Google Is Starting To Break... Here's Why

The rise in what are called zeroclick searches have reduced organic search traffic to many websites by more than 20% just in the last year. And this is proving devastating for many businesses that have relied on traffic from search engines like Google to generate leads and sales. Let me show you an example. A search like this previously would have given you a list of websites. And each of these websites makes money from people clicking on this link to go to their page. whether they are generating leads from this, whether they're selling products, signing up people for a newsletter, whatever. The problem though is now there's this big AI overview right at the top that seeks to answer this searcher's question right in the search results. And by the way, this is only going to get worse. You may have noticed the AI mode at the bottom of these responses. AI mode is an even more extreme version of this that doesn't have any regular organic listings at all. And Google wants to eventually make this the default search engine. These types of AI tools, whether it's AI overviews, AI mode, or chat GBT, are becoming more popular every month, and they don't care about sending anyone to your website. Now, there is hope. The team and I here at Exposure Ninja have spent the last 3 years [music] studying these tools, and we've spent the last 12 months building a framework that you can use to combat this decline. The good news is that this trend is impacting your competitors in much the same way. And if you're smart, you can use this chaos to not only survive, but actually thrive. There are two ways that we help our clients win. And in this video, we're going to show you exactly how to implement them for your business. And we're also going to give you a tool which makes a lot of the tracking and implementation that much easier. So, if you're a business doing more than 50 million in revenue, by the end of this video, you'll know where these frameworks came from, exactly how they work, and how to follow them. And then at the end, I'm going to give you a playbook that you can follow over the next 12 months to make sure that this trend towards AI search results is a huge growth opportunity for you rather than something that causes decline. Sound good? Let's go. So, where did this framework that we've developed come from? A couple of years ago, we started getting a lot of inquiries from marketers who'd seen big traffic drops from Google. In particular, they were losing traffic from top offunnel searches. These are people who are relatively early on in their buyer journey. They might be researching different products to buy, but they might not be ready to buy yet. Now, previously, most businesses targeted top offunnel traffic with what are called information pages. So, guides or blog posts that would inform the audience so that when they're ready to buy, they choose that company. If we look at a search like what memory card for Switch 2, there will be websites that have information guides on the best memory cards for the Switch 2. What they're hoping is that people will click on these websites, they'll visit the article, and then they'll buy one of these memory cards. Now, the companies that run these information pages, they might be affiliate businesses that are taking a cut of each sale that's generated from their recommendations. It might be the memory card companies themselves, or it might be e-commerce stores that sell these cards. But either way, this top offunnel traffic was previously targeted byformational pages and now a lot of that traffic was just disappearing. Of course, the reason for that was that Google was showing these AI overviews at the top of these searches. So, the user didn't need to go to the website anymore. They could just see the answers directly in the search results. Of course, the problem with this is that that top offunnel traffic had value. it was either generating the affiliate clicks or it was generating signups for a newsletter or a guide or even just generating purchases if the buyer journey was relatively short. This was a pattern that we'd already recognized in many of our clients, particularly the large international brands that had huge footprints. We could see that where AI overviews was being gradually rolled out in different areas across the world, their website started to lose organic traffic. And it's no surprise, according to Forbes, 60% of searches now yield no clicks at all. Spark Tory did their own research and documented exactly what was happening in these zeroclick searches. Some marketers had seen their traffic drop from Google and said, "Oh, this just means fewer people are searching on Google." But that's not what's happening at all. What's actually happening is that what Google is showing people has changed. Luckily, the team here at Exposure Ninja and I have been testing these tools for well over a year. In May 2023, Google launched SGE, which was a private test of the early functionality that would eventually become AI overviews. Now, this wasn't launched to everyone. It was tested only in beta mode. And as soon as it was launched, we started playing with it, proddding with it, and experimenting with it to see how we could influence it, get it to recommend our clients, and link to their websites. On the 4th of December 2023, remember this was before most people even knew that Google was testing this, we launched a video on our YouTube channel showing how to rank in SGE. We showed that you could tweak your content on your website and make some changes to get recommended and ranking [music] in SGE answers sometimes within a matter of hours. Then in May 2024, Google took SGE out of private testing mode and launched it as AI overviews. Marketers who didn't know this was coming started to see their traffic drop in some cases literally overnight. We did what we could to help and within a week we launched this video showing people how to navigate this new era of AIdriven search. We noticed businesses respond to this massive change in search in one of three ways. Some got really curious. They started watching all the videos and contacting us and talking to us about how they could make the most of this. Many just panicked. They didn't know what to do. They didn't know how to influence this. But by far the biggest response from most marketers was they just hoped that this would go away. They reacted with glee when Google's AI overviews told people to stick cheese on their pizza with glue or eat rocks in order to improve their vitamin intake. They, like many in the media, hoped that this new era of AIdriven search would just go away. That Google would realize it's all a big mistake and put it back in the box. Unfortunately for them, AI overviews, AI mode, and chat GBT are not going away. This is the clear direction of travel for all future search. And the smart marketers that we work with at Exposure Ninja if they're going to embrace this new era of AI search, they need to win in two ways. Firstly, they need to get these AI overviews recommending their products. If the AI overview gives you a convincing argument as to why you need to buy a certain thing, you may go and buy that certain thing. But secondly, the marketers that are going to win in this new era need to get their websites listed as one of the next step links in the AI overview. This is important because fundamentally people are still going to buy things. They're not going to stop buying stuff just cuz they've had an AI overview answer. And in order to buy something at the moment, they'll still need to visit a website, which is where these links come in. If you're watching this thinking, I really want some help. I really want to work with the people that are the absolute cutting edge of this new AI search area. Then contact the team here at Exposure Ninja. We've been pioneering this stuff with our clients for 3 years now before most people even knew that this stuff was coming. And we've been on the cutting edge of sharing advice and examples of how to do this, how to improve your visibility in AI search. Our team has worked with companies of all sizes, including huge multi-billion dollar enterprise brands, to help them improve their visibility in AI search. And if you're interested in having us do the same for you, then you can request a free digital marketing review from exposureinja at exposuringinja.com/re. We'll take a look at your current visibility in AI search and map you out an action plan to improve that visibility and generate more leads and sales and brand visibility from AI search over the next 12 months. This service is free, but not everybody is eligible. So, you do need to apply for it at exposurinja.com/re. In this new era, the battleground is no longer going to be trying to get one of these 10 blue links. Instead, it's increasingly going to be over brand visibility and recommendation. But it also increasingly means that your customers research is more likely to happen before they even visit your website. They're going to be asking follow-up questions to AI mode, digging deeper, and learning about your products and services on a different website to your own. So, we figured out a playbook which we started implementing to all of our clients to help them win in this new era of AI search optimization. And that playbook has a number of components, three main pillars. Firstly, good solid technical SEO foundations. Because whilst the AI overview looks very different, underneath the surface, there is still a Google search going on. And if your website isn't ranking in that underlying Google search, it's less likely that the AI overview or AI mode is going to recommend your products or your website. So you need to make sure that you've got the technical SEO foundations in place to be found by search in the first place. The second pillar is content. Now not just having lots of good content, but having the sort of content that these AI tools like to refer and reference in their responses. And often this is about answering very specific questions that form part of what's called a query fan out approach. This is because these AI tools are actually not just searching for a couple of things in the background. They're often searching for lots of different searches in parallel. If you're ranking or your content is ranking for lots of these background searches, when the AI tool compiles its answer, there's an increasing chance that your website or your brand is going to be recommended because it's seen you showing up in lots of these underlying searches. So, it's really important that you've got content which covers lots of these topics in very specific detail. We also notice that there is a particular content structure that these AI tools like to reference. Articles that get to the point and give a complete answer to a question at the top of the page tend to do well. Content that has the right schema markup also helps these AI tools to understand exactly what they're looking at. Whether this is a local business or an e-commerce product. The target visitors intent is also really important to match in your content. If somebody's just looking for information, an article that is really trying hard to drive them towards a product might not match their intent and may therefore be less likely to show up in an AI answer. The third pillar in our AI search optimization framework is what happens off your website. A lot of these AI tools, including tools like Perplexity and Chat GBT, actually tend to refer to third-party sites more often than your own website, even if somebody is asking about your brand, products, or services. But even Google's AI overviews and AI mode will draw from third-party reference sites, particularly high authority content sites, when forming their answers. This can sometimes mean that even if your own website is ranking well, you might be invisible in the AI search results because you're not being talked about enough or in the right ways on other sites online. Increasingly, we found that running digital PR campaigns for our clients and getting them featured on the types of websites that were being referenced in the AI answers was becoming a more and more important part of an overall digital marketing strategy. Now, putting these three pillars together, that is a good technical SEO foundation, a good on-site content strategy, and a fantastic off-site visibility plan together helped our clients improve their visibility in AI overviews and generate a lot more traffic from these searches than they've been getting previously. But there was a problem. Previously, in the old world of traditional SEO, we'd been using rank tracking tools to see where our clients were ranking in regular search results. That really helped us to refine what was working well when we wanted clients to show up in the 10 blue links. But for AI search, where the results are different every time, this didn't really work. That meant we had to resort to things like manually checking the Google search results lots and lots of times, taking screenshots, using VPNs and incognito mode to measure how our clients were doing. This incredibly manual approach made it very difficult for us to scale our processes and see how the things that we were doing were impacting across lots of different clients. Both we and our clients needed a better way of measuring and tracking visibility in AI surge to make sure that we were pulling the right levers and that they could see consistent increases in their visibility and traffic. And that's where Peak.ai comes in, who also, by the way, sponsoring today's video. Peak allows us to track website and brand visibility in AI search in a much more scalable way. And this is really important if you're going to be increasing your visibility because you need to be able to see how your visibility is changing as you tweak things on your website and as you run off-site promotion. So peak is an AI visibility tracker designed for this sort of new era of AI search. You've got some overall visibility scores which show how visible your brand is compared to your competitors that are also showing up in AI search. And of course you can track this visibility over time. So as you're moving different levers and optimizing your content, you can see how that's impacting visibility. Now what tools like Peak do is they actually run searches on different AI platforms and they track the visibility of different brands on those platforms. So here you can see different chats that have been conducted on different platforms and where your brand or your competitors are showing up. This is obviously much more efficient than having to go to Perplexity and Google and Chat GBT yourself and run these searches and track your own visibility. There might be particular prompts or topics that you're most keen on seeing how you're performing and you can add these in to see how you're doing over time. But I think one of the most important areas to track when you're measuring your AI visibility is actually the sources section. So this is how often your website is a source for the AI answers. This gives you a really clear picture of which sites are most influential to these AI search tools. For example, here we can see that for the prompts Rocket Mortgage is interested in tracking, bankrate.com is the most visible website in the sources section, then Reddit, then Rocket Mortgage. So if we're designing a promotion strategy for Rocket Mortgage where we want to improve their visibility, this gives us a list of websites that we might want to look at improving their visibility on. And by the way, although we focused a lot today on zeroclick searches, i.e. Google, there are other AI models like perplexity and chat GBT. And as I mentioned before, they can tend to refer to different types of sources in their responses. So you can filter between different models to see how your visibility changes in different places. If we look at AI overviews for example, we'll see that Rocket Mortgage's own website is the second most cited website. If we change that to Perplexity though, we'll see that Rocket Mortgage's own website drops down to fifth place, meaning that if Rocket Mortgage wants to improve its visibility on Perplexity, it's likely going to have to do some work to get featured more often on these other websites. But there's more. Peak is now rolling out something called actions which are recommendations of things that you can do on your website and off your website to improve your visibility in AI search. And this is all based on its observations of what's working well for other brands in your space. Let's take a look. So actions are broken into two categories. We've got off- page actions i.e. things that you need to do on other websites other than your own. And we've got onpage actions are stuff that you need to do to your own website. This is the off-page dashboard which shows you a few different types of things that you might want to focus on. So, taking listicles as the first example. We've got some suggestions of listicles that we might want to get featured on. For example, Bankrate as they are regularly cited by LLMs. It's even given us specific listicles that we might want to get featured in. Down here, we have a list of websites that aren't mentioning our brand. Some of these might be competitors to us who probably aren't going to be mentioning us anyway. But many of these are going to be content sites which are being cited. They're referencing our competitors but not us. So working with a great digital PR team to go out to these publications and try and get yourself featured is a really good next step here. When it comes to onpage actions, Peak is recommending things that you can do to your website to increase the number of times that your website content is being cited and referenced in AI responses. Let's take a look. So, it gives us some ideas of articles that we might want to publish. It even gives us examples of high-erforming content that we might want to take influence from. Here's a nice recommendation of a series of articles that should help us get visibility in the prompts we've told Peak we want to get visibility for. Now, of course, Peak isn't doing this work for you, but it does show you where to focus your time, energy, and budget to get the highest leverage results. And really, if you spend some time looking at the actions, you'll realize that this is really still a visibility and content game. Ranking and getting recommended by AI tools is all about making sure you're seen across the internet and that the content you're publishing on your website is absolutely top-notch and laser targeted at the things these AI tools want to serve to their users. Increasingly also you'll see userenerated content sites like Reddit and YouTube becoming a larger part of your visibility particularly in AI tools like Perplexity. So, how do you actually turn this into a strategy that you, your team, and any agencies you're working with can actually deliver? Well, here's our recommended playbook that you can follow over the next 12 months. And this is a version of what we implement with our clients at Exposure Ninja when they contact us and say, "Get us more visibility in AI search." Step one is an AI search optimization audit. You need to know how your visibility stacks up against your competitors and where the lowhanging fruit lies. We've got a video on how to conduct an AI search optimization audit which is linked somewhere on here and in the description if you want to get started with that. Now, once you've done that, it's a really good idea to start tracking your brand's visibility in a tool like Peak.ai. This allows you to see how different things impact your visibility over time. The third thing to focus on is any lowhanging fruit with your website itself. You might have found during your AI search optimization audit that there are some fundamental problems with your website structure, your technical SEO or your content which are preventing you from showing up. The fastest way to get visibility in AI search is to fix these things first. And sometimes that visibility can be unlocked in a matter of hours. Once you've tackled your on-site lowhanging fruit, the next step is to tackle your off-site lowhanging fruit. Let's say for example that you've worked with a journalist who's written an article which is ranking really well for one of your key terms, but they haven't mentioned you in that article. Can you get yourself featured or can you work with them on another article? Again, this type of lowhanging fruit can sometimes get visibility really quickly. Once you've picked the lowhanging fruit, the next step is to build a strategic plan to handle the less lowhanging fruit. And this typically starts with content. building out a full content plan based on targeting those query fan out search terms, those in-depth articles about very specific subtopics that these AI search tools might be bringing up. You'll want to come up with a full list of the guides that you'll need to publish on your website and any changes to your website's content structure that you can make to improve its visibility in search. Once you've got this content plan, you'll then want to put together a plan for the offsite, the digital PR visibility. That's again slightly less lowhanging fruit than anything that you might have picked so far. This is prioritizing the types of website that you want to get featured in. Maybe looking into who the writers are, the journalists or the authors of that content, and working out how you're going to do that outreach and actually get those features. Once you've tackled the lowhanging fruit, you've built these strategic plans for content and off-site, the next step is to then run through those plans, starting with the content. You'll typically want to be creating content that targets people at all stages of the buyer journey. At the top of the funnel when they're just doing their research, in the middle of the funnel when they're starting to compare different options, and at the bottom of the funnel when they're ready to take an action and they're looking for something to buy. You want to start implementing your digital PR plan and getting featured in the publications that you've identified are the top priority. The final thing, of course, is to keep testing and iterating. This AI search thing moves fast. These companies are iterating their offerings and the algorithms and processes that they're using to find the content to recommend change just like traditional search changes. And that means you need to be adaptable. Another reason to have great visibility tracking so you can see if your visibility starts to dip, who's winning and what are they doing? How can you adopt those new techniques in order to continue thriving? This is a very new and fast evolving space. So, of course, if you want to help implementing a plan like this, the team here at Exposure Ninja are absolute world leaders in this area. We've helped large international brands really dominate their visibility in areas that they consider strategic priorities. We've helped companies of all different shapes and sizes navigate this transition to AI search and turn organic traffic drops into visibility increases in these new AI search tools. If you're determined that this trend towards AI search results and zeroclick searches is not going to lead to huge traffic and revenue drops for your business, contact the team at Exposure Ninja or request a free digital marketing review. Just go to exposurinja.com/re. Tell us a bit about your business and your goals. If you're interested in working with us and you qualify for this free review, one of our team will do a video analysis of the opportunities available to you over the next 12 months. They'll send this video over to you usually within one to three working days. It's amazing. The level of depth that the team go into in these reviews is unreal. And we've had loads of great feedback from people that said this is one of the most useful marketing things they've done for their business this year. I hope you found this useful. But if you want more information about how to rank in Google's AI modes specifically, then check out this video which shows you exactly how to do that, including examples. PS.