ai. Maybe they're using something like Chat PT search, which offers a similar interface or perplexity and they're met with products that the AI has pulled that may or may not benefit you. That is still very in flux. So for those kinds of businesses, I would say it doesn't hurt to appear in the IO review, but I would not stop marketing through other channels and I would actually start. Looking to expand the channels you mark through market through. If you aren't already, like make sure you're on social, make sure you've got email, make sure you're probably gonna need to be doing some paid shopping ads. On the flip side, going back to that brand awareness, if you sell services. I think that there can be some additional benefit to appearing in the a IO review. Um, it's gonna be frustrating, as you said, Erin, you know, you're like, oh, I'm in spot zero. I'm gonna make so much money. But that's not the case because what we're seeing is called the Great Decoupling. And that is a split between impressions, just how many eyeballs were on your listing in the search result and clicks how many people actually. Clicked and visited your website. In the past, a lot of times, impressions and clicks would rise or dip in conjunction with each other. Now we're seeing a split. Those are decoupled. So impressions are rising exponentially in some cases with companies that are appearing in the AI overview. But clicks are down because again, as we talked about before, people, I've done this, you, I'm sure you've done this, everyone listening, I done this. You read the A overview and you're like, all right, well that gives me an idea of what I needed to know. You are not clicking through, but if you are a service company or you are an educational institution, or you're someone who, maybe a consultant who's really operating on brand awareness. Those impressions are still valuable because your customers are doing a lot more informational searches. They are searching a, they're doing a lot more queries to do research, to understand, to compare options versus me if I'm like, I need a new pair of shoes. I know what shoes I like, I'm just gonna go to Google and what type and I'm gonna buy it. There's not gonna be a whole lot of like deep research There's gonna be more deep research and. If you appear in multiple AI overviews, people are gonna start to recognize your brand name more. So the brand awareness can be a help. Um, the con though, of course for everyone, is that those clicks go down. And the other con is that the AI overview is very volatile. So if you focused on your business SEO in the past, you may have noticed that for a few weeks you'll be at spot two, and then you'll be at spot six, and then you'll be at spot one. So there's always a jump that can happen, a shift. The AI overview is like the shift happens very fast. I have published content for clients that has appeared in the AI overview within 40 minutes of publication, which would never happen with traditional search. So that's awesome. But then you gotta do a lot of work updating your content to keep it up in there., I mean, if you've published like the most comprehensive guide ever written to something, yeah, it'll probably stay in the AI overview for a long time, but. If you're like most people, you're putting out some blog posts. They're really good, they're well researched, but then your competitors are doing that too, so it becomes this kind of continual race to stay in the AI overview. Whereas before, yes, you might bop around to different positions, but it would be like over the course of weeks or months. And you know, I hear that and I think two things. I think in one way that actually brings a bigger potential for ranking for smaller businesses. Which means little old Sally who has a gardening blog could outbeat like burpees and , all the really big name seed companies or gardening companies, because Sally herself has done a great job of creating quality content. So in one way. When I'm trying to put a, like a positive spin on it, I think there's a huge potential. But also just like we know for search results, you are not necessarily in control of what they show or what key terms they're pulling you for. Like I. I'm obsessed with ice cream. I'll share this story as an, as an aside here. I love ice cream. I, I really do eat an incredible amount of ice cream. I'm sure I have talked about that before, like a million times on the podcast, on social media. But I can promise you by the time that I recognize this, , search term on my, you know, SEO results and, you know, optimizing my website in former versions I was getting found for ice cream copywriter. Let's just put this out there. Any ice cream brands or shops, I will gladly step into that role. But I don't think, or I'm pretty, I'm a hundred percent positive. I had never written about that on my website, but it has been consistent. I, I'd say at least six years now, I rank for ice cream copywriter. I had saw in one of my paid SEO tools that I actually came up on. I don't remember if it was perplexity or one of them as being a suggested ice cream copywriter, which just kind of brought it up in my mind so could I write an entire page or post about wanting to be an ice cream copywriter? Sure. But like, how does that serve my business? Right. I have never worked with ice cream shops or ice cream brands. They are not, I mean, they are my ideal clients, but they're not my ideal clients in the grand scheme of things. So. If that's what, you know, the Google gods or just search results in general is telling the internet that is important about my website. That's not necessarily what I want them to tell. So again, great potential for the tiny guys to get listed in those AI overviews, but it takes some real culling and. Fingers crossing to make sure what gets in the AI overviews is actually what you want them to show from your website or about your business.. Love the ice cream. But I do want to us to circle back to the question I had asked you earlier. Before we go much further in talking about like how to show up, I wanna talk about how AI overviews are affecting search in general. Because we could tell you, you know, how to update the schema on your website or to add questions to your content, but none of that matters if your audience is searching in a way that. You are not thinking of. So can we go backward and talk about, I guess it's kind of like you mentioned with the great decoupling, but how are AI overviews changing user behavior It does really point to that great decoupling, like the biggest change is people are no longer clicking. Like it may be that they used to click on your competitors because your competitors are in spot one and you are in spot six. Well. Now you might both be in the AI overview and neither of you are getting the clicks., You know, ultimately for Google, and I'm gonna focus on Google here because they have the AI overview., Some other search engines like Duck, duck go have smaller AI generated summaries. But nothing like the AI overview and the AI overview. Just Google's like the number, it's the number one search engine. It just appears there in front of us, so has the most exposure. Um. Google's bottom line is not like their goal is not to help business get found. Their goal is to keep people on their products. Um, ultimately, Google can't offer every product and service, and they're not like Amazon. Even Amazon doesn't offer everything, but like Google doesn't have that kind of business. Um, but they benefit more from keeping people on the search engine page. The end result for that is then they can sell us other ways. Us as business owners, they can sell us other ways to in different parts of search ads. One day there could be ads in the AI overview. We're not there yet, but I expect that will happen down the pipeline. so that's my long way of saying the big change that people aren't clicking anymore. Um, the other thing is that people aren't doing as much deep research. As they used to. there's this that if you go to the AI overview and you read it, you've done your research, it's summarizing a bunch of different But the thing is the AI overview can be wrong. So I was curious months back if I could actually turn off the a IO review. I didn't wanna see it anymore various reasons, so I How to turn off the AI overview. got an AI overview answer that told me step by step how to turn off the AI overview. Fun fact, you can't turn off the AI overview. Google's AI overview answered a question about itself so I fully expected that. yeah, I really fully expected that to happen. mean, it is absolutely wrong about a lot of things.. So people can walk away from it with a misconception. That said, there are some searches, , where people continue to scroll and continue to click. Generally speaking, what's happening is, so in the past, the, so you have a funnel for, , marketing., Top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. Bottom of funnel is where people are ready to make a purchase, , or make a decision. Pick up the phone, call, schedule a demo, visit your store. Whatever. It's in the past, you might have gotten, , let's say you got, which is for easy numbers. We'll say, let's say you got a hundred searches in a day and 70% of those searches were top of funnel. People were just looking. information. They weren't gonna convert, they weren't gonna buy either way. So you were getting a lot of clicks from people who weren't gonna do anything. They were just consuming your content and getting that brand awareness. You would get, let's say 20% of your clicks from middle of funnel where people were getting closer to making a purchase. Maybe they were you and your top competitor, and then you would get 10% of your clicks from people who are at the bottom of funnel, who they were really ready to commit. And take you up on whatever you were offering. you may only get 10 clicks a day, but nine of them will be bottom of funnel and one of them will be top of funnel. So that is to say people are no longer visiting as many websites as they used to. So even though you, when you're, when you see your clicks go down, it can feel like a real pit in your stomach, especially if you work really hard your SEO, which I know so many business owners have. But you also have to look at your conversion rate. If your conversion rate isn't dropping, that means that yes, fewer people are looking at your web, like visiting your website, you're still getting visits from PE, from your actual customers. And in that case, what you're missing is that brand awareness generation from people who used to click on your site and then read some articles and leave without taking any action. In that case, you do need to be in the a i overview to sort of reclaim that aspect of getting your name in front of their eyes. And you were talking earlier, all I could think of toward the end is, and this is the panic that small businesses feel, is the, the click through rate, right? But it also brought up a question for me.'cause before I ask the question, let's just say what what Emily says is correct. You know, you want more qualified buyers on your site. And I think one thing that drives me a little crazy is when I hear people who are worried about click through rate or who are teaching ai how to show up in AI overviews, but not necessarily thinking about, , marketing in general. And, conversions specifically is. The idea that your website is still incredibly important, and so is the blog content that you have. Because again, using your example of 10 clicks, nine potential buyers, which is is just an example everyone. But once they land there, you need to make sure that what they are seeing is what you want them to see that moves them toward whatever conversion related event you're trying to get them to do. Purchase a product, . Contact you so they can potentially see your price range for your services. Whatever it is, your website is still extremely important. So hearing that the clickthroughs are dropping, which is reality, does not mean that you can neglect your website at all. It means that you need to. Pay better attention to it, right? Like, not just use it as like a, a business card, like be very clear on what you offer. You cannot offer every single thing in the world. Like we wanna make it, uh, very obvious that when they land there, there are things they can do, you know, move them, navigate them throughout the site, however, could be or don't, right? If that's not related to the conversion event., But I often hear the lack of click through being. A way to suggest that maybe the website's not important and it just makes me want to scream because like, that makes no sense. Right? Like if, like if you boil down to making money for your business, how does that work without the website? Like, do you just, like, if, if AI Overview recommends you as a potential like local business, do you just think, keep your fingers crossed that they know like. Where your business is located or how to contact you by telephone. No, that's not how it works. Then you still need a website. But the question that I have is. Is there a, a better potential for smaller businesses who have like local related, reasons to show up in AI overviews? For example, you know, wedding vendors near me, or, baby photographers in location-based area. Would it be more likely that they could potentially show up in AI overviews or is that, , not necessarily something that someone should focus on if they're trying to get in an AI overview? That's a good question. Now, caveat, I am not deep into the world of local SEO, and so there are some additional strategies and tactics to take that I won't cover in this answer, but, uh. Nine times outta 10. In my experience, if I am looking at keywords for local searches where it is, including, like you mentioned, the words near me, or a specific location, a lot of times those are not bringing up an AI overview. searches still feel a little more traditional. So when you look at those pages are usually gonna see ads, and then you're gonna see Google Maps with business listings. So in that case. If your website, like you're absolutely right, Erin, what you said about you need to put effort into your site and you can't just treat it as a general business card, but if your site is primarily, say, a photography portfolio. Where it makes more sense for you to show images than text. What you're gonna wanna do in this case is really focus in on building out your Google Business profile and your Google Maps listings. That's gonna give you the biggest bang for your buck there. Um, that said, you may still be cited in more text-based answers in other AI search tools like per perplexity or chat CPT. So you don't wanna. Completely negate having any texts on your website. It would still be a really good idea for you to have a very detailed, like about us page. Um, really build out your services page with some descriptions, like written descriptions about your services. A lot of times I look at photographer websites and it's just like, it'll be a picture and it'll say like, mini session, two 50, full session. Three 80 and it doesn't actually explain what that is. So let's say you are offering mini sessions in the fall. Write a paragraph about what kind of locations you use. Who is this generally for? Where you'll travel to? So you, you do still need the text. Text is still the number one thing that any AI search tool serves up. So you need to have text on your website, but if your goal is to get local business customers focused on that. Google business profile more than worrying about the AI overview if you're a service, and that includes service providers too. Like if you're a an HVAC repair company, you're still gonna wanna focus on that. Uh, that. Google business profile the most. Now, let's say you're a service provider who often has regional clients, but it doesn't necessarily need to be in person. Maybe you're a lawyer, where you might need to serve clients in your state or your province based on where you are licensed, but. You could do it over Zoom or via email. You don't have to meet one on one, like my lawyer lives within a drivable distance from me, but we don't meet in person, we just talk on the phone. I think that's common for a lot of people in their attorneys., In that case, you would want to appear in the a i overview for searches related to your clients' problems. So that's where creating blog content, resource content about the questions people have will be very beneficial. You are completely right. When you were talking, I did Google searches for like wedding photographer near me and then also like using a specific location for a service-based provider. And what happens, as you mentioned, is. You can get the map with a list of people all based on Google, um, business profile. And one thing I noticed that was interesting though is I had misspelled, or just in all honesty, I only spelled half of the name of the city near me. So what happened in that case when it was misspelled, is they did actually give an AI overview. And it said, the AI overview is saying to find a wedding DJ in the Providence area, use online directories like wedding wire or the Knot. Then it gives information on how to find a dj, , as well as bringing up blog posts from a random dj. I don't know if he's local or not, to say that there are things that you can ask your DJs, such as like, do they personalize playlists? So again, that's just bringing up the whole thing about. Having a blog that has quality content that actually is related to your business and potentially your locale. I say this all the time for, for using your example as a lawyer or a photographer. Like if the question is like Massachusetts tenant laws, that is a local based keyword and that keyword for a blog post could absolutely end up in an AI overview because it is specific to. State of Massachusetts, , and if you are a dj, , I'm just using wedding as an example 'cause it's so many vendors are obviously location based. It's another way to kind of use different vendors and share SEO. If you're creating blog posts where you're talking about your, favorite, venues in your area, you're linking out to them. All of these things are, are. Good ways to build traditional SEO as well as having an option to show up in AI overviews. Yeah. And that brings up something else I wanna touch on real quick.. When you mentioned traditional SEO, it's a hundred percent correct. Like yes. If you can be linking with other trusted vendors you like to work with in your region, that's absolutely gonna help your website be viewed as more valuable in search engine size. But it helps, so it helps with traditional SEO, like showing up in those localized search results. But it also helps with the AI overview because. So there was a study recently done by SEMrush. They're a very big SEO company, and the, the study that they did found that the companies mentioned by name AI search results, and the companies listed as linked sites are not one in the same. So there are some different signals that. AI search tools used to say, okay, who are we going to mention my name and who are we going to link to? Based on what, on my knowledge of SEO, if you have a really well known brand name, you are most likely going to be named. the written search result, which may or may not include a link, if your website is considered to be a trustworthy site, so not spammy has good back links, links to and from other related websites, you know, provides value and meets what's called EEAT Signals, which stands for experience, expertise, authorit and trustworthiness. you can achieve mostly just by being your authentic self on your website and talking about what you know., If you meet those signals, then in my opinion, you're gonna be more likely to be listed as a source, even if you aren't mentioned by name. So that's another, another benefit for small businesses doing what you just said, like kind of sharing the SEO wealth in relation to the AI overview. Which brings us. Of the question I bet everyone has at this point in listening to this episode. Okay, well how do we do this? And I think the first thing that someone who is not necessarily like deep in the SEO trenches is thinking or or wondering would be, is traditional SEO what I need to do to appear in. AI optimized results. So I, that's kind of a tricky question'cause we're talking specifically about, you know, the AI overviews right now, but it's still relating to things like showing up in like chat, GPT, perplexity and stuff like that. So can someone go about their regular everyday SEO approaches, or do they need to change what they're doing in order to, to get in AI overview or other search results? question. Um, so you need to continue doing your traditional SEO work and then add another layer on top of it. Which I know is probably not what everyone wants to hear, but good news is the second layer isn't, isn't totally different. It's not like a whole other world. So you need to focus on traditional SEO because that still is what's building up your domains, your websites trustworthiness and expertise level, and is sending the signals to search engines like Google saying this is a site people like to visit. It has links to and from other good sites. You should trust it, You need to create your content slightly differently. So everything should remain the same in terms of how you structure your site, you're linking to when it comes to creating content. That's still very important for traditional SEO, but for AI SEO, which I don't, we haven't really settled on a name for that across the industry. You might hear it called a I SEO AI optimization. Generative engine GEO. GEO. So we're just gonna call it AI SEO for right now. So for your AI SEO, when you're creating content, there's a few things that you really have to do. not good enough to just put up a blog post with a title, and then maybe like 300 words. have to answer specific questions in your text. And the way you gotta do it is you gotta have your title. Then some introductory content. Then you have to have a subhead. Usually, sometimes you'll see those called an H two, and that needs to, doesn't have to be a question, but it needs to be a question or a phrase, and then in the paragraph, immediately beneath that, you need to answer the question or provide the additional. and you can continue on if you want with like more exposition telling a story, but then you need to have another subhead and it needs to have another keyword question phrase, but then you answer. And it needs to be very much structured in that way because when the search engines, particularly AI, search engine crawlers come to your site, they don't read it like we do. They can't, You know, look at a long page of text and recognize, oh, the value's at the bottom. They see code. And in the code they see the letters, H two, H one, around your headers. And then they see what comes underneath it, which is bracket by little Ps to show that it's a paragraph, and that's what they take as the answer. So it's very important that you're very explicitly clear about what people are asking, and then your answer, and really state that upfront before you. You know, further elaborate on, on stuff, have sides, things like that, because that's what's most likely to appear in the AI overview. And while we can't completely control what Google says in the AI overview, as we mentioned, sometimes it is very wrong even about Google products. You can make it likely that correct information is shown about your brand and you and your services if you have a lot of informational site. Content on your site that's structured in that very specific way. Yeah, and I think that's the easiest way to do it. I mean, there's lot, you know, depending if you're more technical, you have a larger team, there's definitely things about like schema that you can do for your specific pages, your post, all of that. Extremely helpful if you can learn more about that and implement those things. Uh, my only quick aside, I will share'cause I wasn't planning on bringing up schema, is I have been harping on the fact that FAQs are extremely important on websites and AI overviews are an excellent reason why FAQs are so important. You know, if you are a service provider, let's say you're a website designer and you also you do branding. The actual design and you also do SEO. Those might be individual services pages. They all need a frequently asked question area on those services pages about that one particular service, not your overall business. That one particular service. So now you have three FAQ like sections on your website and your contact page also needs FAQ. So it is. Helping you with traditional SEO, it is also helping you, giving you that chance by providing information you actually need to provide leads or, you know, people who are really almost about to be clients to make the conversion based decision. And it's giving you an opportunity to show up in front of new people or via AI overview. So that can be done with, or FAQs can be done with or without schema, obviously, if you can, that's gonna benefit you.'cause it's kind of like how you're mentioning, you know, like these ai, little robot processors are looking for things like the text that says H one that, you know, the schema that explains that it's an FAQ section. But do it yourself. Put a, you know, depending on how, whether this is a blog post or a page, however your setup is, maybe there is an H two with a question, because FAQs are frequently asked questions and you put the question there and you answer the question. I'm not trying to oversimplify it, but I think so often the marketing that we do, whether it is search, optimization or copywriting or whatever for our business. Is actually simple. We just over complicate it. Right? So do what you can to. Either create new content or update the content you already have. And the reason I brought that up is'cause I actually think if this scares you or you are just unsure, start with what you already have on your website. You don't need to go creating new things. Do you have suggestions for like, what someone could do looking at their own blog post or their own website pages that are already there in order to make it more likely to show up in an AI overview? so timeliness is a big signal for showing up in the AI overview. When I say signal, I mean that's something that is kind of like a digital blip that makes your website go, Hey, I'm over here to the search crawlers. So if you have. on your page that are old, that are, if they're not relevant to today anymore, just leave them on your site. Just, just let 'em hang out. Um, but if they're still relevant, like if it's still relevant to your business, it's still answers you give to your customers. Go in and update that page, even if the answers haven't changed a whole lot. Make sure it's structured in the way we just talked about. See if there's any other new questions that have come up in the past year or two that you can add. Or even just if you must, if there's really nothing to add, just make a few little, like change some punctuation around and then republish it because that's gonna assign a new date to the page, which is going to make. It more attractive to AI search tools more attractive to the AI overview because it's very fresh. The AI overview is generally not serving up content that's years old. It is possible to get very old content to appear in traditional search results if it's still but the AI overview, it's prioritizing that's the first thing I would do. Second thing I would do is go through your pages, and for this you will need. A tool. if you have Google Search Console, which I do recommend that all business owners set up it's free. It's a Google product that will show you what keywords you're appearing for the most in search results.. You wanna make sure that your content, if there's keywords that are relevant to you, like going back to your ice cream story, like no, it might not make sense for you, Erin, to put a long blog post about dreams of being an ice cream copywriter on your site, but. someone who's looking for copywriting podcasts, and I know you do this, but if you are seeing, if you're a business owner and you're seeing those terms related to your business, make sure that you have those terms on your pages. Make sure that you're, you have content that answers those questions. And then lastly, what I would do is search yourself. So log out of your Google account. And put it into private browsing mode or incognito mode search for the terms you want to show up in, see what's in the AI overview? Then see how you can add similar content to your site. And I'm not saying, you know, obviously don't rip someone off verbatim, but when it comes down to it, digital marketing and SEO is a lot of like, oh, well my competitor did this, so I'm gonna do it now. They're gonna do it. What can you. can you put on your site that will answer the same questions and provide the same kinds of information that's appearing in the A overview and how can you do it better and how to do it better is very broad and it really depends on what else is appearing in the A overview. But the one thing I will say is, and I'm, I'm sorry. I know this is gonna be disappointing to some people who are listening, AI generated content is not going to get you. In the AI overview, so the way the, the biggest thing you can do is make sure your content meets those signals that expertise, authoritative trustworthiness, and AI tools can't do that. AI tools are AI content. Is generated in a way that is programmed to be average and predictable. if you really wanna use AI in the process, maybe use it to create a rough outline based around what you're seeing in the AI overview. But then you, yourself or a writer you hire needs to write it. Without that 'cause AI can't add in. Like first person I statements, it can't. Explain something that's happened to your customer and how you solved it. person's gotta do that. Yeah, absolutely. And that's why AI is great for idea generation. It's great for even editing sometimes or repurposing, but no matter what you're using for. At all, any of those options, I just said they still need to be edited by a human because you know, the EEAT that we talked about before, like you are not an expert unless you share your expertise. I could use AI all day. It does not know the exact things I have done in my business. It doesn't know the training I've had. And you can train it, sure. But it's still not you. So if you want, again, to rank traditionally or showing up in ai like platforms, you need to make sure that the human element is within all of your, your copy and your content.'Cause it's just a waste of your time to put all that effort into like content creation if it doesn't sound like a human A hundred, and it doesn't have all those, like that expertise and things that like the AI tools are actually looking for. a hundred percent. I am very much of the belief that would benefit you more to spend. few hours every month creating one, two medium length blog posts written by you versus using chat GPT for. a couple hours, and you wind up being able to post a blog post every three days that's generated by ai. in this case, having fewer pieces of content at a higher quality is gonna benefit you more in the long run. I completely agree. Um, so to kind of sum up what we're talking about today, I think that, you know, this is gonna be a trial and error for people. It's still kind of like new uncharted territory. Which is why I think it's good to try this now to get your feet wet to practice and to see how you can kind of show up and be more visible online. But people are gonna wanna know it, like did it work? Do you have any suggestions for tracking the efforts or, um, reviewing ai? I don't know if AI overview specific, but like AI optimization, has it been actually successful for your business based on the effort you've put into it? So at a very basic level, if there's something you want people to do on your site, like make a conversion by schedule a call, click. Download a white paper, whatever it is, you can see if your rate has dropped off. If your conversion rate has dropped off, that can be a signal that there can be a lot of reasons for that. Um, but if your conversion rate has dropped off, that can potentially be a signal that you need to adjust your AI SEO strategy because you're not, like we talked about, maybe you are, have gone down to. 10 clicks a day, but you're getting a higher percentage of ready to buy visitors. So you need to adjust why, why they aren't buying. Um, and that that may not be the SEO, it? may be something else on your page. That's a whole other conversation. But that is one thing to look at. It is hard. To track this without using any kind of SEO tools because it can be so different now, if you and I, Aaron both search the same term in Google and we're logged out of our Google accounts, we are going to see similar AI overviews. But when you get into like chat, GPT and perplexity, not necessarily going to see the same answers. There's so much. Nuance that goes in, like based on how the language that we use to speak, talk to the ai. Even if you are saying please and thank you, and I'm giving direct commands, even that alone can change the way it's presenting the results to us. So that's a lot harder to track. So in that case, you are going to need to use some, some tools if you're very serious about it., SEMrush is an SEO tool. Mentioned them before they have a free plan.. Caveat. I do, I do work with Ush as a client. I'm getting nothing from suggesting this. I just think it's a good free tool for real. That's okay. I would suggest it as well. So you add that right in. But they are really good and they have a free plan. And it is, it is good. You can only search like 10 keywords a day, but if you're running a small business that's. Honestly enough for you to check, like figure out what you wanna track and then go check them and they will re will show you if there's an AI overview on the search engine result page and it will let you see if you have the AI overview spot. So I find that really. Useful. You can just like log what you're seeing in a spreadsheet or just keep notes for yourself. If you've got a very small business. If you have a larger business, I would recommend paying for an SEO tool. Um, either SEMrush there, there's a lot on the market that provides similar, like SE ranking is another good one. So pick one you like and buy it and. Set up tracking reports that way. Um, there are other specific AI SEO tools that you can, if you are a larger business, you can use to further optimize your approach. Honestly, they're pretty expensive and very niche. Like I as an SEO consultant, pay for these tools and I use that data in helping my clients, but I wouldn't recommend that the average business buy one of these. It'd be better to. Find someone to work with to do an SEO and an a I SEO audit and get an idea for where you're appearing. And if you wanna go that route, if you're like, I do not want to get into tracking, if you open up so much and you're like, what does this all mean? You can, I mean, I, I can't speak for everyone, but I know you do audits. I do audits. Like there are a lot of SEO professionals who will do an audit for you every, you know, six months or whatever. So you can. Kinda get your benchmarks that way. And honestly, need to be tracking every day, like checking in. on it. Oh God. every few months is gonna be fine for most people, so you can just pay someone to do it for you if you want. Yeah, I think we all know I'm pretty DIY friendly around here, but SEO and, and I do think you can DIY certain aspects of SEO, but I think that especially when we're talking, when we're including AI in the conversation, stop wasting your time doing this. Like this is something like, I am not recommending you go to a, like a bro, SEI agency in any way, shape, or form. I will never recommend that to you. But like Emily said, there are consultants that can do audits for you. Um, again, you could do like a two check-ins a year type of an environment where they're letting you know what they're seeing. They're giving you up, um, suggestions for how to actually improve this. Whether you they implement it or you, your, you or your team does, doesn't matter, you know? And the other thing that bring, like, it brings to mind thinking of the type of businesses we have here. I've heard from many listeners that like. Yes, they would love to blog, but they don't have time. So they, instead, they've done things like a capsule blog or maybe they've had, or cornerstone content, or maybe they have like, you know, just 12 blogs on their site, but they're very specific and conversion related. Cool. You like update those, right? Like you don't have to go create all new content. Um, you, your SEO person, it doesn't have to be this huge contract you sign. Your SEO person can either go into the blog post and make updates themself or they can literally audit just what you have and say, I highly suggest you cut this. I highly suggest you add this. Right? Like, there are very many ways to like get your. Your foot in the door with this, or to make improvements in that are related to this new world, we're all kind of tiptoeing into, percent. without, trying to like recreate the wheel for your business. So Oh I, I definitely think it's like you can track this yourself. You do not have to track this yourself. and I, I normally work with larger companies who they're executing a lot of the recommendations Yeah. but I have clients who come to me once a year and they're like, Hey, can we do another really comprehensive audit? And like, see where Yeah. totally normal. Yeah. So. Mm-hmm. So, you know, hire someone else to do it can. And then, and then again, not to sidetrack us, but I absolutely think that if another potential project, if you're looking for ways to spend your time, is to improve that website so that you know that the navigation that your, your end users are taking. Get them in the right place so that you're actually like encouraging conversions because you know with, you can optimize for search traditionally or through using AI tools all day long, but if they're not actually doing anything for your business, you're just spending time and money Hundred percent. for no reason. One thing I will say, I neglected to say this earlier, but if you are still learning about AI in general and you want to have a better grasp on. Really what it is and how it is affecting things like your marketing. Emily actually has a very simple and stress-free guide to artificial intelligence that I will link to in the show notes so that you can feel maybe like when you're hearing conversations like this or your talking about it , and making plans with like your own marketing team that you're actually pretty well informed on what's. These things mean. But besides that, thank you so much for being here today, Emily. I really appreciate your time. for having me. It was a great conversation.