Episode Transcript
Monica 00:00
Yeah. Well, hello again, and welcome back to marketing with purpose. My name is Monica Pitts, and today I'm flying solo, and I'm talking about AI search and how it's changing website content. We are wrapping up our trade show season at MayeCreate, and so I have had so many conversations about AI I think it's the only thing that people want to talk to me about anymore, AI, how do I use it? What's the right way to use it? Do people need to be worried about it? How I should be using it more? I have opinions about all of it, but today I'm going to focus on websites. So the reality is, yes, AI is definitely changing search, but it's probably not as catastrophic as the internet wants you to believe. Actually, it's absolutely not as catastrophic as the internet wants you to believe, because AI hasn't changed what good websites need to do. It's just raised the stakes for doing it right. And the single biggest shift for most businesses isn't start a blog or optimize for AI, it's your website. Needs to stop reading like a brochure and start reading like a real conversation, because that's what will get you found in Google. Now that's what gets you cited in AI, and that's what gets people to actually contact you. Everything that you want comes from having content that people want to read that's written by you, that makes you sound like an expert that actually answers their questions. How crazy, right? So it's always been true. This isn't new stuff. It's always been true, but it's just more true now. So let's talk about what's actually happening, who it affects, and what if anything you need to do about it. Let's get to business. You're on a mission, and you just need more people to know about it. And whether you're brand new to marketing or a seasoned pro, we are all looking for answers to make marketing decisions with purpose. I'm Monica Pitts, a techie, crafty business owner, mom and aerial dancer who solves communication challenges through technology. This podcast is all about digging in and going digital. I'll share my marketing know how and business experience from almost 20 years of misadventures. I'll be your backup dancer so you can stop doubting and get moving towards marketing with purpose.
So as if this episode isn't already geeky enough, I made you a present that is extra special, geeky in the middle of writing the blog post. Because, yes, there is a blog post that is fully formatted with links and everything in it that goes with this podcast episode over on mayecreate.com I thought to myself, now, wouldn't it be cool if you could actually tell if your website was being cited in AI? Wouldn't that be cool? So I wrote you a tutorial complete with pictures. I may even make videos. Kind of depends on how much time I have. So you can figure this out using Google Analytics and Google Search Console and your brain, because you're going to have to involve your brain. There is some problem solving involved, because neither Google Analytics nor Google Search Console directly report this information, but they do have a very nice breadcrumb that will indicate whether or not your site is being referenced and included in AI overviews. But right now, we have to talk about why. Why does it even matter? Right? What's actually happening with AI search? Like, how is it impacting search? Who it affects? Does it affect you? I don't know. We'll find out, and what if anything you need to do about it. So let's start at the top. Is AI replacing Google? No, no, not right now. Okay, so let's just start there. But it is changing how people research things at the beginning of the buying process. Think of Google like a librarian. The old Google librarian handed you a stack of books and said, Here you go, find your answer. And now the new librarian, which is AI, reads the books for you, gives you the answer and still points you to the shelf where it came from. So AI is shifting how people research and find answers. And here's where it gets interesting for businesses doing any type of content marketing or blogging, the old inbound marketing model worked because people only had access to the old Google librarian. They had a hop from website to website reading until they felt informed enough to make a decision. So each website visit was an opportunity to make an impression and build recognition for your company. Like that was the whole point of having a blog, writing educational content and creating helpful pages, because it allowed you to show up for informational searches. But now the new model, people ask AI to help them understand what they need, and then they search to buy it, or sometimes they just ask AI to find it for them. But I mean, to be fair, AI isn't all that great at shopping at this very moment, but they are working on it. It's in the works. So does this shift matter for your business? Like honestly for most businesses, it really doesn't, not yet, maybe not ever, but just like when social media explodes. It online, people ask me, Well, do I even need a website? And here's the thing, AI search does not make websites obsolete. Ai overviews pull from websites, from them, they don't replace websites. So it changes where people see your content. If you're lucky enough to be a site that AI trusts, your content could potentially be summarized inside of an AI overview without anyone ever knowing it came from you. Bummer, right? But that's not to say that you should trash your blog, because blogging still matters. It helps organic SEO and blog content is actually the number one page type cited in Google's AI overviews. So your content is still doing its job. People are still finding it. It's just doing it from a different shelf, now, usually in a book that no one knows that you wrote,
but you still need people to find this information so that way they can make an educated buying decision to purchase with you. So you still need a website because AI needs it to educate people as they're at the beginning of the buying cycle. But the other and arguably more important reason that you still need your website is that when people search to buy, they still do that in Google. It's Google Search still, and Google takes them to, you guessed it, your website. So your website is still your number one employee, just hanging out there, 24/7 waiting to close the deal. And Google still holds the cards, and SEO still matters as much as it ever did before AI came in the scene, right? And now here's the really fun part, the stuff that gets into, you know, the stuff that gets your site into AI overviews? This is foreshadowing, because we will define it in a hot minute. That's the exact same stuff that gets you to page one of Google in the SEO world, the rules for getting found haven't actually changed. The scoreboard just looks a little different now and now. Here's a plot twist for you. You don't even have to rank on page one to get cited anymore. One early 2026 study of AI citation behavior is showing AI is pulling from pages well outside the top 10. See in 2025 Google was pulling AI citations heavily from the top ranked pages. 76% came from the top 10, with positions one through five getting the lion's share. But now in 2026 a study just found that 38% of AI overview citations came from pages ranking in the top 10 for that query. So that's down considerably from 76 to 38, and 31% came from pages ranked between positions 11 and 131% came from pages ranking beyond position 100 so in other words, AI is digging deeper for answers than it used to, and while ranking well, still absolutely helps. It's no longer the whole story, so your content can be ranked and found, potentially easier now than it ever has been before. The tricky thing is that your name isn't always associated with it. AI can use it. It doesn't have to cite you, right? So that's just something to think about. So who does AI search actually affect? And not all searches are created equal. And AI's impact, it really depends a lot on what kind of searches your customers are doing. So the searches that AI changes the most are informational queries that what is, how does, why would i What's the difference between like those types of questions, because when someone's in research mode trying to understand something before they make a decision, AI is increasingly answering those questions directly, without sending them anywhere. And it makes sense why we look at it that way. You just get a very full picture of what's going on. The tricky thing about it is that AI feeds you your answer back, and you have to be smart enough to vet whether or not it's right or not right. That being said, though, if your customers do a lot of that kind of pre purchase research, then AI search is going to be far more relevant to you. You're going to want to show up. Because even on the off chance that you do get cited, and your domain name is actually there and they click through to your site that's still traffic of qualified people. Now, the searches that AI barely touches are those local searches, transactional searches and branded searches. They largely work the same as they always have. So when someone types in paving company near Columbia, Missouri, or nonprofit CRM software or your actual business name, those types of searches mostly happen in a search engine, not in an AI tool, and even in Google Chrome. AI is not swooping in to summarize the results when you search for those types of terms, traditional search results will display and Google Maps as well. So. That's how those types of searches are handled and presented to buyers. So if your customers mostly find you by searching for a specific service in a specific location, or they know you by name, AI is not your priority right now, because when someone's toilets overflowing, they're not asking chat GBT to explain the plumbing industry. They're googling plumber near me and calling whoever shows up, and the same goes for dentists, contractors, salons, and, quite frankly, most local service businesses. So AI isn't changing that. Where it does get interesting is when your customers don't know what they need, or they don't know what you offer. Is the solution? Okay, these are the people that only know who they are and they have a problem. They don't know that you can come in and solve that problem for them. So if someone has to do real
research before they even know what to search for to buy, that research is increasingly happening inside of AI tools instead of across a dozen website visits, right? So those are like a business owner trying to figure out if there's a software to automate a manual process, maybe a company evaluating a piece of specialized equipment that they've never purchased before, or a buyer researching a product category that didn't even exist five years ago. So if your customers go through a significant education phase before buying, and your website has enough content to show up as a credible source. It's a big if. If your website has enough content to show up as a credible source, then AI search is probably worth paying attention to. You're going to want it, right? You want those people to find you. But if neither of those things is true, then you can just stop worrying about AI and go back to work. Okay, so let's take this forward in an example, think about a local financial advisor. Sure. I mean, people are absolutely asking, AI, where is the best place to put my money for retirement? But what actually matters for that advisor is showing up when someone searches financial advisor in city plus state, right? And people still search for that in Google, the old fashioned way. So if you're like the local financial advisor, even though people research with AI before they buy your product, AI optimization is not your priority. It is so tempting to chase the AI stuff. I get it. The FOMO is so real. But for most local businesses, what you need is a healthy overall web presence. And if you have that, it's already doing the work for you. If you have a good site and good content and active Google business profile, a consistent online presence, that's what gets you found in Google and positions you well for AI over time, not a separate AI strategy. You don't need that. You're okay. You're okay unless your website's a pile of crap and you have no words on it, in which case you're host, okay, but for so many more reasons than because AI, so many more reasons. Okay, so that's what's happening, right? Google's not dying. People are still going to search when they're ready to buy on Google to find what they need for right now, until AI gets better at selling things, but they are using AI to search for stuff, and if your clients are using AI to search for stuff, you probably want your message in the AI mix, so that way they read it. And if not, it's all good. So let's say that you do want to get your stuff cited in AI. What do you need to do? Like, what makes a site more likely to get cited? So here's the part that most people miss, the things I'm going to talk about next, they are not AI specific tactics. They're just what good website, content and structure looks like. That's it. Okay? So a good website with good content and good structure, does it for you? All right now, the shift that's happening right now isn't about adding AI strategy on top of your existing site. It's about moving away from that glossy, vague we're super passionate about delivering solutions website copy and replacing it with content that actually answers real questions in plain language, and then putting that content on a website that actually works for real humans when they land on it, because if it works for humans, then it works for Google, and yes, then it works for AI too. See how it's like this big, beautiful circle. All right, so let's get to those things. The first thing is eat signals, E, E, A T. It stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust. This is online marketing's way of saying that Google knows that your site doesn't suck and they can trust it as a valuable source of information. And what's tricky is it's not just about what's on your site. This is also not a new concept, and it's not built overnight. It's about overall online health. Okay? Because the signals are not compiled from all over the web. They are compiled some on your site. So you can have things like author bios that show who's actually writing and why they're qualified. So you could have staff bios and credentials stories. You can have certification. And years of experience that are stated clearly on the website. Share case studies, project examples with real details, not just pictures. Okay, you have to actually have words. And you have to say, here's a problem that we face, and here's how we solved it. Testimonials from real people. Bonus points. If they're also on Google or someplace else online, you should actually share your contact information. I mean, it makes it a lot easier for people to contact you when your actual contact information is on the site. But Google likes that too, because it shows that
you're credible. And then also on your site, you need to have a security certificate, so it should be served from HTTPS, not HTTP, and a privacy policy. And those are things that you've needed to have for a long time. So if you don't have them and you want to show up on AI, then you should definitely get them. And then there's other pieces that are off your site now, Domain Authority, this is off your site, but it's also on your site. So that's how long your website's been around, and how many sites link to you. The more sites that link to you and use you as a quality reference that shows Google that your website's a quality website, and the longer that your website's been around and the more consistently you've published on it, that also shows Google that you're a quality website. So that domain score, that authority, it's built over time, you should also have a consistent name, address and phone number, across all directories, not just Google. I mean, it should be everywhere, everywhere from Yelp to Facebook. It should all be the same. And I'm talking down to the comma. People make it exactly the same. You should have an active social presence. You don't have to post every day, but you do need to exist. You should not look like you just fell off of a cliff. Okay? Google reviews are really powerful the quality of them and the quantity and the recency, so you want to make sure that they are frequently coming in and that there's not a huge gap in between them. And consistency doesn't just matter in those reviews or testimonials. It's about how consistently you publish everything. And do you update your website? Does it look like you're alive and like you care? Now, if your website looks trustworthy to humans, then it generally looks trustworthy to AI. So just like Google, AI is strongly taking into consideration all of the things that you have about your business out online, all those eat signals. Now, one of the ways that you can build those eat signals is the second thing that your website needs to have to show up in AI overviews, and that is direct answers to real questions. And this is a big one, don't just add a Frequently Asked Questions page and call it done. You need to put frequently asked questions, style content on every service page, every product page, any page where someone might have a question before they decide to contact you. And I'm not just talking about the questions that make you look good. I'm talking about the real ones, the ones that you get in sales meetings, the pushy questions, the objections, the stuff that people actually type into Google when they're trying to decide if you're worth calling. Okay, so you need to answer those on your web pages. How much does this cost? It actually deserves a real answer and not prices vary, but like, if X type of project typically runs between y and z, say that because people aren't searching for what makes you look good, they're searching for what they want to know, and if your page doesn't answer it, someone else's will, and AI will end up citing them instead of you, and it's okay to repeat yourself. If you've already covered something in your page copy, you can put it in the FAQ too, because people scan and some people will read the copy, but a lot of them are just going to skip reading the headers and then go straight to the FAQs to see if you're answering their questions, and all those people deserve the answer. Now the good news is that by answering the questions on your pages and actually having fully built out thoughtful content on the pages of your website, you are building topical authority, and that's the third thing that you need to show up in AI overviews, because sites that cover a topic thoroughly across multiple pages rank higher than sites with one thin paragraph on the subject. So you don't just want to have one services page with a bulleted list on it and some pictures. You need a page for each one of your services, and you might need to have a page to support each one of the sub services too. It's a big web okay. So this is one of the better arguments for why blogging might just matter even more now than it has before, because when an AI overview is triggered, Google doesn't just look at results for your exact search term, it fans out into related sub queries, pulling sources from across those results too. And the sites that show up consistently across all of those interrelated angles are the ones that get cited even when they don't rank well for the original query. So. Individual services, pages with real information, and then blog posts that go deep on industry questions or project pages covering the same topic with actual descriptive text. All of that adds up and increases the likelihood that your content will be shown or sourced in an AI search result those last two things that we talked about, the direct answers to real questions and topical authority. Those words, they really matter. They matter that they're on your site and that Google and AI can find them, but it matters equally as much that people actually want to read them and don't run and hide
from them. So the fourth thing you need to have in order for AI to pick up your site and its results is clean, organized content. So here's what that actually looks like. In practice, you're going to break up your content with H twos and H threes that actually describe what's in the section. I don't mean like cute, clever headings that make people guess, like our process tells Google and AI absolutely nothing, but how our website build process works tells them everything that they need to know about what's going to be in the next paragraph. And speaking of paragraphs, we need to keep those short. I'm talking three to four sentences Max, because if you're staring at a wall of text, so is everyone else, including AI, trying to extract a useful answer from your page. Okay, so then you want to lead with the answer and then explain it, because people scan before they read, and if the most important information is buried at the end of paragraph four, then most people and AI systems are never going to get there. Use bulleted lists. Yes, friends, bulleted lists. It's so much easier to read with those. And then make sure that your page structure is predictable. Talk about what you do, who it's for, how it works, what it costs, what questions people have. Put it in the same order. The order makes sense to humans, and it also makes sense to AI, and it makes it so much easier to design and make your whole website look more professional and consistent, and consistency makes people feel like your website's easy to use and that it's professional, which are two things that you really want them to feel when they're on your site. And these types of things are the reason that we push for ADA compliant content structure, because what's good for a screen reader is good for Google and is good for AI and is good for humans, because it's accessible, scannable, it's all logically organized. It's not just nice to have. It's a must have now, because people need it and AI needs it, and Google has needed it all along. We've just ignored it, right? And now for the last and final item on this list, number five, the most techy of them all, schema markup and technical signals.
Now schema markup is code that labels your content for search engines. So think of it like folder labels that tell AI exactly what's on the page, instead of making it guess it's infrastructure. It's not a magic bullet, so it won't single handedly get you cited, but it's one of the few technical things you can actually control that Google explicitly uses when generating its AI overviews. So we always build a baseline amount of schema into every site that we build. The types that matter most are the organization schema, which tells AI who you are, where you are, and how to verify that you're a real business. The FAQ schema, it labels your question and answer content so that AI can extract it cleanly and see it article slash blog posting schema, that schema attributes content to an author and establishes publish dates. Local Business schema is critical for anyone who serves a geographic area, and it helps AI understand your location and service area. And then there's product and service schema, and you would want this on E commerce and service businesses, because it labels what you offer with enough detail for AI to describe it accurately. And then last but not least is event schema. So for organizations who are running events, it keeps listings accurate across search and AI. Now here's what's kind of crappy, is that schema isn't something that just fully handles itself. There are plugins like Yoast SEO and rank math that now add the most common schema types, like organization, author, article and FAQ, and they do that automatically using a pretty simple interface where you fill in the blanks, but if you need very specific or advanced schema that plugins don't offer, then you still need a developer to write custom code. No, not glamorous, but it does matter, and it helps AI find the individual pieces of content and know exactly what they are. And then, beyond schema, there are a few other technical things worth having in order which are the same that you would want to have on every other website. Which is Page Speed, right? You need things to load quickly. You. Need mobile friendly design, because Google indexes mobile first, and AI follows Google's lead. You need a clean site structure so that your navigation needs to make sense, and pages need to link internally to other pages, because it helps AI understand how your content all connects. And you need to keep your software up to date. If you have an outdated WordPress install and plugins, then you're creating a security vulnerability, and then that can actually tank your credibility signals overnight, and then you're not getting sourced anymore. So none of this is exotic or new. I mean, schema markup has been around for so long, it really has been, but a well built, well maintained website already should have most of it, because it all has been around. And that brings us right back to the answer that we keep landing on, that the shift isn't about optimizing for AI. It's about finally writing your pages and building your sites the way that they probably should have been all along. Okay, so let's say that you've already done all these things and you're like, Well, I want to know, I want to know if my site is showing up in AI searches. You know what? I don't know. I should I even talk about that here? Would that make sense? I mean, I made the tutorial, but let me explain a tiny just a tiny bit, because you know how I like to geek out. Okay, so there are specific tools that will tell you about your AI visibility. I don't know how deep they go. I was just checking out sem rush and or SEMrush, however you want to say it, and Ahrefs to see how they work, but I don't have paid accounts for those. And so I thought to myself, could I use the tools that I already have installed on every single website that I build to glean this information, and the answer is yes. Kind of Is it perfect? No? Is it directionally useful? Totally. Do you have to use your brain 100%
okay, so because between Google Analytics and Search Console, there are enough breadcrumbs to make some pretty educated guesses if you know what you're looking for. So if you're a Google Analytics user, you can go to your referral traffic, which is going to hang out underneath reports, acquisition, traffic, acquisition, and you have to sort it for referral traffic, and then you have to do a search. But it's okay. I outlined that in the tutorial, but ultimately what you're doing there is you're looking at who clicked through to your site from an AI tool. You don't see every time that your content was cited, but if people are clicking then your content is definitely being cited. So it is a solid indicator of which pages are earning AI's trust, even if it doesn't give you the 100% full picture. So that referral data that's hard and fast data right now, you can also pop over into Google Search Console again. There's no clear AI Overview report in Google Search Console yet, but you can see the fingerprints in there. So you're going to look for search terms where your ranking is high and your impressions are high, but your click through rate is either low or declining, because high rank plus high impressions plus low clicks, is a pattern that's going to help you understand if things are being picked up in AI. Remember that traditionally like last year, meaning traditionally, last year, Google was pulling AI citations heavily from the top ranked pages, like 78% came from the top 10 right. But now we're going to see still a lot of activity in the top 10. So 38% of AI overview citations are coming from pages ranked in the top 10 still. So when you're in Search Console, you will want to filter your data, so that way you can look at it from two different perspectives. One is that you're going to look at those, how, what, why searches, because those are those research heavy terms, right? So once you have your data filtered, then you can sort by position and just look through the queries with high impressions and high position. The ones with the low click through rate, they're the ones that are likely being picked up in AI. And you can click on any term, and it will show you exactly what page Google is directing people to when they search for that term. The other way that I would filter and review data in Search Console is looking at non branded search queries. So you can do that by adding a filter and querying to exclude your business name or a part of your business name, or there's actually a new filter now, and you can filter queries by branded and non branded term. So you want to look at the non branded terms, because once again, we're assuming that people are not searching for our business name and AI they're doing that out on Google proper. So we can exclude all that data and review what we have left, sorted by position, and look for those keywords. Once again, have a high position, high impressions, but low clicks, and those are the ones that very well might be picked up in AI and for my last tiny tidbit of a very fun geeking outedness, you can take it full circle, and you can actually start in Google Search Console find the pages that do have that high ranking, high impression, low click through, and then you can go back into Google Analytics and see if you're actually getting referrals from Ai like click throughs from AI to those pages. Bingo, that's it. Those are the ones. I mean, here's the deal, if you have referral traffic from an AI source on a page and the page is ranking in search console with high impressions and lower click through and engagement time on that page has dropped from where it used to be, that content is not failing. It's just very, very likely being cited in AI Okay, that's the end of my geeking out session. Let's wrap this up. All right. The bottom line is, yes, AI is changing search and it will keep changing. But for most of the businesses and nonprofits that we work with, a lot of local businesses, the answer isn't a new AI strategy. It's the same as it's always been. You need a good website with content that actually serves the humans that are trying to use it, clear pages, real answers to real questions, a structure that makes sense, a consistent online presence. Those are the things that get you found in Google, and it's exactly what gets you cited in AI as well. And it's the same thing that gets people to actually contact you once they've
Monica 31:40
landed on your site. So none of this is new advice. It's just more important now than it ever was before. And if your website has those things, your money back to business as usual. You're probably being cited in AI and you can go check out that tutorial to figure out exactly whether you are or not well. Thank you so much for hanging out with me today, friends and for letting me geek out a little bit at the end there. If you enjoyed this podcast, or if you learned a thing or two, please leave us a review. We would love to have you, and definitely head on over to mayecreate.com that's m, a, y, E, C, R, E, A, T, e.com, to get the fully formatted blog post of this episode and that tutorial that I've been referring to this time over and over again, and join us again next month, because we have a whole new, very fun topic, actually not new. It's not new. It's actually just compounding on the thing we just talked about, which is blogging. You guessed it, friends, it is not dead. No blogging did not die, but the strategy that you're currently using, it might have. So we're going to take a look at how you can blog in this new AI atmosphere and get the most out of your work. So thank you so much for hanging out with me today, and until next time, go forth and market with purpose.
