so Google just announced four huge new updates to search which I think Mark the most profound change to its search engine in the 15 odd years that I've been doing SEO today we're going to cover each of these four things and yes sge or now ai overviews as it's called is finally launching these four things are really significant any one of them would be huge the fact that all four are being launched together or at least previewed together is uh is really awesome so we're going to look at exactly what each one of them is I'm going to show you some demos I'm going to explain exactly what this means for you and what you need to do next for each of them and by the way SG launching isn't even the biggest one of these let's do this all right first up let's talk about AI overviews these are now launching so these are used to be called sge so if you've been following exposion in I've heard us talking about sge well it's now launching and they're calling it AI over views which makes sense cuz SG is a terrible name nobody knows what it is no one can even remember the order of the letters AI overviews does exactly what it says in the Tim so if you don't know what these are this is what it looks like so if you do a search on Google you'll see a generative AI answer at the top of the page and it references certain websites and then underneath that you'll see the regular search results now of the moment these aren't showing for every search and in fact actually the number of searches that they are showing for has been dropping so back in February no SGU result for 9% of searches whereas in May no sge result for 58% of searches so it does look like Google has been showing sge or AI overviews for fewer searches in anticipation of this launch now of course the fear that lots of marketers and website owners have is what's going to happen to my organic traffic if Google is just showing content in the search results and not driving people to websites well of course we were all very excited for this new product to launch because then we will be able to see in search cons exactly how much traffic we were getting from these AI overviews well I've got good news and bad news for you good news yes we're going to be able to see the amount of traffic that we're getting bad news we're not going to know whether it's from regular surge or the AI overviews because Google aren't going to be breaking that out for us now to be fair John Muller from Google has said this is in line with what we do for Featured Snippets we don't split out all search features there are a lot in search console yeah sure they don't but then not all of these other search features so blatantly plagiarized content so it would be good to see if we're at least getting some traffic from these AI overviews maybe in the future but not right now so what do you need to do Google is rolling this out in the US now and it's going to be rolling it out to over a billion people by the end of the year if you are targeting a US audience you need to be going through your website and optimizing your content for sge we have videos on exactly how to do this on our YouTube channel we've also got a really in-depth blog that tells you exactly how to do this and shows you some examples so just go and search for sge exposure ninja and you will find those guides now as a bit of a mini update to AI overviews Google is also going to allow you to tailor these or adjust them so in this example you can see someone search for explain the connection between lightning and thunder they've got the AI overview here and they've got these options to make them simpler or break it down in more detail so this shows that we're actually going not just going to have one AI overview for some searches we may also potentially have three AI overviews so if you're trying to optimize for the AI overview do you optimize for the original the simpler or the breakdown only time will tell this is a feature that is coming soon this isn't out yet um so we will continue playing with this and monitoring to see how this changes I would also expect once Google starts rolling this out in labs and people start testing it some of these breakdowns and simple buttons might start disappearing if it turns out that people don't actually need them now the next update is AI organized results pages so this is where Google's AI actually changes the layout of the results page and categorizes results under different AI generated headings let me show you an example so so the the demo here is for the search anniversary celebration dinner places Dallas and then you can see what it's done is it's actually um split out the search results in different sections so we've got restaurants here local listings we've got some Reddit listings here live music and intimate settings with more restaurants here romantic steakhouses we got some perspectives some Tik toks we got some critic pics we've got more local listings then we've got dishes popular for anniversary with beef wellington and kemy late right so I mean clearly this is an interesting development because what we're seeing is that actually the AI has the power to change the search results page according to the search which is really sort of interesting in this particular example I think someone search for restaurants they probably just want to see restaurants they don't necessarily if I'm booking a place for Kate and I for our anniversary I don't necessarily care that people tend to make beef wellington on their anniversary particularly as neither of us eat beef so that's a bit odd but I think this shows that Google is giving its AI more flexibility and control over the search results pages and that we're going to be seeing a more Dynamic and complex experience in search right there is no de there is no doubt that this is a more complicated search results page for people to navigate so it'll be really interesting to see what user feedback is and I'd be really interested to see your feedback uh so let us know in the comments now onto the final two updates which I think are actually the real juice here but although before we do that let me just tell you if you want some help with this for example if you're just hearing about this stuff for the first time and maybe your SEO agency hasn't been updating you on things like sge that could be a bit of an issue this is the future of search they need to be dialed into this stuff so if you're hearing about this for the first time you're thinking oh I don't really have my stuff sorted out for this whole new AI search thing then the team here at exposure Ninja can help you in two ways first if you just want to reach out and have a chat about your SEO campaign or your SEO work then you can just head over to exposure ninja.com and drop us a line we're very happy to talk about this stuff we're very happy to do an analysis of your current SEO the other option is if you want a free website and digital marketing review one of the team will take a look at your website your visibility in these new AI search engines we'll also have a look at things like your paid search your paid social your email marketing if you want us too as well as well as your conversion rate optimization and your Website Layout we'll then take all of our recommendations about how to increase your leads and sales and put them into a 15 to 20 minute video which we send you completely free of charge this service is fantastic it takes us ages to do each one as you can imagine so not everyone is eligible so you do need to go to exposure ninja.com SL review to fill in the short form if you want to request one of these that's exposure ninja.com SLR okay but on to the third and fourth update so the third update is mult multistep reasoning this isn't live this is coming soon I think this is the big one I was expecting Google to do something along these lines but to be honest not for a long time yet I'm very surprised that we are seeing this this early now what I'm going to do is show you a demo of how this works I think that's probably the easiest way to do this um so here we go from Liz Reed from Google first step we're making AI overviews even more helpful for your most complex questions the type that are really more like 10 questions in one you can ask your entire question with all its sub questions and get an AI overview in seconds to make this possible we're introducing multi-step reasoning in Google search so Google can do the researching for you for example let's say you've been trying to get into yoga and pilates finding the right Studio can take a lot of research there's so many factors you need to consider soon you'll be able to ask search to find the best yoga or pilat studios in Boston and show you details on their intro offers and the walking time from Beacon Hill as you can see here Google gets to work for you finding the most relevant information and bringing it together into your AI overview you get some studios with great ratings and their introductory offers and you can see the distance for each like this one it's just a 10-minute walk away right below you you see where they're located laid out visually and you got all this from just a single search under the hood our custom Gemini model acts as your AI agent using what we call multi-step reasoning it breaks your bigger question down into all its parts and it figures out which problems it needs to solve and in what order and thanks to our real-time info and ranking expertise it reasons using the highest quality information out there so I think this is really profound because there sort of a headline to this section was Google will do your Googling for you and as a consumer that sounds great because you know that shortens your research time this is like minutes or even hours of research being condensed into a single search on Google with just a few answers being presented as the output of all of that but I think for a lot of websites and Publishers this is going to be really really dangerous because just taking that example there the best yoga and plate Studios you know in this certain area if you think about the entire ecosystem that survives to uh provide information around searches like that so there'll be bloggers who have been to some of these Studios and they've rated them or there'll be YouTubers who have recorded their reviews of their favorite local Studios there might be magazine sites that have done comparisons and interviews with the founders there might be individual yoga Studios who've written blogs and detailed guides about all of this stuff well Google is going away and taking that initial complex search chunking it into all its con constituent Parts running those searches summarizing all of those answers and then presenting them finally at the end as a few uh you know a small number of options this is a bit of a black box right for all those websites and those Publishers that had relied on getting that search traffic as people were educating themselves about a topic Google wants to take that away Google wants to do that work for you but without giving you any of the traffic so if for example let's say that you were a yoga student and you wanted you were a smaller Studio you wanted to compete against these larger local Studios so you offered people some information about your background and you had a uh you know a free uh checklist that people could download to see if they were ready or to make sure they had all their kit ready for their first session and you captured their email address and you put them in an email sequence so that when they came along they all ready and they knew about your history well all of that has gone now if you're recommended great if you're not recommended you're not even in the game so I think this is going to be a really important Battleground for a lot of businesses and Publishers getting their business recommended by this multi-step reasoning approach it's going to be feast or famine and there's going to be very little top and middle of funnel C search volume for some of these searches now of course it's really early days we don't know how this is going to plan pan out we don't know how many searches Google's going to roll this out for but I suspect they're going to try and be as aggressive as they possibly can with this so it's going to be really important to make sure that your business product or service is being recommended inside these results and of course that's going to lead to more branded traffic as we said before now my point here is that this is a bit of a blackbox era of search and we'll talk about some of the implications of this in a minute but I think the complexity and the number of different Journeys that someone could go through to find your product or service from search is really increasing previously you would have seen exactly how they came onto your website there would have been a very discrete number of keywords that you were ranking for you could see which page they came on and what how they signed up now you're going to be getting potentially a lot of branded traffic and you're not going to know any of the history of that visitor because all of the research may have happened actually inside the Google results page which you have absolutely no visibility on so this is going to be a really interesting time and it's going to be fascinating to see how marketers adapt to this sort of blackbox search thing I'm really excited but only because I know a lot of businesses aren't going to adapt to this stuff and that's going to open opportunities for those who do to be way more aggressive okay let's talk about the fourth part of their announcement then or the fourth key component of their announcement and that is the ability to plan they are bringing planning into their search results so again I'm going to show you another example here um in this example someone has um asked for a 3-day meal plan and the Google search results have basically just completed a 3-day meal plan for them let's have a look at exactly what this looks like and here you get a plan with a wide range of recipes from across the web this one for overnight oats looks particularly interesting and you can easily head over to the website to learn how to prepare them if you want to get more veggies in you can simply ask search to swap in a vegetarian dish and just like that search customizes your meal plan and you can export your meal plan or get the ingredients as a list just by tapping here now this functionality is a power ly out now however when I tried it I didn't get any AI Overview at all when I tried it for planning a trip which is the other category that it is now launched for I also I got an AI overview but it definitely wasn't a detailed plan like they showed in the demo now at the time of recording this and at the time of the announcement they said this was available for meal planning and planning trips only those two categories they plan to announce it also for other areas like party planning date nights and workouts but to me that sort of small number of use cases is fairly limited and I think actually those audiences are fairly well served elsewhere online I'm not really sure that that is the killer application for this I think much more interesting than the specific examples that they showed for planning in this presentation was actually the fact that Google wants to help you plan and wants to help you plan in the search results again this is going to be quite a profound shift for people particularly businesses that are that have content on their website which is all about helping visitors or helping Searchers plan certain activities if Google's trying to do this in the search results a lot of that traffic might not even make its way to your website in the first place all of this can feel like a lot with looking at very complex search results here some of them including AI some of them not some really profound changes to search which can feel quite overwhelming and I think a lot of seos and a lot of marketers are really scared and understandably I think anytime you're trying to understand complexity though it helps to come back to what isn't going to change the things that aren't going to change people are still going to be buying the same number of products and services from Google that they always have done in fact they may even increase the number of products and services they're buying as a result of Google search if they're finding it a more useful place to start their search Journey because those products and services are still going to be purchased from somebody Googling so people are always going to Google and they're going to buy things or at the moment people are going to Google and they're going to buy things so therefore businesses are going to compete for those eyeballs they're going to compete to get their websites ranked they're also going to compete to get their products and services recommended by the generative Ai and I think that this is the next Battleground that we seos will be fighting in businesses will be competing to get these recommendations seos and marketers like exposure ninja will be getting our clients recommended in these answers and we already have some incredibly encouraging test cases of where we've been able to manipulate the generative AI overviews in order to get our clients recommended so I think that is going to be a really important place for us to compete the key to winning in this new space if you want some sort of next steps firstly it's awareness of the types of results that are showing for your searches you need to be playing with this and seeing what type of searches are bringing up AI overviews what types of searches aren't bringing up AI overviews when there is an AI overview is our brand is our business being linked are we being mentioned or is it our competitors this will help you to work out what you need to do to compete the next thing we're going to have to get to grips with is getting lots of visibility and Dimensions across the internet generative AI answers are pulling from lots of different types of site so if your brand or your products or services are being mentioned all around that's going to increase your chances of being recommended in the generative AI results we also saw in this presentation lots of mentions of reputation both Google reviews and Google ratings it's important to note the distinction there a lot of the time the generative AI will pull text out of the reviews for example in this search here is exposure ninja a good agency look at how it's pulling information out of different reviews to share in the review panel but it's also pulling ratings out as well and I think we'll see more businesses focus on generating Google reviews because in lots of the demos the Google reviews were the thing that defined whether or not a business was categorized as a best in the area particularly for local searches Google reviews are going to continue to be the most important also another thing that you need to do is subscribe and follow exposure ninja we are digging into this we are we were the Pioneers in sge we were the first to figure out how to rank and share all that information publicly and we will do the same with all of this new tech as well so if you're not already subscribed to the Channel please do so go and listen to our podcast as well where we share lots of other information about this type of thing and keep up to date with this the final thing I would say is that we are likely to move to a place where it's actually more difficult to attribute conversions in organic surge it may be that we're about to see a bit of a loss of visibility on the user Journey that we used to have from surge we're going to see more branded Surge and that's inherently more difficult to track and understand the journey that that person has been on but we need to keep a holistic view of our digital marketing and in particular with our search as we're helping Google to recommend our businesses more often we might not get the data about how often Google is recommending our business our products or services but as long as the work that we're doing seems to be paying back in branded search in organic clicks we know that this strategy overall is going to be paying off for us I'm going to leave you with one final iconic tweet from back in 2014 Matt Cuts exhe head of spam I think he was I think that was his job title at Google said if you see a scraper URL outranking the original source of content in Google please tell us about it Dan Barker I think I've spotted one map note the similarities in the content text we may see some legal implications of what Google is doing with AI overviews if we do of course it may have to change how it attributes some of this information that's the topic for another day and until then embrace the chaos and good luck