GPTs Are Reshaping SEO: CTR Down. PR Up. Game Changed

Uh good morning, good afternoon and today we will be speaking about deepseek chap GPT and how businesses can survive uh in the AIdriven SEO disruption. Uh SEO is ever changing market and uh I AIdriven search has really shown that it's shaking up the world right now. Uh tools like deepseek grog gpt are reshaping how search engines find rank and show information right now. So to stay ahead uh as businesses uh you need to stay ahead in your data, get smart insights uh and be flexible with your strategies as uh they are always changing. Ranking tools uh can help you keep up with that and uh we'll dive into more details into how uh you can prepare yourself better uh later today. Uh so uh uh it's me. I'm I'm your host today. My name is Ole. I'm uh the sales development uh lead at SE ranking. So

you might have heard from me or some of my teammates in the past. I specialize in outbound strategies. Uh so not really related to SEO but also work on uh engaging with our customers in a personalized uh way. Uh but yeah, we are not here to talk about me. Uh and let's actually meet our experts for today. Uh please meet uh Satlana. She's our amazing content team lead at SE Ranking and uh uh it's I'm excited to uh have you today Slana. Can you please tell the amazing people who join us today more about yourself? Sure. Thanks Se thanks for having me today. So yeah I'm leading the content team at S ranking. I keep an eye on all the content my amazing team creates, support the people behind that content and one of my major goals is to actually keep our blog afloat amidst all the industry turbulence. Normally I stay behind the

scenes, but today our educational manager, Valyria, somehow lured me into this gig. I don't know how this happened. and she didn't even promise me cookies or anything. But anyway, here I am with you today. So, yeah, give me some slack, please, once we get to the good part. Uh, don't worry. Uh, she did the same to me, so I guess we we're in the same boat. Yeah. And yeah, and Aopen, she's not the last one who our webinar manager tricked into it. Uh, please meet our SEO specialist, Oena. Uh I am I've known her for quite a few days and yeah Olena please tell us uh and the people more about what you uh do at this ranking. So I'm an SEO specialist here at this ranking. But in general I am in online marketing since 2016 and um from and since uh 2022 as a part of

our amazing SEO team I'm ensuring our organic growth and assist in developing a ranking platform. Also I make sure that nothing important in the industry passes by uh you our community and the S ranking team as a manager of SEO news digest. That's it. Uh thank you. Yeah, thank you a lot. Uh yeah, I'm I'm I'm keeping up with the SEO industry probably mostly because of Alena's uh insights and yeah, she'll uh she'll share some of them with you today. Uh before we actually get uh yeah, I wanted to tell you a bit more about SE ranking and what we do. Uh we are a powerful uh SEO platform that provides data tools uh uh designed for digital agencies, self professional businesses and everyone who wants to grow their uh visibility on the

internet. During the last 10 years, we've been building up our pro uh platform based on uh what actually professionals need and thanks to that we've received some uh great acclaim. uh on the screen you can see our uh recent awards from uh the G G2 and it uh it's for me as a salesperson it's great to see that we are valued across different markets and different type of clients uh uh doesn't matter if you are a small business or represented enterprise. Uh so here here we are finally at the agenda. Uh today uh we have quite a big uh topic to uncover. Uh the presentation itself should probably take around 40 to 50 minutes. Uh and we'll begin with discussing deepseek what's uh what's true about it? What's a bit of uh hype? Uh then we'll switch to chat GPT and how it concur concurren this search right now. Uh switching over to Google search trends for this year and uh should we

even optimize the engines? is there sufficient enough to start doing that. Uh then we'll go over the AI chat bots and uh how they are similar to traditional search. Uh how you can measure the impact of AI disruption and of course we'll touch on uh what's uh uh what should you prioritize actually the generative engine optimization or the we all know about. Of course, in the end, our experts will share uh some tips and tricks about AI search optimization and we'll obviously uh wrap it up with a Q&A session. So, I highly encourage you to leave your uh comments uh and uh questions in the chat. We'll be trying to cover them on the spot, but uh we'll definitely get uh to them during the Q&A session. Uh so, yeah, that's basically it. we will uh be sending you all the replay uh the replay of the webinar and

all the links that uh and as well as the presentation. So right now I ask you to uh stay tuned uh sit back and soak up all the information we have prepared for you. That about covers uh my part. So Slana Oena please take it away. Okay. So I'll start today. Finally let's get started. We have a lot to cover and first let's take a bird's view on the open um not open on the AI uh search engines market with open AI being the biggest player which is currently valued at $340 billion which is a huge jump from just $29 billion back in early 2023. This was when Chad GPT was publicly launched. So the I market is still new. It's evolving. It's changing rapidly. And there's room for competition. So basically, a software developer can come up with some

groundbreaking cutting edge technology, get all over the news overnight, get millions of users just weeks after its launch. And to be honest, the technology behind the product doesn't even need to be that cutting edge or groundbreaking, which is proved by the cases of Deepseek and Grock. And now let's take a deeper look into Deep Seek success, why everybody got so obsessed with this tool. So it got 20 million daily active users in just 21st days after its launch. Um it ranked number one in the app store across 157 countries including the US and it disrupt which used to occupy that sweet spot and the major reason behind this is probably the cost of development of deepseek which was just slightly above five and a half million dollars compared to $6 billion

Open AI invested into the chat GPT's infrastructure. So that truly is a huge difference which caught everybody's attention and the first feedback we saw online promised that Deepseek offers impressive capabilities on par with what CH GPT's GPT01 model offered. Everybody wanted to give it a try. They did. Deepseek received its millions of users really really fast. And um because of the affordable development uh DeepSeek was able to provide uh affordable API access which opened up a lot of opportunities for software developers and other businesses that relied on AI models data on large scale. So uh there were still like there was a case there were red flags from the get-go and um one of them was major data leak a cloud security firm spotted it uh

in the early days of deepseek and then of course censorship issues due to deepse Chinese origins. Um our team this ranking team ran a manual study in February. We looked into how deepseek chat GPT and Google AI reviews uh answered 40 queries we selected. uh those were from your money or your life topics and we discovered that uh deepseek actually had the lowest objectivity score among the analyzed tools and also quite expectedly it refused to generate responses to certain uh sensitive politically sensitive topics. Now this was back then in January two months ago but um two months later where we are today. And first let's take a look at the chart at the left uh which shows how various uh technical brands uh achieved uh the milestone of first 100 million users. And at the bottom of this chart, we see

Netflix was 18 years. If you got a bit confused, let me give a disclaimer here. It was first a DVD rental company before it evolved in the Netflix we all love today. Then in the middle we have Facebook was for uh two and a half years and at the top is chat GPT which managed to get its first 100 million users is just under like two months uh which was super impressive and now we're two months after deepseek was launched and the question is is it there yet? And we have the answer it's not. I checked Google Play and uh it says DC currently has 10 million downloads which is nowhere close to 100 million. Then we can go to the app store. Uh app store top 103 apps rating. I first checked it on the 13th of March and back then Deepseek was ranked number 18. Now um

Elena is here with us. Maybe you have any thoughts on where it might be today? Uh, oh, I don't know. Uh, taking into account that like the hype around it has calmed down. So, probably I don't know somewhere around 19th position or lower. Uh, lower actually. It's not even there. It's not anymore in the app store top 100. And by the way, Gro Street is currently ranked number 65, but its position is also dropping day by day. So, um, this is basically all I want to say about Deep Seek, guys. And let me sum it up with a quote from a great article on Grog 3 by Victor Schmidt Bush from my team. Go check it out on our blog. So, the AI space race is ramping up. each one is the best at something until it's not. And hopefully

this answers the question you might have like whether you need to closely follow all the new players in the AI engines niche when they appear and they'll keep appearing and like start optimizes optimizing for those engines. But what about chat GPT? And here we have a study by Spark Toro, a fresh one from just last week, which says uh Google search is still 373 times bigger than Chad GPT search. Um here they did really great job comparing apples to apples. And so in this direct comparison we have 14 billion searches uh which Google serves daily uh versus 37 and a half million prompts from Chad GPT. As probably all of you know like not all the prompts people enter into Chad GPT are search like uh like comparable to what people do in

traditional search. Um actually the majority of prompts they were like uh asking for uh ad aid with uh programming with creative writing stuff like that. And um what Sparkur did is they compared searches with like behavior in TGPT that has similar intent as Google search. Now uh our team this ranking team we also conducted a study back in January this year and we looked into the amount of traffic traditional search engines send to the websites on average and uh AI engines and their referral traffic which they send to the websites and the chart shows that the amount of referral traffic from AI engines keeps growing. It's actually growing rapidly, exponentially I would say for chat GPT at least. Um since August 2024, this is when GPT search was launched. And still in spite of this rapid growth, um the

collective amount of traffic websites get from AI engines and here I mean all AI engines, chat, GPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Binks, Copilot, Claude. So it all accounts for less than 1% of traffic a website gets. So AI engine search in general is still pretty pretty small. Um so this brings us a question uh should we keep focusing entirely at Google? Should we ignore AI engines? And the answer is not really. And here let's look at Google search trends. What's happening in Google? And definitely this is when AI reviews come into the picture. Currently Google AI reviews serve over a billion people worldwide across more than 100 countries. They are not yet officially present in Europe, but they were spotted

already in Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, and then in many other countries as well. and it looks like it won't take long until Google actually launches AI reviews officially in Europe. Um, as of November 2024, um, around 90% of all searches triggered AI reviews. This is data from our last AI reviews research. Throughout 2024, we conducted a series of researches looking into the number of like the share of AI or reviews in the SERs. We analyzed over 100,000 queries for that and you can see from the chart that um the number reached its peak in November 2024 by the end of the year and the numbers were comparable to those of January 2024 when AI overviews were still in beta and we named them HDS or generative experience. Now another important scene to take into account is average CTR. We

all expected that when AI reviews go live, users will get their answers like quite extensive answers to their requests rapidly right in the SERs and they won't truly need to click the blue links beneath reviews and this is truly what's happening and it is proved by a recent study by advanced web rankings. Um so they found out that for queries that contain words like what, when, where, how, um the four top ranking websites that rank for these queries, they received 7.3% less clicks. So their CTR dropped quite significantly. And the last alarming stat I have here is that in 2024, 60% of Google searches ended in zero click. And that's uh a huge increase from just 22% uh 26 I'm sorry% back in 2022. Um so yeah this all is quite

alarming and I feel the pain my colleague Elena feels as I share these stats. Um maybe have some thoughts you want to share immediately. Yeah, it's a need hard time for publishers and uh on top of that stat that you've shared with Lana. Uh we haven't included it in the presentation because I've just found out about it, but Google was called red-handed uh in replacing links to websites to publishers by links to their own search results. So even when users want to click, they can't go to website and they go uh directly to another Google search. So yeah. Oh yeah, this is new information for me and it's mindblowing. Need some time to process it actually. Yeah. Um actually it's through her

shared pain with Elena the traffic that no longer goes to the website. As as I mentioned I'm in charge of the ranking blog and it also suffered traffic loss and actually 16 of our blog pages lost 58 to 16% of traffic mostly to AI reviews and AI engines and yeah those were top of the funnel articles. So now whenever someone is wondering what referend domies are or why keyword stuffing is a bad thing then they no longer land on our websites or other websites. Well not all of them but many of them they just read uh what AI reviews offers or what chat GPT and other chatbot offer and that's it. Um so yeah now um I mentioned will less traffic to AI engines and you might be puzzled as before like five minutes before I mentioned AI engines are actually too small just yet to grab a big slice of a pie of traffic

from the websites but everything is not that straightforward and like our favorite SEO thing is it depends. Now uh let me share with you a couple of reasons why you actually should optimize for AI engines and why it's a good idea right now. And the first one is that demographics matters and the Spectre study I cited earlier uh that says Google still uh gets three like processes 300 uh times more searches. So it doesn't take into account industry specifics, demographics, other subtle nuances. And depending on who your audience is, um they actually may be using AI engines differently. For example, if your audience is from younger generation, they're techsavvy, then they're probably using chat GPT and other AI chatbots way more often than an average user. Then another thing is that those people who do use AI chatbot actively uh

for them chat GPT and the likes are the new blogs um in the past people used to clicks like Google click the blue links and get the information they need but now they get it from the chatbots and another story uh another research from Spark uh found out that actually 12% of all the chat GPT use cases account for professional education. So what people in the past used to do on your website, they now do like some people who who do use chat uh bots uh with those chat bots. And one more fact, a positive one finally um is that if you do get uh some traffic from the chat bots, uh it'll be really really good one. Uh the stats below, they're not based on some massive research. um they're from our personal experience but you can still use them as benchmarks I guess. So in our experienceformational traffic from AI

engines converts 23% better and commercial traffic converts 300% better which is awesome. So if if this topic was bigger like it's it's still pretty small. That's true. And uh research also found out that uh the behavior of these users uh who come to your website from AI engines, AI chatbots, it's really great. It's way better than average. They stay on pages longer. They interact with those pages. They click to other pages, explore your website. Uh so basically they did all the exploration, all the preparatory work uh in the AI engines and then they come to your website truly motivated. So, those are great users. And I know that was a lot of stats and and facts I shared may be a bit overwhelming and hard to process. Uh, and you may have more questions than answers at this point. So, I'll pass it

on to my colleague Elena who will hopefully answer those questions you have and you'll be able to build some action plan. Thank you. And yeah, here we come up with the main question for today. What on earth should we do with our websites? Because to sum up what Sitlama said, from the one part AI brings many opportunities. From another side, AI really hurts. But um the good news is that there is a solution for that. and that SEO isn't going anywhere. It's just getting transformed. But the main point that we need to remember is that lazy or let's say overviews overused uh approaches don't work. What I mean here is writing

an article which has already been writed by other websites for about thousands of times or um relying solely on SEO while having a mediocre quality of content and uh when you hope to get on top just by overoptimizing it. Uh-uh. Not anymore. And 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. Um and u let's take a look to understand our further steps what AI engines and the classic ones have in common and both of them strive to meet

user intent with the maximum precision. And here AI engines uh come even with some advantage because they are not only tuned to understand the natural language better but given that the user provide them more context they can precisely understand uh what searchers want. Also, both search engines, both types of search engines, they are mostly rely on well-known and reputable sources. They just eager to highlight some to find first and then highlight some unique knowledge or newly emerged trends. And of course, as we're talking about tech stuff, uh any search engine needs bots for crawling and it analyzes

and ranks sources uh using algorithms. So we already seen it everywhere, right? Uh we already seen it somewhere. Sorry. Right. Uh and does it mean that from this point we can just proceed with our regular sale routine? Not exactly. Because um while classic search engines they try to give us some guidance at least or hints on what we should do with our websites. And um uh like for AI search engines we don't have any of that. We need just to discover it by experimenting and searching on our own. And uh there is still many

questions on how to measure our performance on AI engines. So I'm proposing you to dive deeper exactly in that topic. So, how can we understand the impact of AI on our niche and on our traffic? And by the way, here you can see a sneak peek into S ranking AI rank tracker which can be helpful for you in this end of the course. But what I'm going to propose you is a bit more comprehensive approach. So what we can do for now is just take the data from AI results tracker support it with uh data from a regular rank tracker let's say a rankings tool or any

other Google search console uh and then we merge it into one document But here is a quick note because um first it's better to have at least one month of data for that uh to have enough of it for comparison and um like for analysis and the second thing is um that in Google search console the data can be anonymized when you apply filters and so on. So just keep that in mind. And here we have an example of how this result table might look like. You can adjust it. Of course, you can have your own approach. Uh and maybe you'll need some additional columns and data filters. Uh like you are free to

optimize it. Um, and uh, I believe you'll soon be able to check the a more detailed guide on it on our blog. Uh, so that is a thing concerning rankings. But what about traffic and Google Analytics? And in J4, Google doesn't provide any default report or measure to track AI traffic for now. But we can create our own custom report. For this, we go to the exploration section and just apply a reject filter. Uh you can see the example of that rejects on the screen but you are free once again to add or remove any source based on your needs. And uh then you'll have a traffic report

like you have for any other uh organic referral whatever sources and you'll be able to work with it. But here is another note comes uh because um like here we can see only uh visits when a user clicked on your link. Uh we still don't know how many times we've been shown or our brand was mentioned on search results. So we are working on that and uh there definitely will be solutions but for now it's just a note for you to keep in mind and now let me yeah we to another step yeah I'll cover this one step two once you have all the data which you can analyze and get at least approx

approximate understanding on how much your exact website was affected, whether you lost some traffic to AI or reviews, how much traffic you already get from LLMs. Now, you can use these data points to choose your area of focus as your resources are probably not limitless. You can do everything at once and you'll have to choose wisely. So, to make the choice, I suggest you ask yourself a simple question. If my site gets cited in AI reviews or by AI chatbots, what's in it for me? What do I expect to get out of it? Um, do I expect to get brand awareness, better visibility? Do I want some clicks and to claim back some traffic I lost to AI um disruption of the industry? Now once you have those answers for yourself, you probably have couple scenarios to follow and let's explore them a bit more. So your first

option would be to focus on traditional search and yes we do have AI reviews here in Google but there are still searches not affected by AI reviews. You can find those queries for example using our competitive research tool. You can create new content for those queries, optimize them like do everything you did before and uh your blue link may get um in the top uh positions you'll get your traffic etc. Um, another thing you can do is cover some specific topics where uh AI reviews and AI chatbots, they do have answers, but those answers offer too generic information, they not quite useful and they do not satisfy user intent. So if you see this and you understand you can do a better job, you have some unique insights, you have what to offer to the

users to satisfy than that intent, then definitely go for it. as users will try AIOS, they will try chat GPT, they won't get what they need and they'll resort to their like basic state of things, Google, and they may find your website and again since we'll work for you kind of the old way and one of my biggest advices is to in any case avoid investing your resources into creating generic topfunnel content because if there are already hundreds if not thousands thousands of articles covering the topic and they're pretty good ones. Yes, they may be not perfect. They may miss like top ranking articles may miss some information, some angles. You might have a little something to add. But then uh AI reviews, AI engines, they can also do just that. They combine information from different sources, different angles, provide user with a short handy summary. And if AI uh engines can do this pretty

well that you don't need to do this on your site because it won't take you anywhere in the long run. Uh now another option another scenario you can follow is prioritizing AI search and here if you decide to do so I advise you to get started with your existing content which you already have. You might have lost some of your traffic to AI engines. So why not optimize this existing content for LLMs? It will take some of your time but not as much as creating something from scratch. And once you optimize your content, it can get cited more often. Probably you won't get too many clicks, but those you will get those um users you will get uh coming to your site, they will be good ones. Uh, another thing to do here is to work on your brand's AI visibility, working both with your own site and resorting to digital pure. And what I mean here is

those queries when a user enters a prompt or keywords and gets a list of recommendations of certain tools or products and you surely want your product to be on that list. So to make that happen, you need to make sure your website has the information LLMs need to feature your product, that you communicate your tools, products value properly, and that also other websites, preferably authoritative ones, do also just that. And again, if you decide to focus for some time on AI optimization, please still avoid creating generic top of the funnel content and optimizing it for LLMs. It's still not a good way to go. And finally, you can try mix and match both approaches. It could be tricky as it'll require a lot of effort and resources on your end. But depending on where you are today, on the amount of

resources you have, you might be able to do just that. So, good luck. Uh, you can do it. And here I pass it on to Lena who will finally get into the nitty-gritty of how you can actually optimize your site for AI engines. For sure. Thank you, Satana. Um, so Google says that for being able to qualify for their AI search results like AI overviews or newly released AI mode, you can just follow their general search essential guidance. But there are for sure some tactics, some strategies that can help you get featured more efficiently in AI search results. So let's take a look at them. First of all, as I said, traditional SEO has gone nowhere. It's

still there. And uh it's not just because AI search engines and classic ones cover similar uh cover similar user needs. It's basically because they are often built on the same infrastructure because Google's AI overviews or AI mode it definitely uses Google's index and uh as we know chat GPT or perplexity uses BIN's um search index. So everything that will help you get promoted in regular search result will definitely help you with AI and the works as well. Then as Satana said content must be your top priority and we need to create to make it in depth. Um prompts that user that

users are sending to a chat bots or generative AI they are usually very specific. So covering multiple specific topics from different angles uh increases your chances of getting sides there and so does higher readability and scannability of your pieces because uh during our own experiments as well we've noticed that content that is that has good readability scores it's h cited more effectively. And don't forget to update content. But of course, not just for the sake of having like a new date on your page, but when it's needed indeed when something has changed related to a topic and uh like new data, stats, your own insights because everything uh of that sign also

of relevance and freshness of the content and search engines love that enormously. Our next point is showcasing expertise both um expertise both for your entire website, your articles, your authors and uh work on your brand credibility as well because u uh websites that link to and get mentions from other reputable sources is the search engines tend to perceive them as trustable and u yeah as Google has been telling us for ages and it is true it is a primary for SEOs and everybody who is running their own websites that we should focus on credibility and double

EAT here we come with the brand awareness. Um so AI engines they tend to mention popular brands not only authoritative but popular brands first in results and more often and as we said that all search engines are built on rollers and they use algorithms to work it on. So we need to ensure the accessibility for uh the AI bots because especially at the first time when AI started emerging many websites closed uh in robots um they closed their websites to AI bots or to anything that is not Google or Bing for example. So if you want to get shown, please recheck that. We

check your configuration, recheck your robots txt. And another important thing to mention here is that unlike Google bots, AI bots, they cannot handle JavaScript for now. So if your website is built on JavaScript magic or uh uses that for rendering your website, make sure to review technology if that's possible or consider some measures so the search engines can see your content and what's important and that they can have access to it. And here we come to even more fascinating part of optimizing for AI and I'm inviting Satlana here. It's actually just a small tip like a fun thing you can try yourself. So um if you want to rank in AI engines, you can actually let AI engines help you do just that. You can ask them how they arrived to a

certain conclusion. Um so just go basically to chat GPT or any search engine ask um them to recommend you tools or products which are relevant to your brand and then add phrase something like explain your reasoning step by step or it could be worded differently but the essence is to ask uh chatbot to explain how it came to a certain conclusion and what they'll do they list some criteria they'll explain their choice and u it may give you some hints on what you and fix on your website with your product um to get featured. Uh it might list your competitors and not mention your product. And in that case, you can once again ask why your competitors are there and your product isn't. And um once again asking it to explain um how it the chatbot came to this conclusion. And there you'll get a list of something. Those might be some actual problems your

product has which you want to fix to get featured. Or those might be some non-existent problems or something that was fixed ages ago. But the problem is that chatbots just don't know that because you didn't communicate it properly through your own website and through other authoritative popular websites available out there. So once again digital PR is your best friend here to make sure the way chat boats the way the internet basically whole internet sees your brand is aligned with how you want uh users to perceive your brand. That's just just a small tip um fun one to play around with. And u yeah it's it's it's a good one. Uh giving the floor back to Elena. Is AI a curse or a blessing for us? Because we cannot make AI and any

generative search engines give us traffic back. But we can find new sources. We can adapt. We can learn how to work with them and master new approaches. And uh so still there it has just evolved. That's it from our side. And uh now I believe we are ready to questions. Uh yeah. Wo there was a lot of a lot of different new things uh for new guy from the side about AI. Yeah, I didn't think it was that deep, but yeah, uh guys, we will be sharing uh the presentation and the recording you afterwards. So, uh yeah, and now it's time for uh your questions. Uh the first questions uh question is from Jordan. Uh he asks, does uh the new uh trend suggest that

commercial intent queries are unaffected by the introduction of AI to search? I can get it if you don't mind Elena. Um, yeah. Yeah, they are affected for sure. Uh, just not maybe to that extent asformational queries as definitely the majority of AI reviews out there are forformational queries moreover for molec uh tail keywords which somehow mirror prompts uh users use in chatbots. You do will see AI reviews for commercial queries as well, but they're not that frequent just yet. But yeah, Google provides product recommendations and um we'll get there eventually. It's just kind of smaller yet. Uh thank you, Slana. Uh next question, next question is from Sarah. Uh she's asking, uh isn't it too too soon to hire someone to rewrite our website for LLM's

SEO? Isn't this uh all still uh new to Atlanta or Lena? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just thinking on that. Uh actually I don't think there are some particular um scenarios that would be uh just for LLMs that could work for these search engines and not for another because LLM and regular search engine they are related heavily. Um but what we should strive to is to improve the quality of our content. Uh it's comprehensiveness and uh it will be yeah indeed a good practice. Uh if you think that you might need another person for that um why not but yeah as I said there's like no

some dedicated tricks just for LLMs you should strive for the general improvement the more comprehensive approach I can add a few words maybe here that yeah like both LLM and Google they all love nice fresh uh factual well structured content especially well structured content with all the bullet points and FAQs and proper age uh structure of the headings things like that. So like doing that might help you get into LLM's replies into AI reviews but also may improve your regular rankings and write AI um search is still kind of small but AI reviews are not that small anymore. So but again as as we discussed in the presentation it all depends on your industry your target audience on the many scenes and you can't do everything at once. So you just need to set your

priorities and follow like stick to those and follow um some strategy. Uh great great okay so let's go to the next question from Amanda. Uh she's asking how can we measure and analyze the effectiveness of our SEO strategies when AIdriven search tools increasingly personalize uh results for users. Um a very quick thoughts from me. Uh maybe Elena will then add uh more things. So that's true especially true I believe for AI chat bots where everything is increasingly personalized and honestly you cannot optimize you w with AI engines it's overall a bit different because we don't have like a list of target keywords a couple dozens of target keywords we have endless promps really long one which can change

so the essence here is more like how you want AI engines to perceive your brand, what they have in their database and then have this good quality well structured content for them to site if you want them to site yourformational content and invest your resources there. um with the overviews I guess yeah um we're still in the somewhat early stage it's still volatile one day AI overviews are there the other day they are not in that very ser and it may differ for different people there is personalization but so is the regular search like we also have personalization in the regular Google search but we still optimize for certain keywords and uh kind of use this non-personalized SERs uh available in the tracking tools as our bometra like is something we we look at and

um use as a benchmark. So I would probably handle it that way. Yeah. Uh I would like to add that um AI dream search tools are indeed personalizing the results heavily and we cannot just preview all the possible options that user could look for. But we can continue tracking our main targets and to observe how the performance on them has changed and maybe you know um somewhat uh do somewhat of the reverse engineering and uh try to see trends there. Um thank thank you for your insights. Uh recent uh another question we got is from Ellie. Uh a recent article mentioned that uh authorative sites get better search results from AI. Uh what

does it mean for smaller companies who don't have relationship with those uh authority sites? Mhm. Um it's a good one and um yeah um search AI search and the regular one they tend to highlight more reputable sites but if we cannot compete in our domain power let's say in our website authoriveness we can compete in the data uniqueness and u uh provide some unique data. So we are found by those longtail requests and uh start getting in front of the eyes of users uh covering uh more precise queries and the competition is not that high. Makes sense. Uh okay a couple of more questions from our viewers. Uh the

question from Mia uh how should link building evolve to remain effective in the age of AI? It's more an SEO scene but again like a short comment for me best uh based on what I saw recently. Um there was this research by gross memo which mentioned that actually when it comes to AI engine there is no direct correlation between u backlinks and dominance and all those traditionally important SEO metrics and getting mentioned more often by LLMs. So basically LLMs don't care that much about backlinks but what they care about is PR links like which authoritative media websites mention your brand. So this is happening already I guess and maybe it'll get even bigger link building transforming into more like digital PR work and making sure you not just get a backling but you get a

valuable mention of of your brand of your content piece of your of a person behind your product. Um yeah PR is is a key right now. Uh we actually got another question from Hernand uh on the similar topic. He asked uh can AI optimization be considered a strategy for backlink generation? Could I eventually surpass the impact of backlinks in SEO in general? That's a good one. I've never thought from that perspective. uh to be honest I don't know whether it will surpass the impact of backlinks but it will be definitely a worst try strategy uh because as we see how Google tries to keep users inside its own products and possibly it's not AI that is that uh scary but the Google's threat to monop

to monopolize the market and the AI search engines will probably be a more fair space for getting uh leads from and get some benefits for your uh domain uh and your business but the question is great yeah I will think on it. I will research on it. Thank you. Yeah, maybe I'm wrong here, but I guess Arin mentioned like citations from LLMs, can they considered be backlinks? And as far as I know, not quite. Like backlinks which Google relies on in its traditional algorithm. So I guess those are still like two different things. Um but maybe it's just how I perceived it. Uh yeah, maybe. Uh yeah we are running out of time so uh last thing I wanted to mention is uh one of our viewers Arthur

made some statements in the chat. Um first of them is uh flat basic information architecture equals uh low SER. Uh do you agree with I guess let's let's read the second part because it uh complements the first one. Um rich topical clustering and interlinking means winning the SER and I personally absolutely agree with that. Yeah, like good internal linking uh covering a topic from different angles. Having content clusters on your website, it's works well for Google and it definitely works well for LLMs as well as they want answers to some super specific user questions based on the super long prompts. And the better you cover the topic from all the possible angles. If you have this whole content clusters around the topic, the greater your chances are getting featured. Uh, great. And yeah, we we also got one

follow-up question for the Ellis question. Um, uh, don't uh, did you did you say the smaller companies might focused on long sale keywords to help compete with the authorative site? Let's not uh say that we should focus entirely on longtail keywords, but uh my main uh point here is that we need to look for areas where we can compete for the traffic and uh where we still can get in front of the eyes of users. Uh and if that's uh not um a strong domain yet then probably we should look for more narrow user requests or more narrow areas in our own experience that we can share and that would be useful to users and that uh people could come for them.

Uh makes sense. And uh uh how often do you uh do LLMs observe uh do observe LLMs are rec crawling uh websites to update their data? I don't have the exact numbers just yet but I do remember there was this research back in January which said uh LMS are still like dozens time less active their crawlers than Google. So they do rec recroll but um not that much and not that uh or just just uh made sure. So uh how often do we observe LLMs are recovering the uh data for the websites? Yeah. Yeah. We haven't analyzed uh that question precisely but uh we can share only the industry observation as Lana said but what we see as an emerging trend now is that people

are even adding uh like we have robust TXT they are adding LLM txt to their websites. uh so even if they visit the websites not that often uh in the future I believe it will emerge and we'll see them more like regular bots at the same level approximately. Um good. I think uh this will be it for our Q&A session. Uh before we uh say our goodbyes, I have a few couple uh of uh ultra slides that I would like to for you to accompany me uh through. Uh first of all, I'd like to invite you uh those who aren't using SE Ranking just yet to our extended trial. Uh here uh if you use the QR code to sign up, you'll uh get an extended access to our uh

platform that will be bigger than a regular trial. Uh so yeah, be sure to check it out. Uh and while doing that, I also recommend you use your uh business email uh to sign up uh because you'll be getting a lot more benefits from the trial this way and it will also be easier for us to provide you with even more value on your company. So basically help us and help yourself. Uh also we we've got a great community uh that you can join using the uh QR code. Uh there you will be able to find uh your peers in the SEO space to talk uh different search algorithms features uh even win uh some raffles from SE ranking and yeah we'll be really happy uh to see you there. Uh if you are uh looking for you're always looking for uh somewhere to study and get new knowledge about SEO um our existing

customers have access to SE ranking academy and we've been working on it for a few years already. So the the courses themselves range from beginner friendly to advanced. So yeah, if you are looking uh to uh get some get some uh courses in, uh this is a great place to uh to start. Uh and finally, if you are uh one of the uh if you are like me, you like listen to podcasts in your free time or during your commute, I highly suggest you follow our uh do follow podcasts. uh during the uh on those sessions we speak with uh with different uh SEO and marketing professionals regarding SEO marketing uh search developments and uh while while speaking around that they also give a lot of insightful tips so be sure to check it out in your free time. Uh this is basically it. Uh thank

you a lot uh for uh joining us today for this uh topic. I hope that the eye situation in general got a bit clearer uh to you and uh you are confident in how to prepare to rebuild or uh adjust your SEO strategy for this year. And uh yeah make sure to follow us uh on our uh social medias wherever you go the most. We are on LinkedIn, Facebook, uh X or Twitter. Uh and also if you want to uh dig into more webinars that we've had in the past, uh make sure to go to our YouTube channel uh because all of the replays are stored there. Uh also uh as uh my colleagues mentioned, we have a lot of researches uh around AI overviews and generally on AI technologies. Uh some of some exciting ones are coming in uh in a few weeks. So you can also check out our blog uh for that. And yeah, I

hope you have a great uh day ahead of you and thanks uh for joining us again. Bye guys. Thanks everyone for being here. [Music]