Aleyda Solis shows how to measure whether Google's AI Overviews hurt your organic traffic. Use Ahrefs to find queries where you appear in the Overview versus where you don't, then compare clicks and impressions across date ranges in SEOtesting.com. A SaaS site lost clicks when included in the Overview, but a retail site saw impressions surge.
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AI overviews inclusion impact in your organic search traffic. We have seen many different studies, analysis, research across different industries, markets, which can certainly serve as a good reference of where things are going. Realistically though, this can differ so much per website, right? Because it's not only the share of traffic that your website brings from the type of queries that are being impacted that at this point have been much more informational queries, but also the search behavior with these queries, if there are many more impressions now or search popularity for these queries, if you are included or not within the AI overviews and the visibility of the inclusion and if there is a link within the inclusion or not. So of course, the impact can differ a lot. So I wanted to share with you a little bit of a process that I follow, tools and functionality that I have found myself to be very, very helpful to do this assessment. What I have found to be critical due to the volatility of the AI overviews is to identify those queries for which AI overviews have been consistently included within the time range that you want to do the assessment and have also the traffic and visibility metrics for these same queries for a period of time in which AI overviews hadn't been included, right? To be able to compare apples to apples, what I tend to do is this. You can use Ahrefs, for example, for this. Go to your domain, organic keywords, look for the market that you want to do the analysis for. You select the AI overviews from the SERP features, and then you can obtain those queries for which the target, the website, ranks and doesn't rank. So for example, here I want to obtain the queries for which the website ranks within the AI Overviews, and I select this filter. And then you select here the period of time. I select in the last month to have a very specific period of time to compare. And in this case, I have only a couple of keywords, so I don't have necessarily enough data to do the analysis with. And hopefully it is like this in your case. Your website hasn't been necessarily impacted that much with the inclusion of AI Overviews. You should export and you can double-check them in the Google Sheet that you obtain, seeing that you only leave this, for example, the 2 keywords here for which AI overviews are being shown right now and consistently in this period of time. And then what I do is a comparison, import those keywords in an SEO test using seotesting.com that integrates with my Google Search Console data. By the way, there is a complete completely spontaneous shout out to these tools. I only do it because it's what I use myself to do this analysis because it highly facilitates it. Of course, you can do this comparison directly using the filtering in the Google Search Console or using similar tools. And I use the group testing of SEO testing to be able to see the before and after. Okay, so in this last month, I know that for this group of queries, AI overviews has been shown in the SERPs and I am being featured in them. Let's take a look at the performance right now and compare it with the performance I had a year ago, for example, that I know that these queries hadn't been included in AI Overviews. And you can also take a double look in case you're not completely sure. These queries were not showing AI Overviews at that point yet in time. And you can create a group test to compare the 2 date ranges. And then you can do the same for those queries for which AI overviews are being included, but your website is not being shown. So let's not only assess the impact of the AI overviews whenever you're included, but let's assess what happens when AI overviews are included, but you are not showcased in them, right? So exact same process, export the keywords, import them in SEO testing and do a group test with a similar previous period of time for which you can confirm AI overviews haven't been shown. This analysis that I have done for 2 different types of websites. So for example, for a SaaS website, we can see here what happens when AI Overviews is displayed with the site included in them and also ranking SERPs, of course, in the top positions. So we can see how this is with AI Overviews, this is without AI Overviews. And even if the website is included and ranked, the clicks impact has been negative for them. What I really like about doing it like this is that we can also take a look at the other metrics rather easily, right? So impressions per day. So I know that I am comparing the same queries and I can see that there has been a negative -2.77% change in impressions per day. However, we can see that the negative impact in clicks is definitely much higher. So there's certainly much more here for the negative impact in clicks than just that slight negative shift in impressions. Then we should do the same with AI overview displayed with site not included in them, but still ranked in SERPs. What is the impact that AI overviews has here? And in this case, we can see that there is a slight worse negative impact in clicks, -75.64% here. We can see the drop here in clicks despite a slight improvement in this case in the impressions for these queries. I am comparing here year over year, and there has been a slight improvement in impressions, as we can see. And despite that, yes, there has been slightly worse drop in clicks. On the other hand, I have done this analysis with a different type of website completely. So a retail site in this case. And in this case, we can see that with the AI overview displayed with the site included in them, there was a drop of -47%. And when the AI overview is displayed with the site not included and ranked in SERPs, the drop has been -34%. So it's not even as bad as when the site is displayed. And of course, if you don't take into account all the metrics, you will say, hmm, so my conclusion is that it is worse to be displayed in AI overviews than not. But no, not at all. Wait, wait for a minute here. We can see that in this case impressions have also dropped year over year, -23%. But in this other case, there has been a very big increase in impressions of 93.67%. So of course, if the impressions increase so much, very likely the drop in clicks here when the AI overviews are included on the site is not shown in there will be much, much worse, right? So Again, it's important, I believe, to do the comparison, the assessment of the AI overviews much more segmented. What happens when my website is included? What happened when it is not? What has been the change in the search behavior for these queries? And what is the drop that we can actually attribute to the AI overviews inclusion? And as we can see, it can be very, very different for different reasons based on the specific conditions and context of each website. So it's very, very important to go and take a look and validate yourself following a process that takes all of this into account. Ideally in the future, this is not necessary because we get an AI overviews filter in the Google Search Console. Crossing fingers and another request. I know that there have been many in our industry lately to the Google team for this. It will be very, very important to have this. type of filtering directly in the Google Search Console to avoid all of this additional hassle, to have a much better view, better understand what is going on, and to be able to communicate it with clients, with decision makers, and allocate resources and efforts accordingly. 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