As we’ve stated many times over the past year, we are in the dawn of the era of artificial intelligence (AI). It has already entered a lot of areas and niches; one of them is online search, and particularly Google’s own search engine. This year the company started to transform its search with generative AI, and it plans to completely transform the way people search for information online.
And so, we welcome the Google SGE (Search Generative Experience). This will want to turn searching into a conversation with Google and the site will provide most of the information directly to the user, based, of course, on the information it finds online on websites. Wait, so Google will take all the information from websites, but won’t send users to the pages as it used to? That’s not a fair deal, right?
Well, let’s explore what Google SGE really is and will it truly ruin your website’s organic traffic or not? Because, as with many other things, the answer is not as easy as it may seem.
What’s Google SGE?
According to statistics by DemandSage, 84% of people use Google more than three times a day to get answers. Google themselves say that they process billions of searches per month, but they also spotted something new: Over the past two years there’s a four-fold increase in visual searches – people now use the Google Lens feature for 12 billion visual searchers per month and it’s rising withmany of those searches being multimodal, meaning they feature text and/or voice, too.
This means people are increasingly using different ways to search for information, not just by typing keywords. And with the rise of Generative AI, thanks to projects like ChatGPT by OpenAI and Copilot by Microsoft, we now are on the cusp of another big change in search. Thus, this year Google started to gradually introduce Generative AI into its search engine with the goal to make it the new way people search the Internet.
“With new generative AI capabilities in Search, we’re now taking more of the work out of searching, so you’ll be able to understand a topic faster, uncover new viewpoints and insights, and get things done more easily,” says Google. So, it’s pretty clear that the goal of the company is to make searches even faster and less user-reliant.
How will Google SGE work?
SGE is entirely focused on the user and making everything convenient. So, it will respond to actual questions, instead of relying simply on keywords. It will be able to gather the insight of the conversation and with time it will learn the user’s preferences and adapt to them.
Its answers will be given in detail right there on the search results page. A big part of it will be devoted to the answer, which can be several paragraphs if needed. Next to it Google will also show a small preview of the top web pages it took data from to write the answer. After that, there will be several suggestions for other related questions, next steps to gain further information, follow-up questions and more. The platform will also carry over the context from previous questions, so that the user won’t have to start from scratch with every question. And below all of that, there will be the usual search results we know right now.
But wait – there’s more. Google SGE will try to help people with their online shopping, too. It will use Google’s Shopping Graph which features more than 35 billion product listings worldwide. Every hour, the database refreshes more than 1.8 billion listings, thus keeping the data as fresh as possible. This feature will allow SGE to gather insight into the users’ preferences, to help them monitor price discounts of products and services they are interested in and more. It will also help create shopping lists and research more information and feedback about the products. Or to even find the exact products needed based on specific criteria. So, if you have an online store, you need to be sure your data is part of Google’s Shopping Graph. Google has a special Merchant Center set up to help online shops, retailers and brands add the needed data.
What’s more, Google is also experimenting with “SGE while browsing”. This is part of the Google app for Android and iOS, and it will also be added to the desktop version of Chrome. Thanks to this, the SGE will be part of the user’s continual browsing and it will be able to generate summaries of articles to create AI lists of key points and of course – to search the web for more information straight from the page.
Will Google SGE destroy organic traffic?
All of the above is just the start of Google’s ambitions to transform Internet searches. Even though these changes are obviously going to have their impact on traditional web pages, most of them will still rely on Google as a main source for organic Internet traffic. Social media is a close second, but that’s a whole other world with its own issues. For the most part, Google is still the main source of “free” organic Internet traffic. Free if we don’t count all of the SEO a site has to do in order to get that desired first page ranking.
But if you get to that page, then chances are you will receive a lot of organic user traffic to your website and offset the costs. With SGE, the user could simply get the exact recommendations or products directly on the Google results page and never visit your site. Thus, all of the websites for product comparisons, even deep dive analysis, can be left without users as they will simply get the information via Google.
Keep in mind that SGE is still very limited both in capabilities and spread. It’s only available as a beta to a relatively small number of users and in a handful of languages. Naturally, Google aims to eventually make SGE globally available and in as many languages as it can. Search Engine Land has made a very deep analysis on how SGE impacts website traffic even in its current limited form, and the initial answer is not surprising – the impact can be severe. But, there are also a lot of nuances that can reflect the end results and if done right, SGE could even be a positive gain for your site. But to get to that positive gain, it will require a lot more effort.
The analysis covered 23 different websites. The aggregate organic traffic dropiping as a result of SGE is between 18% for the best-case scenario and 64% for the worst-case option. This is if the sites continue to operate as is without taking into account SGE. The study also reveals a massive variance in the results. Some sites lose as much as 95% of their organic traffic while others could actually gain 219%. In most cases though, the net result is in the negative.
What can we do about it?
There are ways to implement recovery strategies and limit the negative impact of SGE. In fact, some of them can turn SGE into a positive organic traffic gain. The exact benefits will vary greatly, but they can be up anywhere from a few percent to a massive 97% jump or more.
There are several key goals here. One is to optimize your page to appear in the SGE snapshot carousels for webpages it took answers from. That would mean a massive boost for user trust as SGE will show your page with a snapshot and link from which it got the data for its answer, and it will also drive people to click through and discover more.
For that to happen, you would have to optimize webpages and keywords in a way to gain enough traction with SGE to consider the page trustworthy. This means focusing on one page at a time, a lot of trial and error until you get the exact combination right and a lot of experiments along with constant changes.
Also, keep in mind that the carousel features fewer prime spots in the snapshot. It’s also more difficult to predict what types of questions and keywords will be linked by the user and SGE, and most webpages still aren’t doing anything about it. In fact, most don’t realize that SGE will impact them or don’t even know about SGE at all. This will change and the fight for prime space will be on very soon.
The key is to start preparing now. Your SGE recovery strategy should start with an SGE impact analysis and then strategically picking top keywords that are important to your goals and see which ones you can lose, and which ones are vital. And also, be preparedfor carousel ranking as this will soon become a hot topic and many things will change. Google will also – for sure – add more requirements.
The good about SGE
But let’s not think that Google SGE is only a negative. Google still has the major share of its revenue via online ads, and these drive people to websites. So, the company won’t fully nuke classic search results as they are needed for good balance. In fact, SGE could possibly drive websites to create better content in the hope to be noted by the algorithm. At the very least, cheap AI-written pages which can sometimes game the SEO rules, should be weeded out with SGE. Affiliate marketing should also thrive, especially via the shopping graph recommendation. Of course, there will be a period of a lot of stress for website admins, but eventually the process should smooth over and SGE (hopefully) will become a positive for both users and quality websites.