The way we search for information on search engines is about to change. Next time you “Google” something, your query might prompt a fully AI-generated answer instead of a simple list of web links. An experience that includes a beautiful infographic-like layout with tailored, context-aware, interactive, and multimedia-enriched information generated by the world’s most knowledgeable artificial intelligence.
No more bouncing between websites and filtering out information overload on your own. The future of search results is about to get more curated and seamless, providing all the information you need in one place.
The Google search bar, the default tool for accessing the power of knowledge in the information era, incorporates generative AI. And LOCOMOTIVE is breaking down everything you need to know from why this is happening, to how it will affect your website’s SEO efforts.
Why is Google Pushing SGE?
Google Search Generative Experience (SGE) is how the information champion of the world will leverage its 162.5 billion monthly visits to compete in the advent of generative AI. In contrast, the fastest-growing generative AI interface is OpenAI (present in most Bing searches), currently at 2.5 billion visits a month1.
Because Google founders were once in the same position as open.ai, a small but exploding disruptive tech startup, they have arguably not underestimated the possibility that Open.AI or any other AI startup could be a serious threat, and to be clear SGE is one of many fronts the web titan is hedging Generative AI to stay on top of innovative disruptive technologies.
What is Google’s Generative Search Experience Like?
Your Generative Search Experience will probably start when you opt-in to a “Follow-up” search option on top of your traditional results. The new information journey will use what it knows about you and similar scenarios to create AI-generated answers. It will suggest multimedia, search filters, maps, and website lists in an optimized layout. Most importantly, it will result from an AI continuously learning to help you find the most responsible information options as fast as possible; A truly generative search experience2.
What to Expect From SGE?
- Generative AI will be present in other forms of Google search. So far, Google Search is experimenting with web results, but generative AI and search are now promising to be present in many more places, like “circle to search” (on anything shown on your Android screen) or “Point your camera, ask a question, get help from AI.”
- It will look for Quality Content: “SGE is rooted in the foundations of Search, so it will continue to connect people to the richness and vibrancy of content on the web and strive for the highest bar for information quality.”4
- It Provides summaries and follow-up options: SGE can automatically summarize search results and suggest follow-up questions to help users explore a topic in more depth.
- Tailored for different search types: SGE can be used for various searches, including shopping searches showing product information and reviews, or local searches providing context about places.
- Search ads still play a role: Ads will continue to be displayed alongside SGE results, allowing businesses to reach potential customers.
- SGE will focus on creativity and safety: SGE can be used for creative tasks like image generation but with limitations to ensure user safety and high-quality results.
- Transparency and user control: Google emphasizes transparency by labeling AI-generated content and allowing users to opt out of the experiment.
- It will stay within Google AI principles: Since 2018 Google has mandated that all of its innovation in the realm of AI stay within its AI Principles:
- Google’s AI Principles:
- Be socially beneficial.
- Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias.
- Be built and tested for safety.
- Be accountable to people.
- Incorporate privacy design principles.
- Uphold high standards of scientific excellence.
- Be made available for use by these principles.
- Applications Google’s AI will not be deployed in:
- Those likely to cause overall harm.
- Technologies primarily intended to cause injury.
- Surveillance violates internationally accepted norms.
- Purpose contravenes international law and human rights.
- Google’s AI Principles:
What Types of Content Do SGE Results Display?
To better understand the SGE modules SEO will compete for, this is a list of the content modules currently displayed within Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) as part of the SGE framework5.
- List Formats: SGE utilizes lists to present information clearly and concisely. Unordered lists offer bullet points for various items, while ordered lists provide a ranking or sequence for specific purposes. Depending on the search query, descriptions may accompany the list of items.
- Local Search: SGE recognizes searches with geographical intent and delivers local results. This module integrates maps and other location-based information, proving valuable for searches with a regional or local focus.
- Product Views: SGE tailors product presentations within search results. This module dynamically adapts the view based on the nature of the products being searched, enhancing the user experience by providing a more relevant way to explore product offerings and enriching data with Google´s Shopping Graph, with reviews, pricing, and descriptions of over 35 billion products.
- Code Blocks: For queries related to programming or coding, SGE generates code blocks. These are snippets of code directly relevant to the user’s search, providing practical and targeted information for tech-oriented searches.
- Recipe Cards: When users search for recipes or food-related topics, SGE generates recipe cards. These cards present structured information with ingredients, instructions, and potential yield or cooking times catering to culinary searches.
Where Can I Get Access to Google’s SGE?
This new technology is now accessible in over 120 countries and you can become an early user of this experience by signing up at Google Search Labs.
SGE will appear for most searches, and even though it’s been observed that it appears “relatively” less for topics considered YMYL (Topics related to your money or your life), “30% of new information is being generated in the Health industry”, and Google is developing a specialized LLM for Health to provide advanced and accurate health information through AI to generate personalized health recommendations.
Google will place AI-generated informational journeys on many Google products and, as Google usually does, try more than a few new products.
How Does Google’s SGE Affect SEO?
SGE has been a hot topic of conversation in the SEO industry for over a year. Most experts agree that SGE will significantly impact how current organic traffic gets to your site. So, prepare for change.
Capitalize on the possibility that SGE will offer new opportunities to grow high-quality organic visitors and on an SGE traffic recuperation contingency plan for the high possibility that some of your higher-raking keyword traffic might drop.
What Will Not Change With SGE?
It’s important to remember that Google Search already has a long history of leveraging AI to provide better and more contextualized search results. The company is one of the pioneers in Artificial Intelligence and data-driven innovation. This means that we already know what “Quality Content” means for Google and that its quality content principles will remain the same:
- EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust)
- Website Performance: Fast, reliable website code and infrastructure to make the experience of visiting the site fast and enjoyable.
- Good UX in-page: From great content structure to easy-to-read information.
How will SGE Affect my Organic Traffic?
Authoritas.com, an SEO-focused publication, tested the presence of SGE in thousands of queries in an SGE-enabled account and published two articles, one on the effects of SGE on e-commerce-related terms content and one on the effects of SGE on brand and product terms of these many insights, the most impactful are:
- Almost all searches, between 86.8% to 91.04%, of everything searched in Google, were enriched with some SGE elements.
- More than 90% of AI-generated answers point to domains outside the top 10 of traditional SERPs for that specific query.
- When the SGE panel is open, the number 1 search result in SERPs is pushed at least 1500px below the SGE-generated links, placing the SGE-generated links front and center. This greatly impacts the CTR of URLs on the top 10 SERPs, but it has a proportionally high and positive impact on the sources and links recommended by the generative AI.
How Will SGE Change the SEO Industry?
One way or another, SGE will still display a list of links for search users to click on and visit, if anything, SGE will reduce bounce rate and provide highly engaged visitors to a website because it will be the last thing a visitor will do on the SGE Information Journey, taking users to exactly the right place in our ever-growing cyber universe.
For example, before Google delivered an organic visitor to the buy now page for that special pair of shoes, the Informational Journey the visitor went through started in SGE and represented an iterative series of follow-up queries showing various vendors, products, and pricing ranges. By the time the visitor clicks on the “visit website” button, many buying decisions have already been made, and the quality of the visitor will be much higher in terms of conversion rate.
Can I Get More SEO Insights from SGE Clicks?
Yes. “SGE provides AI-powered results, which show up below sponsored listings, but above traditional organic listings. A real example of SGE results can be found below; SGE results vary and differ across searches and industries.
When a user clicks on an SGE result using Chrome, they are brought directly to a snippet of the page, similar to the context of their search.
We can use this scroll-to-text information found in the URL (#:~:text=) to understand which parts of the page are most valuable within SGE results.
So far LOCOMOTIVE has created its own proprietary script to gather this data and answer specific questions for our customers, some of the insights discovered answer questions like:
- Which pages are shown most frequently in SGE results?
- Are there correlations between high-traffic pages and SGE results?
- Are there correlations between high-ranking (position) and SGE results?
- What is the relationship between SGE Sessions in relation to the number of ranking keywords in a page?
- Is there a relationship between SGE sessions and page clicks?
- Is there a relationship between SGE sessions and the placement of the referenced content on a page? ( Is Google SGE taking more content from a specific location on a page?)
Is Technical SEO Important in SGE?
Technical SEO will be beneficial, John Mueller from Google said “as long as machines read websites, technical SEO will remain as important as it is.” But remember, technical SEO can only go as far as the value of the content, its structuring, and indexing. So, content remains king.
What are good SEO practices to compete in SGE results?
We have yet to see the full rollout and final form of SGE to have enough data to provide failsafe advice, having said that, here are some tips suggested by NightWhatch.io
- Summarize: Condense your long-form content or user-generated reviews into bite-sized summaries. Think pro/con lists with short bullet points—perfect for quick decision-making.
- Focus on new information: SGE isn’t well-versed in everything just yet. Focus on fresh topics and current events that haven’t been used to train it. Think of it like a history buff – the more recent the news, the more likely you are to be its source.
- Speak the Language of SGE: Long-tail keywords and questions are gold. Research these specifically for SGE, as they’re the keys that unlock AI-generated snippets.
- Trust & Authority: Building Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (EEAT) is still crucial. Showcase your knowledge, build strong backlinks, and maintain a stellar online reputation.
- Tech Tips for SGE Superpowers:
- Multimedia Matters: Optimize image alt tags and video titles for both accessibility and search engines. SGE loves multimedia to enrich its answers!
- Structured Data—Your Secret Weapon: Use schema markup to help SGE clearly understand your content’s context and relevance.
- Speed is Key: Keep your page load time under 500ms. Slow websites are the enemy of a smooth SGE experience.
- Crawling & Indexing – Open the Gates: Make sure your website isn’t blocked from search engine crawlers or indexing. You want SGE to find your content easily.
- Let the Comments Flow: Index comments and reviews. User-generated content is a valuable source of information for SGE.
- Less Script, More Speed: Keep scripting time on your website low. Complex scripts can slow things down, hindering SGE’s ability to process your content efficiently.
- Don’t Hide Behind JS: Make sure your content isn’t reliant on JavaScript to function. SGE needs to see it all to understand it all.
- Expert-Generated and User-validated Q&As and forum threads seem to be favored, as statistics and data help validate the utility of published information sites that have many “knowledgable” people discussing and validating responses, like Quora, Reddit, Starck Overflow or customer reviews like Yelp, Google Reviews, Trip Advisor and other data rich UGC sites have been sourced more often than most other websites in SGE results6.
Get Ahead of the Curve Today
SGE is important because it affects one of the most common actions people do on the internet: Search. It promises to help the user get better informed, and this promise, if fulfilled, improves the world.
In sharp contrast to how social media algorithms might be socially destructive, helping an individual find important, relevant, and contextual information faster, better, and more digestible is a much better way to leverage AI. Yet the power to tell most people in the world what the “truth” is daunting.
If you want to get ahead of the curve with tailored insights on how your site can drive more traffic from SGE, please contact LOCOMOTIVE today.
Resource Section
- Visits based on SEMRUSH’s Jan 2024 traffic report of top websites: https://www.semrush.com/website/top/ ↩︎
- View details of the vision for Google’s SGE here: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//search/howsearchworks/google-about-SGE.pdf ↩︎
- https://ai.google/static/documents/case-study-responsible-development-of-sge.pdf ↩︎
- https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//search/howsearchworks/google-about-SGE.pdf ↩︎
- https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/google-about-SGE.pdf ↩︎
- “quora.com, local.google.com (Google Maps), and en.wikipedia.org are the most linked domains in SGE.” https://www.onely.com/blog/all-the-useful-data-about-sge-you-need-to-know-right-now/ ↩︎
