For most of the last two decades, SEO mostly meant one thing, where you ranked on Google (and occasionally Bing). The customer journey was familiar. Someone searched, scanned a list of links, clicked and explored. Now the journey is increasingly 'ask, get an answer, take action.' And the platforms shaping that journey include ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google itself, which is inserting AI summaries, what Google calls AI Overviews, into search results.
Google seems to be rolling out colorful sections in the knowledge panels. Sometimes you will see gray, sometimes blue, sometimes orange and sometimes green and maybe more. But those table elements on the right are new. We saw this on mobile over a decade ago, so this does seem new, especially on desktop.
Worries over whether the changing dynamics of search marketing will affect major brands have finally reached the boardroom. In several earnings calls this month, executives at high-profile advertisers like Airbnb and Expedia fielded questions from analysts over the impact of generative AI chatbots or Google's AI Overviews feature on their businesses. It's a sign that alarm bells are ringing. "It's going to be really tricky for brands to play in this new space," said Daniel Moreno, a senior SEO and GEO consultant at Dept U.K.
Google's selection of an image preview is completely automated and takes into account a number of different sources to select which image on a given page is shown on Google (for example, a text result image or the preview image in Discover). You can influence which image gets selected by providing your preferred image through one of the following metadata sources: Specify the schema.org primaryImageOfPage property with a URL or ImageObject, or specify an image URL or ImageObject property and attach it to the main entity, or specify the og:image meta tag.
Several weeks after Google rolled out support for Preferred Sources globally, Google added official help documentation for site owners to use to help them understand what it is all about and how to encourage their readers to subscribe to your site as a preferred source. In December, Google rolled out Preferred sources globally after rolling it out in the US and India in August and beta testing it in June. Now the new help documentation is available here if you need it.
"The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is an open standard designed for the future of commerce, empowering you to turn AI interactions into instant sales. Adopt UCP to enable agentic actions on Google AI Mode and Gemini, starting with direct buying," as Google defines it. It basically gives merchants a way to allow their products to be sold directly through AI experiences like Gemini, AI Mode and other AI engines.
When AI tools started taking off, Google faced a serious problem: the risk of its search results being flooded with AI-generated spam. If left unchecked, the world's most-used search engine would lose trust - and with it, revenue. Search drives almost 57% of Alphabet's income, totaling over $198bn annually. And that revenue was at risk. AI spam isn't like old-school SEO spam. It's better written, harder to detect, and convincing enough to fool algorithms.
What happens when the AI companies (inevitably) encounter spam and attempts at SEO/GEO manipulation in the markdown files targeted to bots? What happens when the .md files no longer provide an equivalent experience to what users are seeing? What happens if they continue crawling those pages but actually toss them out before using the content to form a response? ...And we keep conflating "bot crawling activity" with "the bots are using/liking my markdown content?" How will we know if they're actually using the .md files or not?
AI visibility means your content is included, cited, and recommended in AI-generated answers. If you think ranking at the top of the SERPs is still the way to go, think bigger. AI has become a primary factor in online search strategy. If AI systems can't read your brand, you could become invisible. Below, I share how AI visibility differs from SEO and five strategies to make your brand AI-visible.
At its core, an SEO audit is a step-by-step review of your website's technical health, content quality, and search visibility. An SEO audit identifies technical, on-page, content, and link issues on a website. It helps SEO teams identify, prioritize, and fix the issues that block traffic, rankings, and, importantly, conversions. Businesses and SEO teams should create audits to identify opportunities that advance business goals and growth.
