Google is overhauling Search - what you need to know

Google just reinvented the front door of the internet. Google search will never be the same again. They did it their big Google I/O event, that was huge news. And your marketing team probably is working for the old version of Google search, not the new version. On today's show, I'm gonna show you the three things you're probably getting wrong, and three solutions you can do tomorrow. Start getting more visibility with AI search and win in the new world. (upbeat music) So, Google just had its big I/O event, and that's a big conference where Google announces changes to all things in Google, hardware software, but in this case, specific for somebody who's doing marketing or running a company, search. Google searches an incredible channel if you wanna grow your business, but it's changing dramatically. Google is rebuilding the search box. Logan Copatric, friend of the show, and works at AI and Google, he also agrees that Google's making its biggest overhaul to search in 25 years. And so, let's look at what Google's actually doing. Here's the demo of the new Google search experience. All right, so ask Google. So instead of keywords, it's making it a default AI experience that shows you you're in AI mode. I wanna pick up a new hobby. I'm thinking about pottery. Is that throwing wheel or hand-building easier to learn? So it's asking all these questions. It's what is showing you, instead of a couple keywords, people are now asking a couple sentences. That is what the search experience is moving to in Google. AI by default, long-proves and questions versus short keywords. That is a massive change to how people search and discover online right now. So the first thing that's happening in AIO is what I just show you. The search box is fundamentally different, and it's AI first. And the important thing to know about all this is that you have a very different experience. So Shane posted an awesome article on zero-click search and basically looked at a ton of keyword data and the percentages of searches that don't end with a click. And he cites the Google AI mode is now over two and a half billion monthly users. So it's not just like a little people using AI search. Now a massive percentage of the populations using AI search. And Google's AI mode basically shows that 93% of searches end without a click to your website. And a traditional search engine optimization, what you would do is you would look at referral traffic from Google, you would extrapolate what keywords that referral traffic came from, and then you'd go work on where you rank in those keywords. That is no longer the game. The game is fundamentally changed. It's time to move to a new game. Because it's not gonna go back to the old way. The other thing I think it was interesting in Shane's article is that consumers like the new experience. And that we're seeing a big jump in zero-click search traffic as Google moves to this new AI experience. And so the next question you'd ask is like, well, why do consumers like it so much? Well, I like the old Google search. What happened? Well, AI mode has gotten a lot better. And it now has these agents, they call information agents, would actually work and do work in the background. And this has changed the experience for consumers drastically. And if you're new to marketing, one way to think about marketing is marketing is a reaction to how consumer behavior changes. And this change in search is a big shift to consumer behavior. So how does that translate if you're doing marketing? It means that search is no longer a list of links. Instead, it's one answer. And that answer is a more detailed answer provided by an LLM. And what's even louder is that that answer isn't just like a bunch of text. It can now be a custom widget or visual and it's becoming much more custom and personal to the user. And what's interesting is that there's these agents, now these informational agents that sitting between you and your prospective customer doing work for them, they're now becoming an audience in the search landscape. And to help make this real for you, I'm going to do a live demo now of Google's AI mode and show you exactly what this means in practice. All right, so I went over to Google AI mode because it's still not on by default for me yet. But anybody can go to Google AI mode. What I'm telling you, underlining this like three times in the show today, is that this experience I'm about to show you is becoming default for everyone using Google. And that is a big change. That is why Logan, who is in the midst of all things AI in search is like this is the biggest change to search in 25 years. So I want to ask you a question, people would ask. I'm a B2B marketer, so I'm going to ask you a B2B question. What's the best AI sales agent platform for a 200 person software as a service company? This is a question that if you're out there building software, you would certainly ask, and let's see what AI mode does for us. I know we covered a lot on AI search today. You probably have some questions. We are giving you free additional resources to answer any of those. You can scan that QR code or click the link in the description below and go get everything you need. You see, first of all, real quick, no links, no tin links, right? We don't have a tin blue links. What is fascinating and what I love about how search as an experience is evolving is that it's showing you this whole sidebar alongside of where the key information came from. And all of the places, if you did want to go dive deeper, you could go, which is awesome, but you can also get rid of that if you want. And so it's saying that land-based, artisan, hub spot, where hub spot, we have an amazing product. You should go do this. But what's interesting is that it's giving you what each of these companies good at and why it's the best option, 11X. And again, what you're seeing is that AI search is good at building these custom experiences. In this case, a custom table comparison. Who's got a fully native CRM? We do. So we're standing out as hub spot as part of that. And then what you're seeing is that more detailed product that turns into a longer conversation. Because now it's going to ask you more things about your company. What's your end of your use? What is your business model? All of these things to help refine the recommendation and ultimately get you a much better response. This is different than the Tim Blue links. This is an experience that's rolling out to everyone. And we'll see the amount of clicks that these supplemental articles get. But what I'm here to tell you is you can no longer measure those Tim Blue links and that keyword ranking traffic in the way they used to. And if you do that, if you dashboard, it's just going to be fundamentally lying to you. Would a buyer ask AI for a solution like yours? Does your business come up? Most companies have no idea. And by the time they find out, they're already lost the deal to someone who did. HubSpotAEO helps you show up in those moments with the right answers buyers are looking for. Before the first click, before the first form fill, that's the moment HubSpotAEO is built for. Head to hubspot.com/AEO to try that tool for free today. And when I say your dashboard is lying to you, what do I actually mean? Here's the uncomfortable data that I want to go over with you. The overlap between Google's top 10 organic search results and sources that AI mode is using in the search that we just did, for example, is actually very low. You would think that, oh, if I rank in the top of Google Search, then I will also be the top sources that is used in AI mode. And that's fundamentally not what's happening. So I found data from ICODA that suggests that it's like somewhere between 17 to 36% overlap, depending on the query. And so if you were ranked number one in old school Google search, that means you have about a 17 to 36% chance of being cited as an answer. So you went from being the de facto option to basically at best having a third of a chance of being cited. That is a completely different game. This shows you how the rules of the game have fundamentally changed. And because of this, you're seeing traffic to publishers fall dramatically. And it's likely happening to you. I know it's happened to me. It's happened to us at hubspot over the last two years. And it's been painful. And it's not coming back. Like I think that's the uncomfortable truth is that we can all hope and wish for the days of old Google search because it was such an amazing marketing channel. That is no longer something we should be considering or thinking is happening. What is happening is that for branded search in these AI overviews, the click-through rate goes way up. We found that you have an 18% click-through rate when AI overviews appear in branded queries versus non-branded queries. So one of the things that tells me is brand is going to continue to be more important than ever. Gone are the days of not worrying about your brand and optimizing for the mechanics of pace. search or organic search. You have to care about your brand. You have to have real brand awareness and credibility in the market to stand out and take advantage of AI search. And so when it comes to AI search, there's mentions in their citations. And mentions, you know, in that example I showed you HubSpot was mentioned as one of the options to consider. Citations were all those links in that right hand bar. And what's interesting is if you can become cited in an AI overview, you get 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than if you're unsighted. And that's again, this is from a really good icon to study that I can link down below. So if you're a founder running a company, you're running a marketing team out there. I think there are fundamentally three mistakes I see happening out in the world right now. And we can fix them right now. And I'm here to help you. The first mistake is measuring traffic from search instead of mentions and citation. The measurement of AI search is very different. We talked a little bit about this on the show. But what you want to do is you want to look at your AI visibility. For a given prompt, am I being mentioned showing up in that response, were my being cited, am I being linked to in that response, and across different parts of my product in my audience, what does that AI visibility look like? Our HubSpot.io product is a great way to do that. There's lots of other good products. And you need to move to measuring your citations and mentions. That's step number one. Okay, the second thing you need to do is stop writing for search and crawlers and start writing for your customers. Because AI is reading your content like it's your customer. The old SEO playbook was pick a keyword, write a 2000 word blog post, hit those H2s, do some internal links, and that worked. And when Google was crawling and matching strings of data, that worked really well. AI isn't matching strings of data and using page length. It's synthesizing arguments and consensus from all over the internet and the data it's been trained on. The kind of content most blogs are stuffed with is now actually invisible. So the people who are going to survive this new wave of AI search are the ones that have proprietary data, original research, task-based content completion. I did a whole episode on the six pillars of really quality content. I have a good check that out because that is exactly what you need to do to write for your customer and not for the search crawlers, which is what you need to be doing now. The third thing you need to do is maybe the biggest one. That team that used to chase keyword rankings might not have the skills you need to win in this AI search world. So whether it's somebody on your team, whether it was an agency you hired, a contract you hired, whether it's you yourself, if you're doing work to get search traffic, you need to know that the skills have changed. And so you need to get a new set of skills on your search strategy. And this is what we call AI search optimization skills, how so what we call it, a yo answer engine optimization. But what's happening here is it's a little bit PR. It's a little bit product marketing. It's a little bit journalism and data journalism. It's a hodgepodge of different skills. It's not doing a bunch of cold outreach for backlink campaigns. It's about how do I write for humans, not search engines, but how do I then amplify that content across Reddit, across LinkedIn, across YouTube. These are some of the highest citation sites that AI search uses. It's PR because when you get published on sites like Fortune or Forbes or Inc. or what have you, AI searches using those to determine if you're actually an authority and have some credibility on the topic that you were ranking for. When AI is searches doing, it's looking for consensus across a whole wide variety of sites. And so you need more distribution. It's not just about like building some links and obsessing about the search and your results page. It's, do I show up on LinkedIn? Do I show up on Reddit? Do I show up on YouTube? Do I show up on, you know, customer review sites, etc. If you're showing up there, then AI is going to see a consensus view that you might be the right answer for the given question is trying to answer. And so this is very different than traditional search. And you can see this requires a different set of skills and more importantly, a different strategy than you're currently executing. So you have to make sure you have the skills necessary to succeed and win in this new world. So those are the three things you should do. I want to make this even more actionable for you. I really want this to be the most valuable piece of content you're going to watch this week. So I want to tell you three things you should do immediately. Tomorrow morning, you are three things you can go and do now. The first thing, you want to run a citation audit. You want to find a series of prompts 10 to 15 of them. And you can do this manually yourself if you don't want to go and use a tool yet. Type them all. And these are 10 or 15 things your buyer might be searching for a relative to your company based on things you know about your product or things that people have searched for in the past. Type them in to Google AI mode, not Google search. Screenshot every answer. Are you mentioned? Are you cited? Are your competitors? Where's Google getting this data from? If we're given answer, they're pulling from some YouTube videos and you don't have any YouTube content on that answer. That tells you a lot. So go and do that immediately. The second is get rid of the content calendar. The content calendar, which I think of as a mindset of like, oh, how many two thousand word blog posts can I publish in a given day or week on these topics. That's just not the game to play anymore. And instead of having this big, laborious content calendar, go back to how do I create unique information on data on personal examples, customer case studies, things that are unique to my business that AI search would find really helpful in trying to answer a given question. You know, the more specific, the more original, the more helpful AI is going to find it. So move from a generic content calendar to a content program that is rooted in depth data and specificity. That's the second thing you should do. The third thing is somebody needs to be in charge. Either you're in charge and you need to go tell your boss that this is a top priority for you, or somebody on your team needs to be in charge. They need to be the lead and say, hey, in the next quarter, we're going to go from not caring about AI visibility, not really understanding what's happening. We have woke it up. We know what's happening. We know we need to do things differently. And because of that, this person is going to do the audit. They're going to overhaul our content strategy. They are going to track our visibility week to week to understand what progress we're making with our new strategy and really be the core leader and directly responsible individual. And we are going to then look at our visibility rise on these AI search engines. And as visibility rises, we're going to see leads and revenue rise as well. And having one person who's obsessed about this, even if that's you, is a big game changer. The argument isn't as AI hurting search. Everybody knows that it's hurting traditional search. The argument is Google rebuilt the front door of the internet this week. That is a massive shift. And the playbook for every marketing team that it's been running for SEO has changed and it won't work anymore. But you don't need to panic because the rules of this new game are getting clear. And there are actionable things you can do. And I just went through them all with you. Stop measuring traffic, start measuring, citations, mentions AI visibility. Stop publishing bland generic content, start publishing sources and data and unique perspective. And have people on your team building these new AI skills versus leading too hard into the traditional SEO skills. Companies that do this over the next 90 days are going to be really successful. You're going to see a whole change in how you're discovered and found online. I'm excited to hear what you do. Please leave comments if this video was helpful. If you have follow up questions or if there's other aspects of this topic, you want me to cover in the future. Really appreciate you. Hit like, hit subscribe. We'll see you really soon on marketing. It's the great. I want to tell you about a podcast. I love it's called Nudge. It's hosted by Phil Agnew. It's brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals. Answer the UK's fastest growing business podcast. What I love about it is that the Nudge listeners love no fluff, no BS evidence-based marketing tactics they get in each episode. You're going to want to listen because this is like an MBA's worth of insight in every single podcast. And entrepreneurs, you're going to love the show because it's filled with repeatable proven studies, not hearsay, not one off success stories. Marketers, you're going to love it because it discusses the psychology behind great marketing and what marketers are getting wrong. Listen to the Nudge wherever you get your podcasts. cold history, calls, support tickets, emails, and here's a task from three days ago I totally missed. HubSpot, grow better.