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Olivia-Mae Foong

SEO Consultant

Alice Logan

SEO Consultant

Eleanor Reynolds

SEO Consultant

How we’re adapting to Google’s AI powered search

5 mins read

Google’s latest AI Mode feature, announced at Google I/O, might feel like a huge shift for SEO, but if you've been focusing on providing content that’s genuinely helpful and accessible with solid technical foundations, you're probably already on the right track.

We’ve been actively following this update since May 2023 - testing our clients' appearance in AI Overviews (initially called Search Generative Experience) in beta, staying on the pulse of developments and sharing insights about what the future could hold.

What's reassuring is that much of what Google is now advising, we've been doing with our clients for years. Here are just some of the ways we've been helping clients adapt to the changing search landscape.

Quick recap of Google's AI Mode

You can access AI Mode in a separate tab of Google or click to expand an AI Overview to try it out, however, it’s currently only available in the US. It's expected to be rolled out to other English-speaking countries over the next few months.

AI Mode mainly shows up for informational or exploratory queries. Transactional queries are less likely to trigger a AI Mode or an AI Overview because other search features are seen to provide a better user experience currently.

Helpful content

What Google recommends:

Focus on unique content written for your audience first, and search engines second. Answer the user’s question clearly and think about what they’ll want next. Can you anticipate the follow-up question or action?

How we’ve been responding:

AI Overviews tend to appear for top-of-funnel, informational queries, and we’ve seen variable impacts on client traffic since August 2024. Our strategies have never been focused on chasing vanity traffic, and that’s more important than ever.

Instead, we prioritise content that brings in high-quality traffic and encourages users to take meaningful next steps once they land.

As Google increasingly captures upper-funnel attention within its own interfaces, boosting brand visibility in search is even more critical. We’re also investing more in bottom-funnel keywords - those related to donations or support, for example - where we don’t typically see AI Overviews.

Rather than just aiming to improve rankings, we focus on what users actually need, using real Google Search data to shape decisions. Google has said AI Mode aims to surface “links to content and creators you may not have previously discovered” which reinforces the value of genuinely helpful, insightful content.

We’ve supported clients for years to build strategies that meet specific user needs. For example, with Chatham House, we developed an evergreen strategy that focused on high-value topics with consistent search volumes. This led to a 31% increase in organic traffic, with initial articles achieving top Google rankings and increasing readership for their expert commentary.

We’re also evolving our approach to reflect changes in how people search. That includes working with our clients’ moderators and social teams to improve visibility on other organic platforms and running regular topic reviews to refine or consolidate content where needed.

A line graph showing the number of clicks on a content hub from 14 October 2024 to 8 April 2025. Click volume remains relatively stable between 10K and 20K for most of the period, with occasional spikes. A red vertical line on 23 March 2025 marks the date of a topic review. After this point, clicks rise significantly, reaching between 30K and 40K, indicating a clear improvement in visibility and engagement following the review.

Here’s an example of a client’s content hub where visibility has significantly improved following a recent topic review.

Improving the findability of content

What Google recommends:

Work on your page indexability. Make sure GoogleBot can crawl all important content (including hidden elements like accordions) so that it can be indexed and featured in search results while also using meta tags to manage how your content is crawled and appears in search.

How we’ve been responding:

We’ve implemented MedicalWebPage schema for single-condition charities (charities that focus on a single medical condition, such as breast cancer) and run regular technical audits to ensure our clients’ websites are easy for search engines and LLMs to access and understand.

We're identifying and resolving XML sitemap issues for clients and working closely with them during website structure changes to mitigate risk and ensure their most important content remains visible.

While traditional search crawlers are better at handling JavaScript, Google’s AI crawlers currently can’t, so we’ve been investigating whether JavaScript could be creating unintended barriers to discovery.

We’re also helping clients strengthen their E-E-A-T signals, adding “How your donations are spent” pages, clearly marked authorship on sensitive topics, and last review dates to key content. These demonstrate that the client is an expert in their field with first-hand experience of the topic and an authoritative, trustworthy source of information about the topic at hand.

Reporting

What Google recommends:

Look beyond clicks from Google to understand the value of your search traffic. Search features that have been announced over the years have impacted organic traffic in some way, such as featured snippets. It's important to target searchers who want to take the next step and monitor user engagement metrics beyond clicks.

How we’ve been responding:

With the introduction of AI-powered search, we need to consider how our clients appear in AI Overviews and whether this is impacting their appearance in standard search results, that is, Google’s traditional organic blue links.

We've expanded our keyword position tracking to include pixel position, this captures the position of our client’s website listings in the search results based on pixels from the top of the page to their target URL. As the layout of the search results pages changes frequently with all the different features that can be used, this gives us a clearer understanding of where our client’s sites realistically appear in search.

We’ve also evolved how we approach keyword research, reflecting the growing influence of AI answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity. With our Measurement and Impact team, we’re building dashboards to understand referral traffic from LLMs and how they may shape future search behaviour.

Experiments and tests

What Google recommends:

Adapt to evolving search behaviours. People are using longer, more conversational queries and expecting richer answers in return. As Google stated during Google I/O: in AI Mode, search queries have been 2-3 times longer for their early product testers.

How we’ve been responding:

As search patterns change, our strategies change with them. With limited data about AI Overviews and AI Mode's traffic impact, we've been conducting experiments with our Innovation team to understand search behaviour better for our clients.

We’re testing how LLMs use our clients’ content in their responses and where that may lead to misrepresentation or misinformation.

Not all clients are equally impacted. Health organisations, like NHS.UK (where we’ve been the sole SEO supplier for seven years), and single-condition charities are seeing more effects, especially where AI Overviews appear for medical queries.

By contrast, many of our international development clients haven’t seen the same impact yet. But with Google's AI tools evolving fast, we’re staying alert.

What this means going forward

AI-powered search is at the forefront of our thinking, and we'll continue to share developments and monitor the impact on our clients and the sector.

While Google’s advice has evolved since their first announcement in April 2023, the fundamentals haven’t changed. Helpful, high-quality content that meets user needs is still key.

The key is to focus on the unique value you bring and use this to make your content stand out. If you've already been creating content with your audience's genuine needs in mind and maintaining solid technical foundations, you're well-positioned for this AI-powered future.

Looking for support with anything we've outlined above?

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