Search Generative Experience (SGE) explained

What is Search Generative Experience (SGE)?

Search Generative Experience is a new search feature from Google where the search engine uses AI to answer your searches. It has now been rolled out in several countries and we know it in the Netherlands under the name AI Overview or AI Overview (AIO).

To make search even easier, faster and clearer, Google is giving its users new capabilities with Search Generative Experience:

• AI Overviews: Google provides a quick and concise summary of information from the various websites in the search results.
• Personalized results: the Search Generative Experience AI uses context, previous searches or, for example, location to provide personalized (and thus more relevant) results.
• Complicated searches: SGE gives better results for longer and complicated searches (a bit like ChatGPT, in other words).

How does it work?

Beware: technical story incoming.

Generative Search works with generative AI that can create content. Not just text, but also images or video, for example. That AI consists partly of large language models trained with a lot of data and technologies like natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning.

It enables Google to better understand the intent behind search queries, process content and even formulate an answer based on that content.

Impact of SGE and Google AI Overviews

Search Generative Experience and Google AI Overviews have big implications for the way people search.

An example: you want to know the best time to vacation in Bali, so you google "best travel time bali.

Google answers you right away:

"The best time to travel to Bali is from May to September, which is the dry season. This is the period with lots of sunshine hours, little rain and pleasant temperatures, perfect for beach vacations and other outdoor activities."

Top. Just the info you needed and you don't have to dig through an entire blog from some vacation discounter for it.

You happy, Google happy.

But website owners? A little less happy.

Because people are less likely to click through to a website. Your website. And surely that's where you turn visitors into customers.

Consequence? That No. 1 position in Google is worth less than it used to be.

But on the other hand: there are opportunities.

Namely, when your content is used in AI Overviews in a given search, your website or brand name becomes visible to all users who did that search. In fact, there are source citations (and links) with the info from the AI Overview.

It's especially nice if you're in position 5-10 and otherwise wouldn't have gotten any visibility at all. And that's worth something, too.

How do you optimize for Search Generative Experience and Google AI Overviews?

For now, Google mainly uses the top results as sources in the AI overviews. So traditional SEO already helps you get into the overview (so be sure to check out all these SEO tips for beginners)

Yet there are some things you can pay just a little more attention to to make sure Google uses your content for Search Generative Experience:

1. Optimize for longtails, queries and intentions

For now, specific content seems to do better in the AI views than some more global content.

So instead of focusing your content on big keywords with high volume, you should also focus on longtails. On search intent. On what people really want to know when they search for something and what is relevant to your website.

So don't optimize your content for "best backpack," but "best backpack for backpacking" or "best backpack for backpacking through bali. To give just one example.

But what should you write about? Do extensive keyword research to find those long-tail keywords, use tools like Answer the Public and check the "People also ask" section in Google for input.

Or think about logical follow-up questions a user might ask. For example, how big that backpack should be or the maximum weight of your ideal backpack.

2. Focus on E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness and is used by Google to rate the quality of your content. E-E-A-T is already an important ranking factor, but seems to have become even more important with Search Generative Experience because Google is also using your content itself as a resource.

Here's how to show E-E-A-T on your Web site and in your content:

Experience: use personal stories, case examples in your content to show that you have experience with the topic.

Expertise: add an author block to your blogs and articles, including photo and short biography showing that you are an expert.

Authority: with link building, get backlinks from other relevant and trustworthy websites in your industry (a mention is good too!).

Reliability: link to other reliable sources in your content, put clear contact information on your website and make sure your privacy statement is in order.

3. Make your content understandable to machines, too

To get into the AI overviews, of course, the algorithm must be able to understand your content properly.

For example, you do it with structured data. Structured data (or schema markup) is code you add to your website to help Google and that generative AI better understand what's on a page (also read: What is structured data and how can you optimally use it?).

Something less technical is optimizing your content for NLP. You want to write and structure your texts so that language models can easily understand the meaning and intent. You do that in the following way:

• write in colloquial language and avoid jargon or complicated sentences
• Structure paragraphs as question-and-answer with the question as the subtitle and the answer directly below it in the first 1-2 sentences
• Use clear headings with hierarchy(H1, H2, H3, etc.)
• Increase readability with short paragraphs, tables or bullets with bullet points
• Provide contextual cues like internal links to related pages, a clear title and a meta description that summarizes your content

Want to know more?

Want to know more about Search Generative Experience? Or need some help optimizing your website and content for Google AI Overviews? Feel free to get in touch. We would be happy to help you further.