Our monthly roundup looks at AI news and developments impacting SEO. July 2024 saw Google continue to dominate publications with its ongoing tweaks to its AI Overviews feature but we also saw significant developments from OpenAI and Bing, and Reddit and Cloudflare who are taking a strong stance on the management of AI bots.

What is happening? 

AI Overviews testing continues

A study published on the first of July claimed that the rollout of AI Overviews in May 2024 coincided with a decrease in mobile searches, although there was a slight increase in desktop searches – and that around 60% of searches end without a click. As mobile searches account for around two thirds of total searches, if correct, the reduction is significant. 

However, the study revealed that despite the drop in searches, clicks on mobile increased slightly and remained essentially stable on desktop devices, indicating that while users may have been less inclined to search, those that did interact with the AI Overviews engaged at a similar or slightly higher level than before (perhaps due to the novelty of the feature).

The study also concluded that only one third of Google searches in both the US and the EU result in clicks to a non-Google owned, non-Google ad paying property.

Since May, Google has dialed down the appearance of AI Overviews and they are now only present for 7% of queries – the lowest level to date. The industries most impacted were:

• Education: from 26% to 13%
• Ecommerce: from 26% to 9%
• Entertainment: 14% to almost 0%

Additionally, the actual space taken up by the feature in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) was reduced by 13%.

The analysis also suggested that search intent naturally plays a significant role in whether AI Overviews appear, with the following increases and decreases evident depending on intent:

• Increases: ‘best’ +50%, ‘what is’ +20%, ‘how to’ +15%, and ‘symptoms of’ +12%. 
• Decreases: ‘vs’ -20%, ‘brand-specific’ -15%, ‘general product’ -14%, and ‘lifestyle-related’ -12%.

Furthermore, there was a reported dramatic decrease in the inclusion of user-generated content, with Reddit and Quora dropping by 85.7% and 99.7%, respectively.

Although AI Overviews were surfacing less frequently, by the middle of July there were early reports that they were appearing for some Workspace accounts in the UK, following on from their presence for a subset of logged in users back in April 2024.

As well as testing where these appear, Google also conducted tests more focused on functionality, including the ability for users to save AI Overviews to the Google Interests section; once saved, users can then access them in a private collection in the Google Search app. Another saw Google testing link icons to show citations that, once clicked, display an overlay window that contains the links in a search result format page. Finally, Google also tested the use of AI Overviews to provide video descriptions in the Google Search results – so if a user clicks to expand a video, Google may overlay the video and its description directly in the search results.

OpenAI tests SearchGPT

A couple of months ago, rumours were circulating that OpenAI was working on a new search product – and in July, The Atlantic shared the news that it had granted permission for its content to be included in it. Around the same time it was revealed that OpenAI was developing new reasoning technology under the code name ‘Strawberry’ to ‘perform research’. While details about its capabilities remain largely unknown, even by company employees, the technology aims to go beyond basic query answering to autonomously navigate the internet and conduct in-depth research, a process the company refers to as ‘deep research’.

It’s thought that this technology will have human-like reasoning skills and ultimately (and likely fairly quickly) go beyond those levels. How much impact Strawberry will have on the new search product remains to be seen, but towards the end of July the company officially announced a temporary prototype named SearchGPT. This promises to combine the power of the company’s AI models with information from the web, giving users fast and timely answers along with clear and relevant sources. Users will be able to ask follow-up questions in a conversational manner that adds additional context to the initial query, providing a more helpful and tailored response. 

Perhaps in a bid to outperform Google and Gemini, the company explicitly states that SearchGPT will prominently cite and link to publishers, providing responses with clear, in-line, named attribution and links, along with a sidebar containing source links. Coincidentally however, Google simultaneously rolled out a large update to Gemini that included more links to related content, as well as links to verify the content that Gemini responds with. While over a year ago Gemini initially included link citations, these were subsequently removed; this update reinstates them but in a new format. 

Cloudflare and Reddit block crawling

OpenAI also made it clear that websites can be included in search results even if they opt out of generative AI training. In that vein, Cloudflare recently provided an ‘easy button’ that allows its customers to block AI bots with a single click. Evidently the top four of these making the most frequent requests to Cloudflare sites are Bytespider, Amazonbot, ClaudeBot, and GPTBot. Bytespider makes the most requests (with a 40% share of websites accessed) and is operated by ByteDance – the company that owns TikTok. It is used to gather training data for its large language models, including those that support its ChatGPT rival ‘Doubao’ which is not often reported on – at least in English-speaking SEO publications.

Towards the end of the month, Reddit updated its robots.txt file to block both AI bots and search engines (including Bing) from crawling its content – though Google was a notable exception to the rule. In this regard, Reddit sought to clarify that this decision was ‘not at all related to [their] recent partnership with Google’ which is a reference to the fact that Google is currently paying the company $60 million annually to access the content on its site.

Bing generative search

While Bing still holds a relatively small market share despite its many recent developments, the search engine continues to evolve its product and in late July announced that it had begun testing the latest of these innovations ‘Bing generative search’ on a small percentage of queries. It stated that ‘by combining the power of generative AI and large language models (LLMs) with the search results page, Bing’s generative search creates a bespoke and dynamic response to a user’s query’.

Here, Bing uses AI to both generate the content and also to create the layout of the page – that additionally includes the traditional search results to one side. Similarly to SearchGPT, Bing explicitly states that links to sources are included and that particular attention is being given to how generative search impacts traffic to publishers, claiming that the experience maintains the level of clicks to websites.

What we think

If this study is correct in indicating that a significant drop in mobile searches contributed to Google’s decision to reduce AI Overviews, and given the high percentage of searches ending without clicks, online publishers should consider further diversifying traffic sources beyond Google alone.

Beyond clicks and search metrics, the lukewarm response to the rollout of AI Overviews likely influenced Google’s decision to minimise their appearance (to their lowest level to date). The company is now focused on enhancing the quality of its SERP reinvention while preserving revenue. Initial improvements in AI Overviews’ quality may explain their increased visibility in the UK, and the decreased reliance on user-generated content indicates that Google is now prioritising reliability.

OpenAI’s entry to search with its product SearchGPT was inevitable. Despite being in its infancy,  early signs are promising and ChatGPT’s existing (and growing) user base could drive its success (data storage costs aside). With a stronger emphasis on attribution and the inclusion of traditional search results, similar to Bing’s generative search, which also offers the option to switch AI off, OpenAI appears to be targeting Google’s potential vulnerabilities. While Google’s concurrent attribution improvements might seem reactive, the extremely close timing of the announcements indicates that this is coincidental. Either way, it’s a move in the right direction by all involved. 

Mirrored to this, it’s encouraging to see companies like Cloudflare providing its users with a simple and effective means to prevent unwelcome crawling from AI bots. Reddit’s blocking however is much more likely related to financial reasons, despite its claims that the whitelisting of Google is unrelated to the $60 million annual fee being paid to them.

Planning ahead

With AI Overviews now appearing in the UK, the biggest change in organic search for many years is finally upon us. At RocketMill, we have been analysing them for our US clients for some time – and devising related strategies to improve their websites’ visibility, giving us a head start when it comes to planning campaigns in the UK. As Google is still refining their format, level of appearance, and methods of  attribution, it’s important to remain flexible and carefully balance the direction of effort against the potential impact.

That said, creating content that is contextually relevant and can be both easily analysed and synthesised by AI systems is likely to be an ongoing important approach, as well as analysing (more closely than ever) the daily state of the AI-infused SERPs – and using additional AI tools to analyse these themselves. 

And as for SearchGPT (and yes, even Bing generative search too) we are watching early development very closely. The next few months look to be a very eventful time for organic search.