Olena
Key takeaways
- 15:16AI Overviews now trigger on approximately 90% of Google searches, with zero-click searches increasing to 60% in 2024 (up from 26% in 2022), making traffic visibility a critical challenge.
- 14:15Despite rapid growth in AI engine adoption, AI-driven traffic currently accounts for less than 1% of total website traffic across all LLMs combined (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Bing Copilot).
- 21:26Traffic from AI engines converts 23% better for informational queries and 300% better for commercial queries than average organic traffic, attracting highly motivated users already well-informed about topics.
- 52:22Link building is transforming into digital PR: LLMs show no direct correlation between backlinks and citation frequency, instead prioritizing mentions from authoritative media sources.
- 33:50Avoid creating generic top-of-funnel content; instead build deep, comprehensive coverage of narrow topics from multiple angles using proper structure, readability, and brand credibility to compete for AI citations.
Questions Olena answered
There are no tactics unique only to LLMs; both LLMs and Google prefer comprehensive, high-quality, well-structured content. Focus on general content improvement in depth and structure rather than hiring specifically for LLM optimization.
Track main target keywords using non-personalized SERPs as benchmarks through tracking tools, similar to traditional SEO. AI chatbots are highly personalized with endless prompts, so the focus shifts to how you want AI engines to perceive your brand rather than optimizing for specific keywords.
Smaller companies can compete through data uniqueness and unique insights, focusing on long-tail and precise queries with lower competition rather than competing on domain authority.
AI optimization through citations is not equivalent to backlinks in Google's traditional algorithm. AI search engines may provide a fairer competitive space for generating leads, though whether citations will surpass traditional backlinks remains uncertain.
LLM crawlers are significantly less active than Google bots—tens of times less frequent. However, emerging trends include adding llm.txt to robots.txt files, similar to robots.txt, which may standardize future crawling patterns.
In Olena's words
“SEO isn't going anywhere. It's just getting transformed. The main point that we need to remember is that lazy or overused approaches don't work.”
“Avoid investing your resources into creating generic top-funnel content because if there are already hundreds if not thousands of articles covering the topic and AI engines can combine information from different sources and provide a short handy summary, you don't need to do this on your site.”
“What we need to do instead is to make a website as a digital reflection of our real firsthand unique experience and just support it with SEO best practices.”