How to Rank in Google’s AI Overviews

so they're finally here Google has launched AI overviews previously known as sge live to us audience and it's coming to another 1 billion users before the end of this year this is one of the biggest changes to search and SEO in the last two decades so of course many businesses and marketers are thinking how on Earth do we get our website ranking in this new AI overview section well here it's exposure ninja we've been playing with this technology for a year now while it was in testing mode before it was fully launched and we were

one of the first agencies to figure out how to rank in it and the first agency to share that process publicly but the version of AI overviews that Google has actually launched has some important differences so in this video we're going to explain exactly what AI overviews is how it works and most importantly how to get your website content ranking in this brand new search engine now if you already know about AI overviews then you can skip this next section and we'll just go straight into ranking but if you want to learn about the important

differences between Ai overviews and sge which is what this thing used to be called then listen on so first up what are AI overviews well when you do a search on Google if you are in one of the countries that Google is showing AI overviews you will now see this AI generated section at the top of the page now you've got a little show more thing which you can toggle which shows you more detail and then you've got the rest of the regular organic search results below that now these AI overviews are Snippets of text

with links to websites that corroborate the information in this text and Google's official position is that this text is generated by Google's large language model Gemini and then these websites simply back up the information that the llm is generating I don't believe that for a second but we'll come back to that later you'll see that under each paragraph we've got a few websites that you can see by clicking this little drop- down icon these websites are the ones that corroborate the information in that paragraph now of course you can see why marketers are so invested

in this AI overviews thing because if Google is just showing information in the search results what incentive is there for someone to go and click on a website link to find out more and what happens if you're ranking in the regular organic results but you're not even showing in these AI overview section are you going to lose a lot of your traffic possibly now before we go into what you need to do to get ranking in this AI overview section let's just talk about some of the types of search that are bringing up these AI

overviews so generally speaking it's informational queries that are bringing up these searches things like this search which is sponsored tags which is obviously an informational search and you'll notice it's often questions that start what how when why which bring up these AI overviews in fact here is an interesting comparison for you if you search flat feet running shoes you get an ordinary Google results page at the time of filming this you've got product listing ads at the top here then you've got some organic results down below if you search for what are the best running

shoes for flat feet however you get an AI overview result now this is a kind of interesting result because when this was in SG labs when they were testing this this type of search would have brought up actual product suggestions and you would have been able to click through and go to those products now Google is going to be testing running product listing ads actually in these AI overview results so I suspect that we'll see that coming soon but what happens right now if you do this search is you'll get this article from Runners World

which actually just lists some of these products now one of the big differences between AI overviews as it has been launched and SG when it was in testing mode is that Google has really reduced the number of searches that these AI overviews are showing for in particular I've noticed Google being much less willing to show AI overviews for financial type searches so how to fill out a mortgage application for example when it was in testing mode this brought up an SG result we managed to get our client ranking at the top of that well now

that AI overviews has been launched this search doesn't bring up an AI Overview at all and in fact for many types of financial searches Google seems to be being much more cautious about showing these AI results another type of search that isn't bringing up AI overviews but used to bring up G results is local searches so for example best personal injury lawyers Mallen we got our client ranking at the top of Google Maps here and when this was in testing mode this query brought up an sge response which also listed these same businesses in the

same order well with AI overviews there is no answer to this query interestingly though Google is not shying away from producing AI overviews for medical or health related queries for example should you eat yellow snow Google will happily answer that question another key difference between AI overviews as it has launched and sge as it was in testing is that you can't ask follow-up questions so in sge there were little buttons here that you could click to ask common follow-up questions or you could type in your own follow-up question to talk to Google about the results

and to get more information well in AI overviews as it stands now that functionality is not enabled so whether we'll see Google expand AI overviews capability ities to make them more in line with the SG that they were testing before we don't know but some of the tips in this video are going to help you prepare in case Google does roll out this additional functionality as it continues to test and get feedback about these AI overviews okay so how do you use AI overviews to get more traffic more visibility and more business that's really what

we're here for right well the first way is to get your website listed as one of the corroborating sources if we look at this query here what are page titles you'll see that we've got an AI overviews answer to this question now the websites that corroborate the first sentence of this query are open here and in fact above the fold on this page on desktop there are only three websites visible exposure ninja is the first one if the user decides that they want more context and more information they might click on one of these tiles

and come through to our website this is the first and most obvious way to win using AI over viws get your website linked here the second way to win in Google AI overviews is to have it actually recommend your business your products or your services let's say for example that you are selling one of the running shoes that is linked in this Runner's World article well you've not only got visibility on the Runner's World article page you've also now got visibility in the main search results the Brooks Adrenaline GTS 23 is being shown as the

best overall running shoe for flat feet for someone who hasn't even been on a website yet it's just being shown in the search results now that's obviously a fantastic result and this is going to be one of the key Battlegrounds for marketers over the coming years to get their business products and services actually recommended inside the search result like this okay so how do you get your website ranked in these AI overviews well the first step is to start from a strong base it really helps if you're already ranking prominently for the search for example

this search what our page titles we'll see there are three websites listed exposure ninja campaign Monitor and active campaign now if we look down at the regular organic results we'll see active campaign has the featured snippet at the moment exposion ninjja is there and campaign monitor is there so all three of these corroborating websites are in the first four results of the regular organic search so it really helps to be visible if you want to pick up some AI visibility now of course that's not to say that just because you are ranking in regular organic

search you're going to be in the AI overviews by default that is simply not the case for example just because active campaign has the featured snippet here for example exposion injur is ranking first in the AI overview but it's active campaign that had the featured snippet in the regular organic results we've essentially leapfrogged them to be first ranked in the AO overviews in this search for Shen marketing strategy you'll see that daxu exposure ninja and research gate are the top three results well daxu great marketing China is nowhere to be seen in this generative AI

snippet as is the sheen website itself so although these two websites are ranking prominently in the Organics they're nowhere in the AI overview of course to get ranking in the regular organic results you need to do all the standard SEO stuff you need to optimize your content including your page titles and your metas you need to have a fast site that is easily accessible you need to have good user metrics you need to have a good link profile you need to have good engagement stats we've got a whole bunch of content about how to rank

on Google but you also need to make some very specific adjustments and optimizations for the AI overviews we found that similar to regular organic results if you want to rank for a particular AI overview search it really helps to have content that very narrowly matches that search topic and that actually an exact match relevance can often outweigh a higher authority piece of content that's more generalist on another website for example this search where is Tim Cameron kitchen based the blog post that I wrote to Target this search to try and get ranking in AI overviews

is incredibly short and it's incredibly rubbish but because it is highly relevant on this topic Google has chosen to feature it as the first link in AI overviews in some ways this goes against the content Trend over the last few years where it's very much been about writing the UL guide to XY Z where you have a 2,000 3000w monster blog that covers your topics in every tiny little bit of detail well what AI overviews actually seems to prefer is shorter and more targeted posts that are laser focused on specific queries the next step in

optimizing your content for AI overviews is to make sure that you're summarizing the answer to the question in as few sentences as possible in very high readability language let me show you an example so in this search here best fungicides for lawns we optimized one of our clients existing pieces of content to rank for this search and we did this because we noticed that the websites that Google was linking to in the AI overviews answer they highlighted the text that was being scraped with that attribution I mean sorry the text that was corroborating Google's answer

was highlighted in purple now this text tended to appear towards the top of the page and it tended to be very straightforward plain language with simple sentence structure so what we decided to do is summarize the article right at the top of the page in that same simple sentence structure lo and behold within 5 hours this piece of content that hadn't been ranking in the AI overview section was ranking position one in the AI overviews this is now an approach that we take by default with our new content for example the exposure ninja page what

our page titles and metad descript Des itions you can see the text that the AI overviews is scraping and republishing without proper attribution on the search results page oh I mean sorry you can see the text that is corroborating the information that the AI overview was already publishing of course your goal as a marketer is to get featured in the first paragraph here you want to be featured in the first set of links because whilst you might be able to get featured in the fifth or sixth pile of links the chances of someone going all

the way way down there to click on your website if they want more information should be pretty low so we really want to get featured around the first set of links because these are open by default when the AI overviews page loads so of course you want to make sure that your content is covering the topics focused on in this first paragraph now we're going to come back to this in a minute now once you've made these changes to your page it's really important that you go into Google search console and you request indexing of

this page so you do this by just typing in your url at the top of search console and click request indexing and we found this to be a really important step AI overviews seem to refresh fairly quickly and in many cases we've been able to get a page ranking in AI overviews within a matter of 5 to 12 hours from making the changes and submitting in search console but if you don't request reindexing on search console those changes can take much much longer to filter through into any AI overviews ranking now in some cases you

will optimize your your page for AO overviews you'll think why I've written a fantastic summary intro paragraph I've submitted it to Google search console and I've waited but I'm still not ranking in AI overviews what you might need to do in those cases is go back to AI overviews reread this opening paragraph and have another go optimizing your content to corroborate that information IE give Google something to scrape we found in a number of cases that actually you have to continue reoptimizing content until you find something that Google actually wants to reference the other thing

to note on this point is that AI overviews answers can change they seem to be a lot more Dynamic than search results which means that sometimes you'll go back to an AI overviews answer that you're ranking for and you'll notice that that entire answer has completely changed you might then need to go back to your content reoptimize for what the AI overviews answer is now submit and follow the same process yes this is annoying but it's also a massive opport Unity for you to steal some ranking over competitors that don't keep up with these changes

as frequently as you can see AI overviews can be fairly simple to rank for if you know what you're doing and you already have some content that's ranking prominently Google's official line on the websites that it's linking to are that they are receiving more clicks than they would be if they were showing in just the regular organic results whether or not this is true we will probably never find out because the clicks that we are going to be getting from AI overviews won't be split out in a separate area in Google search console Google's just

going to lump all of the traffic that you get from organic search into the same place so we won't know how many of these clicks come from AI overviews versus regular organic results what about the future of AI overviews well I think this is quite difficult to predict on the one hand you could see that Google has invested a lot of time and credibility and money in building this Tech technology Sundar pitchai the CEO of Google and alphabet has been very public that he thinks that this is the future of search and this is where

Google is going so there is a lot of reputation at stake to make AI overviews very common and visible across Google search results the other elephant in the room is the fact that Google AI overviews are essentially copying and pasting text from underlying publisher websites and they're not really attributing this properly in as far as they're not saying this text comes from this website they're saying this text is ours and by the way here are some other websites that you can visit now Google has been very careful not to say that the AI overviews site

or reference these websites that they're linking to instead they've always describe the websites as corroborating the AI answer well I don't think that's the case at all there are numerous tests that we've conducted which show that Google is using text word for word from the underlying websites whether there is some sort of legal challenge that comes as a result of this particularly if the amount of organic traffic being passed to Publishers drops is a question for another video and probably another Channel but as a marketer I'm just looking at this tool and saying what can

we do to get our clients more traffic more leads and more sales today and that means optimizing their content to get showing in these AI overviews as long as these AI overviews are here they're going to be getting traffic and they're going to be getting eyeballs so we need to make sure that it's your website showing in those AI overview links rather than your competitors so let me know in the comments what do you think about Ai overviews and are you excited for this new technology or are you a little bit scared about what might

happen to your organic traffic now Google launching AI overviews is actually only the first step in a massive plan to overhaul search results check out this video where I break down some of the other announcements that Google put out around the same time