Google published new documentation on its new AI Overviews search feature that summarizes an answer to a search query and links to web pages where more information can be found. The new documentation provides important information about how the new feature works and what publishers and SEOs should be aware of.
What triggers AI Overviews
AI overviews show when the user’s intent is to quickly understand information, especially when that need for information is tied to a task.
“AI overviews appear in Google Search results when our systems determine… when you want to quickly understand information from a variety of sources, including information from across the web and Google’s Knowledge Graph “.
Elsewhere in the documentation it links the trigger to task-based information needs:
“…and use the information they find to advance their tasks.” “
What kinds of sites do AI overviews link to?
An important fact to note is that just because AI Overviews are triggered by a user’s need to quickly understand something doesn’t mean that only queries with a need for information will trigger the new search Google’s documentation makes it clear that the types of websites that will benefit from links from AI Overviews include “creators” (implying video creators), e-commerce stores, and other businesses. This means that much more than informational websites will benefit from AI overviews.
The new documentation lists the types of sites that can receive a link from AI overviews:
“This allows people to dig deeper and discover a wide range of content from publishers, creators, retailers, companies and more, and use the information they find to advance their tasks.”
Where AI visualizes information sources
AI Overviews display web and knowledge graph information. Currently, large language models must be completely recycled from the ground up when significant amounts of new data are added. This means that the websites chosen to be displayed in the Overviews feature are selected from Google’s standard search index, which in turn means that Google can use Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).
RAG is a system that sits between a large language model and a database of information external to the LLM. This external database can be specific knowledge such as the entire content of an organization’s HR policies to a searchable index. It is a source of additional information that can be used to check information provided by an LLM or to show where to read more about the question being answered.
The section cited at the beginning of the article notes that AI Overviews cites web and Knowledge Graph sources:
“AI overviews appear in Google Search results when our systems determine… when you want to quickly understand information from a variety of sources, including information from across the web and Google’s Knowledge Graph “.
What Auto-Inclusion Means for SEO
Inclusion in AI overviews is automatic and there is nothing specific to AI overviews that publishers or SEOs need to do. Google’s documentation says that following their guidelines for ranking in regular search is all you need to do to rank in AI overviews. Google’s “systems” determine which sites are chosen to display topics that appear in AI overviews.
All statements seem to confirm that the new Overviews include source data from the regular search index. It’s possible that Google filters the search index specifically for AI overviews, but I can’t think of any reason why Google would do this.
All statements indicating automatic inclusions point to the likely possibility that Google uses the regular search index:
“No action is required for publishers to benefit from AI overviews.”
“AI overviews show links to resources that support the information in the snapshot and explore the topic further.”
“…variety of content from publishers, creators, retailers, businesses and more…”
“To rank for AI overviews, publishers just need to follow the Google Search Essentials guide.
“Google’s systems automatically determine which links appear. There’s nothing special that creators can do to be considered other than following our standard guidelines for appearing in search, as outlined in Google Search Essentials.”
Think in terms of themes
Obviously, keywords and synonyms in queries and documents play a role. But in my opinion, they play an outsized role in SEO. There are many ways a search engine can annotate a document to match a web page to a topic, such as what Googler Martin Splitt called a core annotation. Google uses a core annotation to tag a web page with what that web page is about.
Semantic annotation
This type of annotation links the content of the web page with concepts that in turn give structure to an unstructured document. Every web page is unstructured data, so search engines have to make sense of it. Semantic annotation is one way to do this.
Google has been matching web pages with concepts since at least 2015. A Google web page about their cloud products talks about how they integrated neural matching into their search engine in order to annotate web page content with its inherent topics.
Here’s what Google says about how it matches web pages with concepts:
“Google Search began incorporating semantic search in 2015, with the introduction of notable AI search innovations such as the RankBrain deep learning ranking system. This innovation was quickly followed by neural matching to improve the accuracy of document retrieval in Search Neural matching allows a retrieval engine to learn the relationships between the intents of a query and highly relevant documents, allowing Search to recognize the context of a query in instead of the simple search by similarity.
Neural matching helps us understand more diffuse representations of concepts in queries and pages and relate them to each other. Look at an entire query or page instead of just keywords, developing a better understanding of the underlying concepts they represent.”
Google has been doing this for almost ten years, matching web pages with concepts. Google’s AI Overviews documentation also mentions that showing links to topic-based web pages is part of determining which sites qualify for AI Overviews.
This is how Google explains it:
“AI overviews display links to resources that support the information in the snapshot and explore the topic further.
…AI overviews provide a preview of a topic or query based on a variety of sources, including web sources.”
Google’s focus on topics has been a thing for a long time and it’s about time that SEOs loosen their grip on keyword targeting and start giving Topic Targeting a chance to enrich as well its ability to display content on Google Search, including AI overviews.
Google says that the same optimizations described in its Search Essentials documentation for ranking in Google Search are the same optimizations to apply to ranking in Google Overview.
This is exactly what the new documentation says:
“There is nothing special that creators can do to be considered other than following our standard guidelines for appearing in search, as outlined in Google Search Essentials.”
Read Google’s new SEO-related documentation on AI overviews
General descriptions of AI and your website
Featured image by Shutterstock/Piotr Swat
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