Do you want to get links in the new Google AI Overviews that show up in Google Search? Well, a new report says all you need to do is rank well in Google Search organically and you are incredibly likely to have links in the AI Overviews.
Mark Traphagen from seoClarity posted some data on LinkedIn that says that over 99% of the time a link was in the AI Overview, it came from one of the top ten organic results. He wrote, "a whopping 99.5% of the time one or more of the top 10 web results was included in the AI Overview's sources!"
This was after analyzing "36,000 keywords and compared the URLs showing up in AIOs to those showing up in the top 10 organic results," he said.
Initially, Google told us that AI Overviews, formerly Search Generative Experience, would show content from sites that already rank well in Google Search.
As Mark said in his post, that was not the case early on - in fact, there were tons of complaints about the quality of those AI Overviews. "That's a mammoth change from what we saw in SGE and the early days of AIO, where there was very little correlation between ranking sites and what appeared in AI results," Mark wrote.
"My speculation is that 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," he added. I do agree.
So if you want to rank and have links in the AI Overviews, then rank well in Google Search organically.
Here is one example but there are many:
But Glenn Gabe said he has been watching this and said he does not see it in his data. "I'm not seeing this based on tracking AI overviews for a number of companies. As an extreme example, there's one company I'm tracking AIOs for that ranks in the top 10 for 71% of the queries tracked, and even has some featured snippets, yet doesn't have one citation in any of the AI overviews," Glenn Gabe wrote on X.
I'm not seeing this based on tracking AI overviews for a number of companies. As an extreme example, there's one company I'm tracking AIOs for that ranks in the top 10 for 71% of the queries tracked, and even has some featured snippets, yet doesn't have one citation in any of the… pic.twitter.com/5YJlqLBaJS
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 21, 2024
And it goes with what we covered yesterday about AI Overviews links going away if you get his by a core update:
This would seem to line up with the @seoClarity data I shared earlier today, confirming that Google is steppping up the use of “traditional” signals of quality & authority in choosing sources for AI overviews. https://t.co/ohxC6e88ma
— Mark Traphagen 🏳️🌈 (they/them) (@marktraphagen) August 21, 2024
Mark did add some more clarifications in the comments of his post:
1) These are early results for 36K keywords. As AIOs keep expanding we may see a decline in the percentage of sources from top 10 results. Nevertheless even this early glimpse indicates a significant change from Google.
2) The keywords are those tracked by our clients, so tend to be "money" keywords, the informational and transactional keywords these clients care about most. So results may vary for more obscure, long tail searches.
3) This result also highlights a very big advantage that Google has over standard LLMs, and it is leveraging it to improve the AI results. They understand website authority and have a lot more signals than any standard LLM like ChatGPT or Perplexity would have.
4) These were all based on Google mobile in the US.
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
