Since Google released its AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE), there have been many questions about what its effect will be on websites traffic. Considerable research into how this can affect traffic to your site has now been done, and here are some of the findings:
What is Search Generative Experience?
SGE is Google’s new way of using artificial intelligence (AI) within search results. The AI utilises several sources to generate information related to the search conducted by the user. The sources are also listed so that people can learn more by clicking through to them.
Search Engine Land Research
Research was conducted by Search Engine Land, on 23 websites in the technology industry, with traffic mainly coming from informational keywords. The research found that some websites could gain an increase as much as 219%, but others could potentially lose as much as 95% of their traffic due to the introduction of SGE.
Simple questions in search results
SGE tries to answer the question entered by the user right at the top of the search results, so SGE can impact on your rankings if you currently have a featured snippet for a simple question asked by your target audience. However, if SGE uses your website to generate the response, this could still mean people click through to your website.
A mixed bag
To conclude, there are ways to estimate how SGE might affect or improve the traffic to your website, but it looks like we’ll just have to wait and see the true impact of this new Google feature.
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