Towards 2025: New SEO Strategies in the AI Revolution - Core Changes and Responses I Understand

1. Changes in Search Engine Competition Landscape

• Past: The main battlefield of SEO was almost equivalent to Google. Most of our energy was focused on understanding Google's algorithms and improving rankings on Google.
• Present: The situation has changed. Powerful AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, with their new interaction methods and information integration capabilities, have brought real search competition.
• Response: Our SEO strategies must be more flexible, ensuring that enterprise brands, products, and services can not only be found on Google, but also appear anywhere users search, including Google's AI Overviews, as well as in the responses of other generative AI tools that users may rely on.

2. Adjustment of Phased SEO Strategy

• Traditional: We are accustomed to developing different SEO strategies and content based on users' search funnel (top-level information gathering, middle-level solution comparison, bottom-level purchase decisions).
• Present: Since AI tools play an increasingly important role in the early stages of user research and information gathering (top and middle levels), traditional funnel strategies need to be reconsidered. Future SEO strategies may be more clearly divided into two main parts:
  • Top and Middle Level Strategy: The core goal is to make your brand or product recommended in users' AI consultations, becoming one of the important information sources for AI responses.
  • Bottom Level Strategy: Focus on users who already have clear purchase intent and are close to the decision stage, ensuring they can easily find your website through search (whether traditional search or AI-guided search) and complete conversions.

3. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

What it is: This is a future-oriented new term that describes the techniques and strategies needed to make your business cited, recommended, or given higher weight in new generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews.

Importance: GEO will be the core of SEO strategies in the coming years.

Foundation: To do GEO well, you must first ensure your website has good performance in basic web search (especially Google). Because many generative AI tools still crawl and integrate traditional web search results to compile their responses.

Key Points for GEO Optimization:

• Content Structure: Make your content structure similar to the typical response patterns of AI tools, usually starting with concise summary answers, then gradually delving into details and background information, making it convenient for AI to crawl and organize information.
• Focus on Long-tail and More Specific Searches: Generative AI tools encourage users to use more natural, longer-tail, and more specific search phrases for queries. Publishing in-depth content targeting these specific, niche queries not only provides ranking opportunities in these long-tail searches but also provides rich, accurate information sources for AI tools.
• Digital PR and Content Marketing: Getting brand mentions, citations, and recommendations on other authoritative, high-traffic websites can significantly enhance your brand's visibility and authority across the web. AI tools are more likely to cite or recommend brands that are widely 'visible' and recognized on the internet when integrating information.

4. Impact of AI Overviews on Traffic

Characteristics: Google's AI Overviews will display in AI-generated summary form above regular search results.

Impact: While improving user experience in some cases, this may lead to a decline in your website's organic traffic, as users may get the information they need in AI Overviews without clicking into your website.

Focus Shift: This makes bottom-funnel traffic with clear purchase intent, which is at the bottom of the search funnel, more valuable and important. We need to focus more on attracting and converting this high-quality traffic.

5. E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust)

Evolution: Google has always emphasized E-A-T, and now officially expands and adds "Experience" to become E-E-A-T.

Importance: E-E-A-T is not only crucial for traditional search engine rankings but also equally important for generative AI engines. AI tools want to present the most reliable, highest-quality information sources in results, and E-E-A-T is an important standard for measuring this reliability.

How to Showcase E-E-A-T on Your Website:

• Clearly Showcase Author Experience and Expertise: Provide detailed author bios, work experience, qualifications, professional background, and other information in articles and pages to prove content is created by people with 'experience' and 'expertise'.
• Provide Content Update Dates and Review Information: Especially for content in YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) fields like medical and financial, clearly mark publication/update dates and whether experts have reviewed it, increasing content timeliness and credibility.
• Especially Important in YMYL Fields: For fields that directly affect users' lives like health, finance, and law, Google and AI have particularly strict requirements for E-E-A-T.
• Showcase Actual Usage Experience of Products or Services: This is an important manifestation of the newly added 'experience' dimension. Through user cases, video demonstrations, detailed reviews, usage tutorials, and other ways, showcase the effects and value of products or services in the real world.
• Systematically Showcase These Signals Throughout the Website: Don't limit yourself to content pages, but systematically showcase your qualifications, honors, media mentions, expert teams, customer reviews and ratings, etc., throughout the entire website in places like homepage, about us page, product pages, case studies, customer testimonials, etc., to build comprehensive trust signals.

6. Beyond Traditional SEO Thinking

Challenge: Generative AI search results usually only present few or no direct links, making it insufficient to rely solely on traditional rankings and meta descriptions to attract users.

Response: Enterprises need to break out of traditional SEO thinking and actively seek unique ways to attract user and media attention. Consider launching a valuable user research and publishing reports, or initiating petitions based on social issues, etc. These can all win you attention-grabbing angles, gain media exposure, and significantly enhance brand awareness.

Synergy: The more AI search engines and Google see positive mentions, authoritative endorsements, and broad visibility about your brand on the internet, the more likely they are to cite and recommend it to users.

7. Current State of Voice Search

Development: The functionality of voice assistants is indeed enhancing, able to understand and answer more complex queries.

Current State: Currently, most voice searches are still concentrated on relatively simple, informational queries like weather, definitions, and basic information.

Value: When digesting complex information or making comparisons, visual search results are still the most efficient way. Therefore, at least in the next 12 months, voice search traffic may still have relatively low value among all search traffic, but as a potential future trend, it's still worth our attention to its development.