The answer to why website traffic has dropped?
Ready for it? AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimisation, and GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimisation. The effects of these have been rolling out for a number of weeks now, under cover of darkness and our populaces ignorance. But every good digital marketing company knows about it! In fact, I have no doubt they have been fielding concerns from their very panicked clients who have all seen major drops in traffic on their websites. All of them! While there are seasonal drops for certain industries, never ever before have experts seen an ‘across the board’ drop like the one being experienced today.
When I say we are living in a rapidly evolving landscape of digital disruption, future search and artificial intelligence are one of the reasons. Few (excluding me of course) saw this coming, and even fewer understand what’s really going on!
So, what has actually happened with website traffic?
In short, Search Engine Optimisation like your dad (or some other older person who did marketing back in the day) is done and dusted, finished, klaar, qedile! You can SEO all day and all night, but if you don’t evolve and start mastering AEO and GEO right away, you’re basically baking a cake without an oven, flour, eggs, sugar or electricity. Its going to be such a flop!
The next natural question is: does your web marketing team know how to implement Answer Engine Optimisation and Generative Engine Optimisation into your website marketing plans? The answer is probably no, they do not.
Just like SEO in days gone past, no one really understood how Google’s algorithms worked (and still don’t fully), but now we have two more ‘types of Digital Marketing’ to deal with, which we know even less about — including the people at Google! You see, just like Google 1.0, or Backrub (which was the first name for google), Google is trying to evolve and adapt to this massive influence called AI. If it doesn’t, it will lose market share. (Imagine how embarrassing that would be for them!).
If you search on Google now, Google’s AI will spit out the usual search results we’ve all come to know, but it also displays (in a prominent spot) a Google AI search answer. And that, dear reader, is the main reason for the loss of traffic. Google AI displays information from our websites, but on its own platform — so no one needs to click onto the actual site to get what they’re looking for. No click, no traffic…
The end result of the Google search changes.
For the foreseeable future, we can all expect far less traffic to our websites, but that doesn’t mean you need to lose business! You just need to be smart and act now!
What actions need to be taken to ensure sales and enquiries are maintained?
Education, education! You must learn a little about what these new digital marketing influences are, and to help you, here is a summary written by yours truly.
Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) involves optimizing your website content to be directly presented as the answer or solution in search engine answer boxes (like the AI results I mentioned earlier), featured snippets, and voice search responses. The primary goal of AEO is to prepare content in a way that Google’s AI can easily extract and display as a concise, authoritative answer to user queries.
Just worth mentioning: featured snippets and voice search responses often provide different responses. If I ask Google Home who Jean-Pierre Murray-Kline is, it tells me it was a lesbian who lived decades back. I am not even joking about this result. If I ask Google ‘normal search’, it gets the answer correct. This error or discrepancy in results probably comes down to voice search using a very different dataset of information to learn from and has a different algorithm to prepare its results. (Or, Google has become sentient and nasty.)
How to excel in AEO?
Your web marketing team or web marketing expert must focus on creating content that answers specific questions clearly and succinctly. I believe this extends far beyond text and very soon images, videos and even sound will need to be optimised.
With these new changes, we now have to become experts at what humans want to see, not just AI! This is a slight flip flop from what the plan was perhaps a year ago. The truth is we actually need to be experts at both. For now, your marketing team must focus on question-based headers, providing direct answers early in the content, employing bullet points and numbered lists, and ensuring factual accuracy however they can.
An example of good AEO please?
Sure. An example: when a human searches for “What is the capital of South Africa?”, an answer result might directly state, “The capital of South Africa is Johannesburg,” prominently positioned in a featured snippet at the top of the search results. Out of interest, you might find it fascinating that South Africa is the only country in the world with three capital cities! We are extra that way! Pretoria is our administrative Capital, Cape Town our legislative, and then there is Bloemfontein, which is our judicial.
Let’s get back on track.
By aligning content with user intent or focusing on their desire, and structuring content in a way that answer search engines, your website increases its chances of appearing in these prime ‘answer slots’. The trick to getting business or a sale is to craft that content so it has an advantage over competitors and includes a call to action — perhaps offering a follow-up, e.g., “The capital of South Africa is Johannesburg, email jp@knowitall.com for more information”.
Bonus extra!
You can also take a look at how I wrote and structured this article as another example for content ready for AEO.
Next, how generative engine optimisation works!
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is a relatively newer ‘concept’ that relates to optimising content for generative AI models and engines. Unlike the traditional search engine methods that rank and display existing web pages, generative engines create new content (all by themselves) from vast datasets and training models that include your competitors’ websites! ChatGPT, Bing AI, and Google’s Bard all ‘use’ GEO.
How do you get featured in GEO search results?
Have as many authorities as you can! GEO involves tailoring content so that generative AI platforms believe it to be accurate and relevant, with follow-through content aligned with user queries. Information results must come from authorities (websites and other datasets) that offer high-quality, structured data, with in-depth information, and nice clear prompts guiding the AI to produce desired responses. Kulula kwaye entle!
The difference between AEO and GEO?
While both AEO and GEO focus on optimising content for advanced AI and search platforms, their core focuses differ somewhat with AEO emphasising on optimizing existing content to appear as a direct answer in search engines, voice assistants, and answer boxes, while GEO focuses on creating and structuring content for effective use by generative AI models. How do you excel at both? You need to innovate and think about what search will be tomorrow, not what it is today! Don’t forget we work in South Africa, and we do things differently here online, and just bearing that in mind when preparing content might be the edge you are needing.
Is your web marketing team able to do AEO and GEO? * For more information, visit www.jeanpierremurraykline.co.za