Turn AI snippets into sales: Track Google’s AI traffic in GA4 & prove ROI

[Music] One of the things too, like I'm really thrilled that that SE ranking asked me to be a part of this today. We're a proud SE Ranking customer um and we love the initiatives that they support including women in tech SEO and I'm really excited to be part of this client-led workshop today. So, one of the things that um has been the emphasis really for my entire career is proving your value, showing what you do. And SEOs, let's be honest, we're not necessarily the best at proving our value. And especially now with the world of AI search and AI overviews taking over, we are not getting great uh at uh at doing this. Oh, I just saw in the chat too, somebody from University of Victoria is here. So, there are some locals on the chat, which is great. Um, so what I'm going to be talking to you today about is tracking AI searches in G4 and then what you can do with that

data um in combining what with what you get in SE ranking and then what you can do with that data in G4 and then how you can take that data and be like hey look at this great work we're doing you should probably give us some more money because honestly at the end of the day that's what I'm here for. Um and there was a question in the chat about whether or not you can ask questions. Absolutely. I have left time at the end for questions, not just related to this. If you have some feelings generally about J4 or tracking questions, happy to answer about any of those things. All right, let's get into it. So, most of us in J4 right now, if you load up a traffic acquisition report, this is what you see. Everything from Google gets lumped into organic search. But think about this. Someone who clicks through from an AI overview has already been pre-qualified for you by Google's AI. They've seen your content highlighted as the answer to their specific question, which is really different intent than someone who just clicked on your regular blue links, blue links search listing. So without proper tracking, you're really flying blind on one of the

fastest growing search features in search right now. And we can't walk into a meeting and say, "Trust me, snippet optimization is totally worth it." without data to back that up. So today I'm going to show you exactly how to track this traffic, measure its performance, and how to build that business case for snippet optimization that gets you resources to make that happen on a regular ongoing scale. So the first thing we need to do to make this happen is to separate snippet traffic from our regular organic search. The method I recommend is one that I've put together from the blog post that I'll link to at the end, but I'm going to walk you through the essence of it as opposed to the entire blog post because we have other stuff to talk about. This is an example of what you would get for an AI overview. And you can see that our post and nicely our YouTube video is coming up in the sidebar. So, if you click on that link in the sidebar to come to our website, you'll end up with a URL that looks like this. You don't always get this. And to be clear, you can only track this traffic if you get a URL that has this highlighting. These

highlighting URLs do not show up 100% of the time. They show up, I would say, probably at least 60 70% of the time, but not 100% of the time. The other thing too to consider is this isn't just for AI overview traffic. People who click through from people also ask or the old school featured snippet may also see this text highlighting. So it is not exclusive to AI overviews, but the techniques that you use to optimize for AI overviews are basically the same as what you would do for people also ask or for featured snippet. So you know what traffic is traffic and let's make sure that we're capturing as much of it as you can. So my post here and again I have a link to it at the end walks you through exactly how to do this. It takes 10 minutes. I recorded myself doing it from start to finish. I give you all the JavaScript code. You do need Google Tag Manager on your website to detect this. So, if you haven't used Google Tag Manager before, now is a great time to get into that. I won't go through the full GTM setup right now because it is

detailed in that blog post. But the key is detecting that information and then adding grabbing onto that information and then grabbing it and saving it as custom parameters as in dimensions in G4. And then what you create from this is an event. I call mine snippet text for example. You can call it whatever you want that records whenever someone lands on your site from those AI overviews, a people also ask or featured snippet. And then this is an exploration that you can create in G4. It's just a simple free form exploration. And the only things I'm looking at here are the landing page, the start of my snippet text, and the end of my snippet text. And then I'm also looking at how many sessions I had that landed on these specific pages. Um, and so this is one of the things where you're using Google Tag Manager to ingest this data, but then you're saving it in G4 and then you're taking a look at this data and making decisions on it based G4 because remember nothing is stored in GTM itself. You have to send it off to somewhere useful. And so that's where G4 comes in. And so what's

really interesting about this is you can see what text was highlighted, which is really useful. You can see how many people got to your website via these snippets, which is also really useful, but is it's not necessarily useful yet. It's just interesting. Interesting doesn't get us budget. And I want to be really clear on that. And this is one of the things that I think SEOs make mistakes when they're asking for money is they might focus on the things that are, oh, look, this is neat, or here's this interesting new search feature, but they're not necessarily connecting that to value. At the end of the day, interesting doesn't get us budget. useful gets us budget. So let's talk about making it useful. Here's a really simple audience in J4. So this is the other power of J4 is you can create a so you can create an audience in J4 of people who came to your website via AI overviews pa's featured snippets. And so this is just anyone who ever had this particular event happen and had one of those text highlights. So we're saying that snippet text was never not set.

Essentially, it's a double negative. That's how you create the audience. And then you can see how these people engage with your website over time. Now, one of the things to note about creating audiences in J4 is that they do not backfill. So, you have to create this right away as soon as you add this event to J4 and let it start building. So, you can have some audience information in there. And usually depending upon how much volume of traffic you have after a couple weeks or a month, you'll have enough interesting data that you can then compare it against what you're getting from a regular organic search. So now in this screenshot, I've created a comparison of AIO visitors based on that audience. So if you're in that audience, you're showing up as that comparison. And I'm comparing it against all our organic search visitors. And this is real data from my Analytics Playbook website. This is not a madeup screenshot. This is real data from me. Um, and we're running this for our clients as well, but of course I don't like showing client data, so you get my data because I can show that to you. And so you can see it's obviously a much smaller percentage of our overall

traffic. Um, but you can see right here on the screen that we're looking at, you know, is even though it's only 4% of our sessions, they have an average longer session duration, 35 minutes versus 31 minutes, they have a higher key event rate. And this is the part that's really interesting for me. AI over visitors have on average a session key event rate of 5.9% versus all organic search people which is 4.2%. It's still better than the average in general. It's a little bit higher than the overall average key event rate on our site but it is significantly higher and that to me says wow this is really fantastic traffic and we have enough sessions in there. I'm not making this decision based on 10 people. There's a 230 in there. That's enough people for me to say, "Yep, this looks like it is converting better than average everyday organic traffic." So, this is the part that I'm really excited about. So, because it is already above, you could just take this insight and go to your boss and be like, "Hey, look, these visitors are converting at a

much higher rate. Let's do something with this." Now, we're talking, right? But one thing we want to talk about as well is when you give that narrative to your boss or your client when you're asking for budget intuitively, you also want to explain to them that Google's AI selected your content as the best answer to someone's question. So these visitors are probably more qualified. They're probably more interested in what you have to say. They aren't just tire kickers, to use a used car sales metaphor. They're actually ready. They're in the driver's seat. They want you to take them around the lot and show what the car can do. So something else you can do as well to prove the value of these visitors in G4 is create something called a cohort analysis exploration. This is in the exploration section of G4. If you haven't dabbled in there, all you have to do is go into the exploration section, scroll across the top until you find the cohort exploration, click on that, and then you get this chart. Very little work to be done here. What I'm showing is the percentage of visitors who came back

again on following weeks based on when they first got to the website. And again, I have a comparison of AIO visitors, that audience versus all organic traffic. This took me literally 2 minutes to set up. I understand that teaching G4 is quite literally my job. So, obviously, I'm pretty quick at this, but even if you've never created a cohort exploration before, they are extremely quick and very valuable. So right here, this chart tells me that AIO traffic is valuable in really a couple of different ways. They're more likely to convert, which we already established, and they're more likely to return later if they visited the site via an AI overview as opposed to just regular organic search. And I can tell this by looking at, say, for example, the week 1 results. So week zero is 100% because that's the when they first got to the website. And then week one for AIO visitors, 18% of those people came back to the site again compared to just 4% from organic search. Week two, 9% for AIO versus 1% for organic search. Week three, 1.85. Week 4, 1.85 versus

basically nothing by the end of week four. So those visitors are far more likely to come back again. And that's how you can prove that is via cohort exploration. And if you've never played with cohort explorations, you can do this for any grouping of users. doesn't have to be just AI overviews. It could be paid versus not paid. There's lots of interesting things that you can do with cohort explorations. So now I can pull together this data and I can start building my ROI case. I'm comparing our snippet track performance against our regular organic search for these key metrics. And again to be clear, this is real data from our website. So one thing I want you to remember though when I'm looking at this J4 data is not 100% accurate. No analytics tool is going to give you 100% accuracy at any time because there are all kinds of factors that could influence these comparisons. People have ad blockers. People say no to being tracked. There's all kinds of stuff that stops your analytics from being 100%. But we're not looking for accounting level insights and precision. We're

looking for directional insights. And directionally, what this data tells me is that snippet visitors are consistently outperforming regular organic visitors across every metric that matters for our business. They're more engaged. They stay longer. They convert better and they're more likely to come back. Even if these numbers are off a little bit, the pattern is still very clear. Snippet optimization brings higher quality traffic to our website. Once you set up this technique, I encourage you building this chart for yourself. For every client we've implemented this for, we see that snippet visitors are higher quality visitors than regular organic visitors. But if that isn't true for you, I'd be super curious to see your data as well. Um, and I've implemented this across many different niches. So, now that we have our numbers, it's time for some math. But it's it's easy math. Don't worry if you hate math. I'm not good at math either, which is ironic considering I work in analytics. But we're going to get through the math of this together. So, what I want to know is what is the business impact of these better AIO visitors. So, we're going to put some real numbers on this. Here's what I know. Our snippet traffic converts at

5.9% compared to 4.2 for regular organic. If I have 847 snippet visitors in a month, that's about 14 additional conversions that we can attribute to snippet optimization. So, if your average lead value is $500, adjust that for your business. Of course, that's $7,000 in additional monthly value or $84,000 annually that came from the better conversion rate of snippet visitors. That sounds pretty good, right? Now, let's do an ROI impact analysis. So, let's say you spend 3 hours optimizing each piece of content for your snippets. You do 20 pieces a year. Your time is $250 an hour, for example. This is an agency math. You know, obviously adjust it for your own circumstance. Make sure to get your SE ranking license paid for as well, so you can monitor those snippets and how well it's going. And so, what I'm looking at here is about $16,200 in annual investment. If you just told your boss or client, hey, I need $16,000

to do this thing, they're probably going to say no. But you can prove that the ROI of this is over 400%. So again, this calculation isn't necessarily perfect. Your costs could be higher. Your conversion values might be different. But even if I'm off by 50%, we're still looking at a great ROI. It's better than the ROI on paid, for example. Um actually and if the you could move my head right down to the bottom right um just on the layout because my ROI There we go. Okay. So now you can see the ROI is was being hidden but then you can see optimization cost of this being at 418%. And of course you will get the slides afterwards as well. So fear not. And I'll go back to the other one. So here's the annual value of $84,000. Okay. You can show my head again. Thank you. All right. So now let's now that we've got this math and we're like, "Yeah, this is totally valuable. Let's go into that step-by-step process to connect all this J4 data to your actual content strategy using, of course, SE ranking." So here's the four-step process. I'm going to walk you through

each step. First thing we're going to do is export GSC data. Then we're going to look into Claude or Chat GPT or whatever AI tool you like using. Then we're going to work in SE ranking for competitive opportunity analysis. And then we're going to create a priority matrix to determine what we should work on first. So the first thing you're going to do is grab that list of snippet generating landing pages from that free form exploration I showed you at the beginning and just toss the URL into Google Search Console and keep it to say the top 10 snippet generating URLs to start. Export that full keyword list. You're going to end up with about a thousandish, sometimes more, sometimes less keywords as a result. Not all these keywords are going to be gems. when you export the stuff, you get, you know, you rank for all sorts of weird stuff. It's the internet that shows up for weird things. Not all of those thousand keywords are going to be great. So then what I do is I ask AI to help me out. Um, and so what I do is I'll toss in the keywords. I use Claude. Any AI will be able to do this. Any LLM will be able to

do this. So, what I'm asking it to do instead is to focus on just the keywords that are most likely to return a snippet or in general the keywords that are actually quite relevant for this particular post. So, you can revise this prompt as you want. In this case, I was just saying just just give me stuff that's relevant to the page. I got about I think 200 is this. I'll show it on the next slide. You can also be really specific and say only include results that are more likely to return an AI overview result, which will narrow down the list even more. So what you put in the prompt totally up to you. Um but this is how I happen to do it on the regular basis. So here's my response in Claude. It's very proud of itself for connecting it down to 235 keywords. Um of course when I reran the prompt and said just things that are likely to snippets, I think it got down to 70s something keywords. Um but in this case I just wanted to see everything that's on topic, whether or not it's going to trigger an AI overview. Then you take that keyword list and you add it as a list in SE ranking. Of course, you might need to add these keywords into the

database. So, double check on that if that happens. Um, I name the list the post URL. So, when I create that keyword list, I actually put in the full URL of the post so that I know exactly which post these particular keywords are drawn from. And even though I'm in Canada, I use the USA for the database because that is where most of our visitors and our business comes from. And of course, depending upon where you're optimizing for, make sure to pick the right country and search engine uh when you add in those keywords. You can also tag these as well to be for specific pages. So then you can take this in SE ranking and then you can filter the results that you get by snippet generating search features. So for these keywords, which ones are already generating snippet features? And so I actually have this as a filter preset in AI in SC ranking. So I can just say show me everything that is either AIO or PAA or featured snippet right away. And then I can save that to my keyword list or I can filter this down and add tags to those particular

keywords as well. So I know which ones are going to be performing the best. So now I can take these and I can break out my list into three different buckets. And this is where SE ranking I find becomes incredibly valuable. Not just the ability to tag different keywords, but because in the data itself, I can see which keywords are already triggering snippets. I can see where I'm ranking for these particular keywords. And most importantly, I can see where my competitors have weak content that I could potentially beat. So, for example, when I'm thinking about my highest priority pieces for keywords, I'm thinking about the ones that have high volume and weak competitor snippets. And optionally, if you're already there, maybe you're showing up in like the 5 to 10 spot, for example, great. That's a that's my number one opportunity is to just make that extra push to get me showing up in those AI overviews. Medium priority would be medium volume. You have an okay content fit and the competition is beatable. And low priority, don't worry about these. Low volume, good competition, and

content gaps. Or on the other hand, if there's extremely high volume, but there's extremely high competition, leave that for later. Especially when you're just starting with this process and you just got this budget sort of on a provisional basis, like, okay, I'll give you some money and try it out and see what you get. You really want to pick the winners to start with because that is where you can get those quick wins and you can prove that value immediately, which means that you get more budget to keep implementing this process. So even though a high volume keyword might look really sexy, maybe you pick that slightly less high volume keyword because the competition is much more beatable in that particular space. So for example, in this case, I filtered for and I often find for my keywords because they are a little bit niche. Um it'll say that I only have you know 90 volume for example for that term. If I look in Google search console it is a bit more sometimes but again your mileage will vary. Your own keyword list is going to vary, but I can scan through this list and I can decide from here what makes the most sense from an optimization perspective. My page is already coming up for these search terms

because this list is pulled directly from my impressions in Google search console. These already have snippets and in this case I'm looking at lower competition. So for example, one of the keywords that came up for me that I looked at immediately was like, yeah, this is great is how to track AI overviews or people also ask tracking. Those are really interesting opportunities to start with. In that case, there's some volume. There's some difficulty. There's a little bit of competition. It's already kind of, if I had to pay for that term, I'd be paying six bucks a click, which no thank you. I work in SEO. I don't like paying for traffic, but it is, you know, we pay with our time as opposed to with our with our credit cards. And so, in this case, that's a snippet that I'm like, yeah, I bet you I could probably own that snippet. So remember as well the snippet optimization when it comes to making that content is not just about creating better content. It's about strategic competitive analysis. You want to go after those snippets you can actually win. Don't waste time on keywords where Wikipedia has that featured snippet locked up or in my case I often compete against Google's own

help articles. And I'll show you a screenshot of that later on. If Google has that locked up I'm going to move on to something else. I'll work on that. And if you haven't done a lot of work before in terms of optimizing your content for AI search in particular and you're feeling a little stuck, Elita Solless, who was SEO extraordinaire, if you do not follow her, you should. Her SEO FOMO mailing list is fantastic. She also has an excellent checklist and I'll cover some of these items I personally found the most useful, but definitely check out this post as well. It is fantastic. She published it in July. It's so good. Definitely check it out. She also has a spreadsheet that you can grab a copy of too and oh, leave that up for a second so you can see the URL without my head in the way. Thank you. All right, so some of the first questions that I always ask myself and you know sometimes you write your content, you're like, uh, this content is so good. How could I possibly change anything? And then you come back to it a month later and you're like, what was I thinking? This is crap. Well, not say crap, but you know, over time you learn. Uh so the first thing that I always

start with is do you have a clear hierarchal heading structure? Do you use H1's, H2s, H3s? And you might have, for example, if you don't load the content on your site yourself, you might have written a perfectly beautiful heading structure, but then when say the developer loaded it up, they're like, I don't like how this looks. I'm going to make this an H6 cuz it looks pretty. And so you end up with weird hierarch structures as a result. So just double check that. Make sure that there's well-defined sections that answer specific questions. This is something that I really work hard on is making sure that I have answers to questions in their own paragraphs. Do you put key information early in the document? You know, a newspaper term is don't bury the lead. And you definitely don't want to do that when it comes to AI overviews. Do you use question and answer formats within your content? This is something that I've been doing for frankly years because it's also a really approachable way for the content because people are like, "Oh, I do have that question. Great. this particular content answers that question. Do you include what, how, why, when structure in your content? And

finally, is there a date? I know that there was a big trend a while ago to just remove dates entirely from content so that people wouldn't think the content is out of date. Guess what? Dates are back. And so, make sure that there's a date on your content. And one of the things that we have set up for ourselves and for our clients is a regular content review process. not to just go in and update the date because we updated the date, but actually to check the content, make sure it's still relevant, especially for my stuff where I'm talking about G4 all the time, which changes approximately every 10 minutes there's a new feature being released in there. Um, I was saying before we got started today that what's nice about it is that at least I can rely on the Europeans to tell me what's changed and then I can wake up in the morning and find out what's new in G4, but it means I have to review my content a lot. You can also see what an LLM tells you. just toss your question in there and you hope to rank for LLM and see what it does. I was speaking to the Alberta Magazine Publishers Association, the number one site on this list, Avenue Calgary as a member and I was surprised that Claude did not fetch their post, but instead it went with a post way further down the

list for their fetch. And so I just asked it and it told me exactly what the issue was. It didn't see the actual restaurants in the list because like many of these lists of top restaurants, they've been around for a while. They lead with that methodology. But the AI does not care about the methodology. they just want the list of restaurants. So, as a result, just restructuring the content would really make a big difference for this particular magazine. And remember too that if you can't beat the result, just get mentioned on the result. There's also excellent opportunities for link building or content distribution hiding these lists. For example, we all know that Reddit comes up a lot in featured snippets. So, work on your Reddit strategy. And then when it comes to content distribution, here's an example. So, I was working on a project and I couldn't remember the um annotation limits in G4 in terms of how long they were. So, I was like, I'm just going to Google it, even though I know I wrote a post on it, but I can't remember off the top of my head. And all the citations that came up were me except for the actual Google resource. None of these are my actual website. I don't care. I don't care how many people learn about me uh or follow me. Like, I don't

care how people get to learn about me or follow me. I don't care that my content reposted to LinkedIn does better than exactly the same content on my website. As long as someone finds it and ends up engaging with me, that is all I care about. So technically, this is a loop, but this is your ongoing process to optimize for snippets. SE ranking gives you the opportunities. Content team optimized recipients. Cohort analysis shows you that long-term value. ROI calculation justifies further investment. And then you repeat with bigger budget, hopefully raises, continued happy clients, etc., etc., etc. So, my monthly checklist when I'm looking at this is this is how you turn this analysis into ongoing business value. Creating this monthly ongoing review process that connects your J4 performance data with your SE ranking keyword intelligence. So, every month I'm looking at these four things. How much snippet traffic? What snippets were won or lost? Which content is converting best? And then I determine next month's optimization targets. you're really creating this feedback loop where your

performance data informs your content strategy and so on. And I have a list of pitfalls you really want to avoid that I want to go over quickly before we wrap up. From analysis, don't expect immediate results from brand new content. It really can take weeks for Google start featuring your content in snippets consistently. Sometimes it's quick and that may be that Google was just looking for the right response to make that happen. And again, make sure to focus on directional trends, not absolute precision. If your snippet traffic converts 50% better than regular organic, that's an actual insight, even if the exact numbers aren't perfect. And strategically, the biggest error I see is, for example, if you can't win that snippet, let it go. So, if WebMD has a featured snippet for a health topic, you're not necessarily going to beat them unless you're someone that's as big as WebMD. Use SE ranking to find those winnable opportunities first. So, I have a four-week implementation plan to get this whole system up and running. Week one, this is, you know, it's Tuesday, you could do this this week. Get that tracking foundation right. Don't skip the

validation step. Spend a few days making sure data is flowing correctly before you build your analysis on top of it. So then by the end of this week, you've got this data flowing into G4. Week two is when you set up that advanced analysis tool, you create that comparison, the cohort exploration. You can start to evaluate how snippet tracking is doing compared to regular organic compare the differences. Week three, you connect your J4 insights to content strategy through search console and SE ranking integrations. And then week four is where you calculate that real ROI and start building those systematic processes around SIP optimiz optimization. The whole setup takes about 6 to 8 hours of focused work, but once it's running, your monthly analysis will really only take about an hour. Okay? And you'll need to hide my head again on this one. So, here are the links I talked about. So, this is my detailed setup guide and how to track these snippets. Um, the second link explains why we focus on directional data rather than absolute precision. It's a philosophy that will change how you think about analytics reporting. And of course, you're going to need SE ranking for all these pieces. But hopefully, you're already SE ranking

member. And if you aren't, go sign up, thank me later. And then, of course, feel free to reach out if you run into any implementation issues. I also love hearing about how people adapt this framework for their specific business. So, tell me about your wins. I love hearing about those. And now we have some questions. Um, yeah. So, who wants to go first? >> Amazing. No, first of all, DA, thank you so much. That was very educational. I I don't use AI um GA4 um as much working in B2B. Um but I was just whilst she was talking, I was thinking I know you can do that. >> So, that's really really helpful. So, thank you. We do have a few um questions um within the chat. Um so one of the questions um that we received was that how do you track or how do you evaluate um following KPIs? Uh oh what are the KPIs? Oh there we go. So key percent of keywords triggering AIO's.

Let's see two percented keywords. Okay. So how do I evaluate those? Percent of keywords triggering AIO's. That's something for sure that you would evaluate using SE ranking for sure because that's, you know, one of the metrics you can get out of there. Um, and then keywords where your domain is actually cited. Again, this is another SE ranking built-in report um to take a look at. And then let's see, I don't know if she posted three or four or just those two, but yeah, I would say SE ranking is absolutely the place to uh to set those up. >> Amazing. Thank you so much. Um, and we do have another question from Thomas Jumstone. Uh, asks, "Do you need GCM or is it a general tag manager?" Um, he currently uses PQI Pro. >> Yeah, you can definitely use the um I think in the Temo tag manager, any tag manager at all. You could even build it directly into the website. The the JavaScript that's in that post can it's just JavaScript. You can apply it anywhere. Um, my audience mostly talks about GTM, so that's why I have that on there. But that JavaScript works literally anywhere. So, same sort of

principles apply. Use that JavaScript. It triggers when the presence of that that highlighting text is in the URL and then you'll save the values in your individual analytics tool. >> Amazing. Thank you for that. Um, continuing studies at UIC says, can you define key events? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I would Oh, can I define what a key event is? Yeah. So, key events in G4. Um, it's the silliest term. Google decided to come up with this. Uh, key events are conversions. So, it's just that's just what it is. And so, if you don't use G4 a lot, they're just conversions. They used to be called goals universal analytics. Google keeps changing the name. I think key events is the silliest one so far, but that that's what it is. And just call key events conversions, whatever you want to call it. I usually use what the client's language is. No client calls them key events. It's just that's what the screenshot says because that's what Google calls them. >> Yeah, Google has a very fun naming conventions for very simple things. >> Fun is a word for it for sure. Yeah. Yeah.

>> Thank you so much. Um Jacob asks, "Hi Dana, quick one. When you're trying to catch traffics from AI overviews and other chat tools in G4, which channel or grouping rules or rejects actually hold up given how referers get rewritten?" >> Yeah. So refer the actual referral URL doesn't necessarily get rewritten at all. Um if you are rewriting referers then I think your website is a different issue entirely but the core refer doesn't actually ever get rewritten. So one of the things you can look at is what that refer is. I have another post on my website on creating a channel in um G4 for and really you could use this reax anywhere Looker studio pickwork pro etc. um on creating a channel specifically for people coming to your website from AI tools. So what you might see in your source medium data could be different depending upon how you've set up your channel rules in G4, whatever tool you're using, but the original refer is usually there and intact. If you're

seeing traffic come in and there's no referral at all, that means that there was no there was no referral provided. And if you ever want to check this, it's actually in any browser at all. If you go into say the console in Google in um in Google Chrome, you just type in document.refer in the console and it will tell you what the referer was for that particular page. So that's just a basic web internet thing. But some websites are quite rude and do not provide referers. So for example on Slack, if you're using Slack, even in a web browser and you click on a link, Slack does not provide the refer. So you see that it came from Slack. And that's an example of of where the referers get stripped and there's nothing you can do about that. >> Amazing. Um, we have we're in for one more question. Um, continuous does at youth vig said, "How do you how are you balancing the work optimizing AI with traditional organic search?" >> Yeah, that's a great question. That really does depend on what you do. So, because UIC is the University of Victoria here where I live uh in British Columbia and um I do work with a bunch

of higher education institutions. One of the things that I'm finding and if there's other people from higher education here too. I find that people in higher education are really almost seeing the leading edge of where where AI search is going. I see significantly higher percentages of traffic coming to higher education websites from AI tools particularly perplexity which means that the the youth the kids these days are using those AI tools to find stuff on the websites and then going to the websites to get the full information. But they are definitely using they're using perplexity as a search tool to then go to the website. So one of the things to think about is like looking at the people coming to the website from those different tools and then that almost gives you an audience of people who are are they prospective students are they current students and then that can tell you where the gaps may exist in terms of people might be using Google and not finding the stuff or maybe traditional search is not really where you need to be thinking about and instead maybe you need to be providing a chatbot like experience for people to find stuff on your website particularly for people who are on your website and

this is really what I'm seeing a lot of in higher education I was working with a very large university in the United States and they had I think it was almost 11% of their traffic from AI tools and it wasn't just prospective students too when they use different tools like profound for example to determine what people might be searching for. It's for stuff like you know what are the top law schools in the US for example. So it does there's a number of different uses of this and and making sure your site comes up well is really paramount not just on Google search but but AI tools as well. >> No perfect. No, thank you so much. Honestly, that for answering those questions, where can people connect with you? >> Yeah, so um on my previous slides, so I would say that uh link link my link tree is probably the best place to go. LinkedIn is what I use the most. I'm there every day. I actually have another webinar after this. I do a monthly webinar uh on LinkedIn as well. And then my website is kpplaybook.com. I know it says analexplaybook. We're actually rebranding. So we'll be changing the URL in later this month. That's another great SEO challenge is a is a reader is

a migration will be at analyplaybook.com. But yeah, I would say following me on LinkedIn is the best way to keep in touch with me.