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Categories: SEO, Software
Posted: by Arthur Lee

Ever since Google introduced AI overview, people have clicking on websites even less now. I been fascinated with this change on how its affecting our websites and thought about looking into it farther. So what am i talking about?

Here is our AI overview that google provides, anytime something is answerable it usually pops up with this chat box. The problem that we have with our sites, is this chatbot isn’t really citing our sites. As you can see in the picture above, the sites on the right, don’t mention our sites.

Things we can do right now to improve our SEO.

  1. Welcome headings needs to go. Our headings need to be more specific to what project they are apart of so that chat bots can quickly see what our sites are all about. For the case of Everett Link Extension, we should definitely just call it that, “Everett Link Extension”.
  2. Answer questions. A lot of users nowadays are just searching “what is this topic”. If our content on the homepage doesn’t answer what that, we really are shooting ourselves in the foot here. Lets look at TDLE. https://tdlink.participate.online/ we have no answers to any common questions, just a welcome page with no information about the project.
  3. Surprisingly, videos, AI can also scrape from websites. Looks like having short videos explaining what the website is, adds another level of authenticity to the website thus making these AI search boxes like it more.

There are a ton more we can do but I highlighted some of the things we may be lacking. For more details about SEO, I think Yoast does a really good job explaining it here:

Lighthouse Agentic Browsing report

The light house Agentic Browsing is something new that google added to its lighthouse extension. Unlike traditional lighthouse audits that cares only about human users, this report shows how effective AI systems can navigate the website.

Why this all matters

AI searches and AI assistants are becoming so much more popular and its changing the way users search for information. Based on this study done by PewResearch, it highlights that users are clicking fewer website links and that’s because of AI overview. Researchers suggests that success in search is no longer just measured by SEO rankings, it also depends on how effectively your content can be understood by AI.

We at EI have a lot of content heavy info and we need to give the public as much information as possible, with the changes of how Google is functioning, we need to rethink the way we do this.