AI Search
Ben Eaglestone, SEO and insights specialist at Energy PR
If you use SEMrush, Ahrefs, Google Search Console or any other SEO software – you might’ve seen some weird data this month.
Why? Because Google removed the option to view the top 100 search results (using the parameter &num=100), instead limiting it to just the top 10. Which is baaad news for SEO tracking tools. The cost of sourcing ranking data suddenly increased by up to 10x overnight.
Brodie Clark first spotted this change. So please check out his insights here or the LinkedIn post below for more info on his findings.
So far, it seems like this has had two big impacts…
1) Search tracking tools have been hit. Rising costs, missing data. The way they’ve operated for years is in doubt. SEMrush and Ahrefs are already questioning the value of tracking beyond the top 20 search results, and with AI platforms like ChatGPT potentially impacted too (maybe by design?) – we could see some significant changes to how third parties crawl Google’s search results soon. Especially as Google recently advertised for an “anti-scraping engineering analyst”.
2) Google Search Console data has also dropped. And the leading theory is that this is because these third-party tracking tools suddenly aren’t crawling the web as often. Some sites are seeing drops in search impressions by as much as 50% (including ours here at Energy PR), meaning third party tools might’ve been responsible for up to half of all search impressions. HALF?! That’s madness. SEOs originally thought the recent increase in search impressions was due to AI search, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was just third-party tools crawling our websites on an enormous scale.
What does this mean for digital PR?
It’s a big deal on a few fronts. First, SEOs and digital PRs rely pretty heavily on search tools – rank tracking software in particular. It’s one of the core ways we can measure the impacts of our work on website visibility and performance. Yes, some these tools are arguably less important in the era of AI search. But they’re still pretty essential for anyone in the industry. So if these tools aren’t working anymore, our day-to-day work is going to be affected heavily.
Beyond this, it also suggests that our existing search data has been incorrect for some time. If the ‘great decoupling’ was just an increase in bots, then we’ve been operating with inaccurate search data for a while. Which means reports will need annotating and future measurement may need tweaking. But to be fair, search impressions have always been more of a vanity metric – so maybe this is the push the industry needed to start measuring the metrics that really matter?
Google just announced some new Chrome features. And as with anything Google does, these could have a pretty huge impact on the search landscape (and on our work as digital PRs). The highlights are:
New ‘Gemini in Chrome’ functionality means you can now access an AI assistant that can work across tabs, with agentic capabilities coming soon.
New AI Mode button in the Chrome search bar, so users can search directly in AI Mode, instead of having to click into it after a search.
New security features aimed at improving both online safety and the search experience.
Check out the below video for more info.
This is a flavour of what search could look like in a few years’ time. Personalised AI agents that you can access everywhere, supporting everything you do online – even doing the work for you. And with these features coming to Chrome’s 3.45 billion users, it’s a pretty big deal.
What does this mean for digital PR?
As with most of these AI updates, no one’s 100% sure. But I think this means that personalisation and audience targeting are going to become even more crucial for PRs.
AI features like these are completely personal. They can access all of your information, they remember everything you’ve searched before. And if everyone is using these AI assistants, a “spray and pray” approach to PR simply won’t cut it.
We need to drill down on our target audience. Where do they spend their time? Where do they get their information? What makes them tick? We need to build detailed, behaviour-focused audience personas – and then run everything we do past them. Whether that’s the news story we’re building, the language we’re using or the media titles we’re pitching, we need to be audience obsessed.
If we do that, we can’t go wrong.
Google Discover adds follow buttons and social posts. You can now follow publishers in Discover directly, and social media posts will soon be included in the feed too. Great news for publishers. But for PRs? It means more opportunities to reach and engage our target audiences, and even more need to properly invest in audience analysis.
August spam update finishes rolling out. Early reports are that it’s done a pretty good job of removing spam from the SERPs. But it’s all a bit of a mess because of the rank tracking issues (covered above). So who knows?!
Penske Media sues Google over AI Overviews. The Rolling Stone publisher is the latest in a long list of publications to begin legal action against AI search companies. Will it go anywhere? Maybe not. But it’s another indication that publishers aren’t just sitting down and accepting their fate. Watch this space.
Microsoft announces content marketplace to compensate publishers in AI search. This could be the sustainable business model that publishers (like Penske Media) have been searching for. Right now it’s just a pilot, but this could become something REALLY exciting for the publishing industry.
Ben Eaglestone, SEO and insights specialist at Energy PR
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