Cheese not sticking to pizza🍕

Hello marketers. Welcome to AI Marketing School, where we dish out the latest and greatest in AI-powered marketing. In this week’s issue:

1. AI Marketing Update: Google’s AI Overviews are hilarious

2. The Stack: A quick and dirty SEO prompt

3. Consultant’s Corner: A free template for you

Onwards!

AI MARKETING UPDATE

How’s all the AI stuff going at Google? Well, not great, to be honest!

Google unveiled a new feature this month - AI Overviews.

It's so bad that there’s already a "Hide annoying Google AI Overviews" Chrome extension. And it’s had 8,000 downloads.

If you haven't encountered AI Overviews yet, it's essentially a Featured Snippet (the highlighted excerpt at the top of Google search results in 'Position 0') enhanced with AI.

Instead of featuring a snippet from an existing web page (with proper attribution), Google provides its own AI-generated answer.

From the user's perspective, it kind of makes sense – for some queries, a direct answer is preferable to a load of blue links.

From Google's perspective, although it’s likely to cost in the short-term through lost clicks, it's the only way they can compete with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, who could literally launch a search engine at any moment.

The problem is that AI Overviews are, to put it mildly, totally rubbish.

The web’s been awash with comical examples.

So, what on earth is going on here?

Essentially, Google is scraping information from other sites, feeding it into its model, and serving it back to us without context.

Much of this information comes from places like Reddit (which Google paid $60m for using its data to train its model—which seems insanely cheap, but anyway). And as you know, a lot of the stuff posted on Reddit is people taking the piss (as we like to say in the UK.)

Until Google knows how to tell the difference between someone being serious and silly, Overviews will remain unfit for everyday use.

THE STACK

A quick and dirty SEO audit

When it comes to SEO, Pareto's Principle applies - 80% of the benefits come from just 20% of the effort. Get the basics right, and you'll be ahead of most of your competitors, which could make all the difference.

If you're looking for a quick way to get started, consider using ChatGPT to help you optimize your website. Get ChatGPT to create an SEO audit checklist for you. Ask it to rank each step in order of importance, provide step-by-step instructions on making the necessary changes, and suggest tools to help you get the job done quickly.

Start at the top and work your way down. You'll be amazed by how much you can get done in a day. Then you can decide whether you want to invest more time and effort into the remaining 20%.

I need assistance in creating a comprehensive SEO audit checklist for my website. Please outline the steps required to optimize my site and rank them in order of importance. For each step, provide detailed instructions on how to implement the necessary changes. Additionally, recommend any tools or resources that can aid in completing each task efficiently. Organize the information in a clear and easy-to-follow format, ensuring that even someone with minimal SEO experience can understand and apply the recommendations.

CONSULTANT’S CORNER

Let’s face it: Google's AI Overviews are dodgy, to say the least, but they're not going away anytime soon. In fact, AI-generated overviews are likely to become the new norm in the world of search.

As marketers, this leaves us with a pressing question: How can we prevent our hard-earned traffic from taking a nosedive? When users can get all the information they need from an Overview, what incentive do they have to visit our carefully crafted educational content?

While there's no perfect solution. But there are steps we can take to stay ahead of the game.

First and foremost, create a spreadsheet listing all of your website’s informational pages, with columns indicating whether they include things like embedded videos, proprietary research, genuine opinions, images, and other elements that AI struggles to replicate effectively. Using Ahrefs (or your SEO tool of choice) monitor how these pages perform and identify correlations. Then use this intel to focus your ongoing content creation and refresh strategy.

If AI Overviews are a significant concern for you, you can take things to the next level!

Consider using a tool like Ziptie to identify which search terms driving traffic to your site are currently appearing as AI Overviews. Then track CTR, visits, and other metrics before and after the implementation of AI Overviews (14.05.24), giving you valuable insights into their impact.

I wish I could, but I can't take credit for this idea – that honor goes to the incredible Aleyda Solis. The best part: she's created a spreadsheet that you can copy and use to track all of this information yourself.

So go ahead, steal it, and impress your boss/client with your proactive approach!

Get the spreadsheet here.

Thanks to Kieran Flanagan for pointing me in the right direction. As usual.

Hope you enjoyed this week’s issue. If you missed it last week, you can read it here.

Until next time. Happy marketing.

—The AI Marketer