Reading my social media feeds, Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) is a subject I’ve been seeing more of.

SGE is the next chapter in the evolution of search, and that’s the reason why it’s something I’ve been paying more attention to.

So what is SGE?

Search Generative Experience (SGE) is Google’s AI powered search experience. It’s an important development because we’re likely to see a change in how people use and interact with search engines and this will potentially change SEO strategies.

Google SGE gives an AI generated result to lots of search queries that appear in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).

SGE is not like ChatGPT. When you perform a search on Google, an AI powered result appears. It will pull together content from around the web, giving an overall snapshot including links to underlying sources along with further prompts/questions for you to explore the topic.

It’s giving you more detailed answers beyond the traditional search results. Alongside relevant links, searchers will see suggestions for places, people and companies that are associated with the search query.

You’re getting a general overview on the query you’ve typed in, and the benefit is that you don’t have to click around on lots of different links in the SERPs to get a better understanding of the topic you’re interested in.

I found this article from Search Engine Journal really useful in understanding on how search results will look with SGE.

Google Search Generative Experience: A look at SGE with 12 AI Overviews

It gives you plenty of examples of results for different types of queries.

Beneath the generative AI response, you’ll still see the standard Google search results appear with organic search results, people also ask, and a knowledge panel. If you’re wondering about Ads, they’re not disappearing. They’ll still be displayed at the top for certain queries.

SGE is about moving towards a more interactive, conversational style search experience, where users get to join the dots as they research and learn more about a topic. One feature of SGE is that you can ask follow-up questions, which is part of that conversational experience. You can already start to see a more personalised and interactive experience developing.

How to prepare for SGE

This is the obvious question I’ve been thinking. SGE is still in the experimental stages of testing, and it’s not affecting my day-to-day working life, but I’m already thinking about its likely impact in the future.

There are a few key points which are becoming really clear and obvious to me. Firstly, the role of search engines in moving beyond just simply retrieving information.

For your content to be included in an SGE result, it needs to be of high quality. Google is placing a higher premium on high value content. It means making sure you adhere to the principles of E-E-A-T. You want to be seen as a credible source on a topic.

Google wants to give users trustworthy and reliable information by including content from experts into the Search Generative Experience. It means creating content that shows real knowledge and expertise and isn’t just generated by AI. Showing that a real human is behind the content created is important, as this is more likely to be pulled into an SGE result.

More zero click results

SGE is likely to have an impact on organic traffic. In the SERPs, organic results are going to be pushed further down, SGE will drive less traffic to most sites ranking for a keyword and there’s going to be more no-click queries. These are queries where you can get your answer without having to click on a link taking you to a particular website.

For writers, marketeers and SEOs it’s probably not going to be worth trying to rank and create content for these no click queries. Instead, SGE will mean focussing more on conversational and long-tail search terms. This is something I feel I already do, but it feels like this will become more important.

Connecting users and content

SGE is about Google enhancing search with AI, and it’s going to have a significant impact on how writers, content creators and SEO professionals think about and plan their content strategies but one thing to keep remembering is that ultimately, we’re still trying to connect users with web content that they’re looking for.