• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 22, 2024

It appears one of the best ways for all types of publishers to get mentioned in Google AI Overviews is to rank high in Google Search, according to data released this week.

Analysts at seoClarity analyzed 36,000 keywords and compared the URLs that served up in Google AI Overview to those showing up in the top 10 organic results.

Mark Traphagen, vice president of product marketing at seoClarity, posted the data on LinkedIn, which suggests that more than 99% of the time, a link landed in the query results on Google AI Overview.

As AIOs keep expanding, he wrote, the industry may see a decline in the percentage of sources from top 10 results. Even this early glimpse indicates a significant change from Google -- indeed, a major change from what marketers experienced in the early days of Google Search Generative Experience. At that time, there was very little correlation between ranking sites and what appeared in AI results.

In response to “widespread criticism of the all-too-often inaccuracy of AIOs, Google has finally begun to incorporate some traditional ranking factors in selecting what should be a source for an AIO,” Traphagen wrote.

He added that the keywords were those tracked by seoClarity clients, so they “tend to be money’ keywords, the informational and transactional keywords these clients care about most.”

Results may vary for more obscure, long-tail searches. The test highlights a big advantage that Google has over standard large language models (LLMs), he wrote, and it is leveraging them to improve the AI results, because the company understands website authority. It also has many more signals than any standard LLM like ChatGPT or Perplexity, he added.