Hi friends 👋🏻

This week, I'm sharing a roundup of news and recommended reading for all of us racing to keep up with what the AI explosion means for our websites.

I think I'm doing a pretty good job of NOT talking about AI all day every day, but this past week saw a few announcements and articles that are worth paying attention to. This is a longer one ...

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Google Analytics introduces an AI Assistant traffic channel

First a quick feature announcement from Google Analytics: everyone's love-to-hate analytics tool is adding a new traffic channel to separate out website visits from "AI assistants".

This means GA will separate out website visits originating from AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, etc into a separate "channel group", in the same way that it separates out clicks from social media platforms.

Here's the official definition:

Some of us were already doing this manually anyway. Dana DiTomaso published a great tutorial on setting up a separate channel, pulling referral traffic with a source that matches a long regex of AI tools.

Google's May 13 announcement makes that manual setup unnecessary, although I haven't seen the new channel appear in any of my analytics properties yet. So keep an eye out for that coming soon... When it arrives, you'll see it in the red box on the screenshot below in the Acquisition > Traffic acquisition > Sessions by Primary Channel Group report.

h/t to Brie Anderson for sharing this news. And as Dana DiTomaso pointed out on the same post, this channel will NOT capture traffic from Google's AI Overviews that appear in Google search results. If you get any traffic from those at all 🙄 those visits will still get grouped into Organic Search.

Google provides advice around AEO, GEO ...

The next thing that got people excited was a Google Search Central article titled "Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search".

If you've been worrying about how SEO best practices have shifted as AI tools have exploded in popularity, this is worth a read. Google clearly made an effort to keep this guide fairly non-technical, so if you've made an effort to get educated around SEO and content strategy in the past decade this should make sense to you.

The general message in this guidance is that you should continue focusing on traditional SEO practices to get surfaced in AI features on Google Search:

• Create valuable, non-commodity (aka real, meaningful) content for your audience
• Follow accessibility best practices, which will lead to good user experience and clean page structure

Google was also willing to provoke all the vendors and AI-experts (add air quotes if you want) by including a mythbusting section. The myths they want to dispel include the need to pay attention to llms.txt files, "chunking" your content, rewriting content specifically for AI tools, and chasing "inauthentic" brand mentions.

My take: for your most small comms teams without a huge budget, this is generally good advice.

• Continuing to focus on generally high-quality content that is aligned with your audience's needs is the way to go.
• Present that content on a well designed, structurally-sound website.
• Try to tune out all the AEO/GEO snake oil salespeople on LinkedIn and elsewhere trying to sell you on new tools and tactics that are essential to surface your website on ChatGPT.

HOWEVER, there's counter argument that's worth paying attention to

Plenty of respected voices in the SEO space rankled at Google's latest guidance, reminding us that Google has a history of self-interest ... which is true.

Google's guidance is a simplification, although I appreciate their attempt to steer people away from all the garbage, vibe-coded "AI platforms" that people are selling currently.

The team at Microsoft / Bing have also been publishing similar guidance, and there's one blog post in particular that is worth reading alongside the Google guide linked above.

This one is titled "Evolving role of the index: From ranking pages to supporting answers", from the Microsoft Bing blog on May 6.

This article goes a little deeper on how fundamentally different the challenge is, as AI tools emerge alongside traditional search as a way people try to find information and solve problems.

Here's the quote that jumped out at me:

Microsoft's guidance is more technical. And if you're looking for a more transparent explanation of what is shifting in the SEO/AEO landscape, this article is helpful.

Until recently, basic SEO was just about building good-enough content to get into the search results and ranked highly enough that users might click through to your page and explore more.

Now that's not the case. (Although remember traditional search still dominates at this point.) With the arrival of AI tools, we need our content to be accessible, authoritative, and trustworthy enough to be referenced in an AI answer, WITHOUT a user necessarily visiting the page that contains that content to verify for themselves.

And then later, the user might visit your website to complete a transaction or some other bottom-of-the-funnel activity, in a way that is hard to trace back to the use of an AI tool earlier in their journey.

In this environment, what we've traditionally called offsite SEO becomes more important. In addition to creating good content, we need to work on brand building, digital PR, and building authority beyond our own channels.

Want to dive deep?

If you really want to dive into the details of this debate, I recommend Mike King's article, published yesterday under the pulls-no-punches title "Google’s Guidance on AI Search is Naive and Self-Serving".

Mike makes some good points. The comparison between Google and Microsofts public guidance is telling. And I think honestly Mike's biggest worry is about how Google's simplistic advice to stick to SEO fundamentals might impact marketing teams' ability to adapt in this evolving landscape.

If senior leadership and those with budget-setting power hear Google's message that marketers don't need to evolve and that traditional SEO is enough, budgets won't change and marketers will struggle with these expanded responsibilities. The landscape is shifting, and marketers need to follow those shifts and be able to advocate for shifting strategies, tactics, and budgets. And from that perspective, Microsoft's guidance is more helpful than Google's.

As always, thoughts and questions welcome. Good luck out there!

Until next time ✨

— Ed Harris (your digital strategy guide)

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