AIO... The New Toy in Town

This post is a derivative of the Adweek Post:

"Marketers Must Move Beyond Google Traffic as Zero-Click Becomes the Norm in 2025" by Katie Tweedy, Director of SEO and content marketing at Collective Measures

What's "Zero-click"? <---- I encourage you to read this link

Essentially, it's the scenario where users find the information they were looking for on the search engine results page (SERP) without having to click or interact. This obviously impacts SEO and marketing measurements like click-through rates (CTR) and organic traffic. In 2020, nearly 66% of Google searches were zero-click... due to Google's efforts to improve user experience with instant answers.

What's Google's AI-Overview? <---- Read this too

Essentially, Google's using their generative AI in Google Search to privde immediate, comprehensive answers (AIOs). Originally known as Search Generative Experience (SGE), it's evolved to synthesize information from multiple sources (TBH, it sounds just like chatGPT or Grok but in Google Search). Even though the results will show the links that were used to gather the response, users liklihood of clicking them is low. For more on this topic, read "Latest Google AIO Updates May Impact SEO" on Search Engine Journal by Roger Montti.

What's the connection? Well, as Google continues to optimize the search results with AI Overviews, there will be less and less user clicks (zero-click).

Katie's suggestions:

• Measurement must shift - clicks will probably decline in 2025 but impressions will likely remain steady. AIOs don't impact ranking they just take up the top real-estate spot while pushing down the #1 result. There might be an increase in conversions as this AIO is a means of passing only the highest of intent traffic to the site.

• AIO Citations - The value of AIO citations will ultimately lie in the brand's visibility and credibility boost from the citation. To see an increase in traffic from AIO Citations is not likely.

• Social Search further eats into Google traffic - besides search results changing, users' behavior is changing with it. Social sites are becoming preferred search platforms with 67% of social media users engaging with social search in their purchase journey.

Scott's thoughts: I gotta be honest, the day of using Google search is quickly ending in my own practices. I use AI more and more. For shopping... It wouldn't be a stretch to imagine an AI agent being released that would basically know who I am, my preferences and shopping patterns, and just tailor a shopping experience for me that shows AI generated images of my life with the items in it. I mean, I used to push data feeds with static image links for shopping campaigns... I really think the countdown to those days being over has definitely started.

Things I learned:

• What Zero-clicks are

• What Google's AIO is

• Brightedge for a source of SEO research