Understanding Google's SGE

Duet is a Google AI product for Google Workspace, and will be able to integrate with SGE. Gemini is Generative AI that is also not new, but recently rebranded from Bard. It also creates code. AI powered Google Ads have been around since Q4 2021.

May 2023, SGE was rolled out publicly to anyone in the US except teens letting people know it would be fully released in 2024. Teens and non beta users were added in September. In November, it rolled out to other countries. December Gemini was rolled out.

September - October for non beta users if they were in the US. A marketing company based or outsourcing to countries such as Canada or India would begin in November.

1. Gemini being rolled out into Google Assistant (Feb 2024)
2. Changes to Google Ads terms like top of page (March 2024)
3. SGE being passively rolled out into your personal use cases now such as Google Maps (Feb - April 2024) to anyone who didn't opt into Labs

While the first major rollout of Gemini had a lot of backlash, SGE is a different animal because answers about your industry, costs, your company, experiences with your company are pointed back to you as the responsible party.

Clickless world is just that. You should expect your organic traffic to drop, which means organic leads will follow.

Before you get caught up in building hundreds of blogs (unless you actually have something that is actually new, never been talked about before or is new YMYL, original, non AI content), you need to know that Google may use your content and does not necessarily have to link you as a citation back to your website. Just like any Gen AI, it web scrapes to give answers.

And if it does link you to an answer, it gives multiple sources as to how it came up with the answer and the answers could be wildly wrong due to web scraping (your almost 2 decades old, original AI website content creator) and what is out there.

Breaking up is hard, but you are going to have to say goodbye to horizontal experiences.

Anyone considering your brand will also be given prompts to consider one's right nearby you.

Brand will summarize what people say about you and BBB is one place that matters that you probably have forgotten about! Almost every roofer you search will say "family owned". Make sure you include differentiators.

If you have bad reviews, it will summarize your problems because the goal of SGE is to answer questions, and the question for the consumer is whether they want to use you or not. They may also pull bad reviews primarily from Angi and Yelp.

Be careful with Yelp - they are the most sensitive and rule enforced platform about review manipulation.

Anything created with Generative AI from images, video and written content will still not have any SEO value. This content is not owned by you, you have no rights to it, and has no copyright. This content under Google's Content Guidelines falls under low effort, not new as SGE still uses human and AI software to detect and rate your content.

Easier to read Search Rater Quality Guidelines - Updated August 2022 https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/hsw-sqrg.pdf

Detailed Search Rater Quality Guidelines - Updated July 2022. Marketers, SEOs and Web Devs should be using this one. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf

For Google Ads, they have announced there will be significantly less inventory. This may also drive the cost up per click, call, lead, etc.

For Google LSA (Local Search Ads, Google Guaranteed) it remains unknown.