Google Search Generative Experience (SGE) has come a long way since its experimental launch in May 2023.
Starting out by simply generating paraphrased snippets for search engine queries, SGE now offers more comprehensive summaries and source links.
Essentially, Google’s SGE is an interactive generative AI-powered feature that uses existing results to answer search queries.
Think of it as a chatbot — but Google’s organic search results power it.
Every indexed webpage that crosses a search engine results page (SERP) helps teach SGE what it knows.
As exciting (and partly terrifying) as the feature is, you may be trying to understand its true potential to leverage it for your businesses.
How Does Google SGE Work?
SGE offers comprehensive answers to search queries, just like Open AI’s ChatGPT, but SGE cites sources.
To see SGE in action:
- Navigate to Google to begin a search.
- Enter a search query or question into the search bar.
- Watch as multiple search results are written as a conversational response to your question.
Context and more information are added to your result through SGE, especially when compared to the old featured snippets, which only displayed a snippet or sentence without its full context.
As you can see, pre-SGE days allowed you to sift through multiple websites, giving each result traffic to their respective webpages.
Now, SGE takes up the space where direct webpage results used to display, meaning that many websites may no longer get the traffic they used to get.
How Will SGE Change How Google Search Works?
As you can imagine, many SEO experts believe SGE will eat into organic traffic from top-of-funnel queries.
There are three key reasons for a potential drop in organic traffic from SERPs:
- Featured snippets only offer one clickable source, while SGE offers many. If you owned the top position, you may now be sharing clicks with multiple sources.
- SGE takes up too much space on the SERPs, pushing the traditional SERP below the fold, resulting in fewer clicks.
- You can ask follow-up questions right, which keeps searchers on the SERP instead of traveling to a site for more information.
That said, there is still potential for pages to get traffic as long as the content answers the query.
SGE Sites Pages That Are Not In The Top 10
There have been many instances where SGE cites pages that don’t rank in the top 10 results — indicating that the data is pooled from a larger sample.
However, you should adapt your strategy as SGE emerges from its experimental phase.
A recent study found that 49% of consumers are interested in AI-powered searches, indicating that AI-generated SERPs are perceived positively.
If Google wants to stay competitive, especially with Bing Search’s hard comeback last year, SGE will eventually be a permanent part of the SERPs.
What SEO Experts Have To Say About SGE’s Impact On Digital Marketing
Many businesses, like yours, rely on Google for their revenue. Whether that’s in the form of ads or organic results, SGE is set to disrupt both of these formats.
How SGE Impacts Organic Traffic
On the organic side, achieving the top 3 positions could lead to lackluster results.
How SGE Impacts PPC
On the advertising end, you might be safe, as Sponsored results appear above SGE.
However, that only pushes organic results even further down.
Some experts believe SGE to be like Featured Snippets but on steroids. Ihor Rudnyk, CEO of Collaborator, explains:
We saw sites that gave simple and fast answers lost some of their traffic. That’s because users receive these answers directly in the SERPs. For example, weather prediction, currency rates, short facts, etc.
Businesses focused on short, easy answers and fast information are in the worst position. I don’t see how you can change it without creating additional value for…
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