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Recent research from BrightEdge, a company specializing in enterprise search marketing, highlights significant shifts in the websites appearing in Google’s AI Overviews search feature. Despite Google maintaining its dominance in the search market, the data indicates that the AI search engine Perplexity is rapidly increasing its influence.
The keywords that activate AI Overviews are evolving swiftly. Trends observed in June may already be outdated by July.
In June, AI Overviews were triggered 50% more frequently by keywords containing the term “best.” However, Google seems to have altered this behavior, as these phrases, particularly when related to products, no longer appear to activate AI Overviews in July.
A spokesperson from BrightEdge commented on ecommerce search queries:
“The prevalence of AI in ecommerce is notably rising, with nearly a 20% uptick in ecommerce keywords triggering AI overviews since early July, marking a substantial 62.6% increase compared to the final week of June. Concurrently, there’s been a significant 66.67% surge in product searches incorporating both pros and cons highlighted by AI overviews. This dual trend underscores not only the growing adoption of AI in ecommerce search results but also the delivery of more comprehensive and informative content to consumers through features such as pros/cons modules.”
BrightEdge utilized its proprietary tool, the BrightEdge Generative Parser™ (BGP), to identify pivotal search trends likely to shape digital marketing strategies throughout 2024. BGP aggregates extensive search trend data and transforms it into actionable insights.
According to their research, each percentage point of search market share equates to approximately $1.2 billion, underscoring the substantial value even minor market gains can yield.
Jim Yu, founder and executive chairman of BrightEdge, remarked:
“Google undeniably maintains a strong dominance, and its advancements in AI significantly impact every business and marketer globally.
Simultaneously, emerging players are establishing new frameworks in an AI-driven multi-search landscape. As AI evolves continuously, marketers’ primary focus should be leveraging precise insights to monitor, prepare for, and adapt to forthcoming changes.
Google retains its position as the foremost driver of search traffic, accounting for roughly 92% of organic search referrals. A noteworthy finding from the study is that AI competitors in various forms have yet to make a significant impact on traffic sources, dispelling speculation that they would diminish Google’s search traffic.”
In May 2024, Google took action to reduce the visibility of user-generated content (UGC) through its AI Overviews search feature, a move of significant interest to search marketers. UGC, often associated with poorly received responses that garnered negative publicity, saw a sharp decline in referrals from AI Overviews to platforms like Reddit and Quora in June.
According to BrightEdge’s research, citations to Quora from AI Overviews plummeted by 99.69%, while Reddit experienced a somewhat lesser decline of 85.71% during the same period.
BrightEdge’s report highlighted:
“Google is placing greater emphasis on authoritative content from established sources, prioritizing it over user discussions and forums.”
Bing’s market share continues to grow incrementally, moving from 4.2% to 4.5%. While modest, any progress is preferable to stagnation.
Conversely, Perplexity is expanding rapidly with a monthly growth rate of 31%. It’s important to note that percentages can be deceiving when applied to small initial numbers. Despite this growth, many publishers are not yet highlighting significant traffic from Perplexity, indicating there’s still ground to cover. Nonetheless, a monthly growth rate of 31% is a positive step forward.
It’s worth noting that chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT are not significant drivers of referral traffic to websites at this time. The data shows minimal impact in this regard.
OpenAI employs the rel=noreferrer HTML attribute, which conceals traffic referrals to external websites. This practice hinders tracking and understanding the full extent of traffic generated by language models like ChatGPT. However, the use of rel=noreferrer is standard in the industry for privacy and security purposes.
BrightEdge’s analysis takes a long-term view and predicts that referral traffic from Language Model Models (LLMs) will increasingly impact marketers in the future.
BrightEdge concludes:
“Currently, the volume of referrals from LLMs is limited and unlikely to significantly impact the industry. However, if this growth trend continues, BrightEdge anticipates it will influence search behavior and alter how brands optimize for various search engines.”
Similar skepticism surrounded the concept of mobile internet before the advent of the iPhone, underscoring that BrightEdge’s projections regarding LLMs are plausible.
Recent shifts in AI Overviews trends in July emphasize the importance of having current data to adapt to rapidly changing keyword trends. BrightEdge provides real-time, daily updated data to enable marketers to make more informed decisions.
Original news from SearchEngineJournal
