SEO Strategy Archives SEO Strategy

Jun 18 2025

AIO Hurting Traffic? How To Identify True Loss With GA4, GSC & Rank Tracking [Webinar] via @sejournal, @lorenbaker

Wondering if AI Overviews (AIOs) are stealing your clicks?

Are these AI answer engines eating into our traffic, or just changing the shape of it?

Google’s AI Overviews now appear on up to 40% of search queries, but what impact are they really having?

Stop Guessing. How To Measure AIO’s Real Impact

Get the on-demand webinar, where we explore the three main tools that can help you:

In this tactical on-demand session, Tom Capper, Sr. Search Scientist at STAT, will walk you through a practical framework for assessing AIO impact using three tools you already rely on.

You’ll learn to pinpoint if, where, and how AIOs affect your traffic so that you can respond with clarity, not guesswork.

Start Measuring the Real Impact of AIOs on SERPs Today

Don’t rely on assumptions.

Grab this free on-demand webinar now to accompany the slides below; uncover if AIOs are actually hurting your traffic, and what to do about it.

Join Us For Our Next Webinar!

Lead Local SEO: How To AI-Proof Your Rankings With Reviews

Join Mél Attia, Sr. Marketing Manager at GatherUp, as she shows how consumer trust and AI updates are reshaping Local SEO, and how agencies can lead the way.

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Jun 17 2025

See What AI Sees: AI Mode Killed the Old SEO Playbook — Here’s the New One via @sejournal, @mktbrew

This post was sponsored by MarketBrew. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

Is Google using AI to censor thousands of independent websites?

Wondering why your traffic has suddenly dropped, even though you’re doing SEO properly?

Between letters to the FTC describing a systematic dismantling of the open web by Google to SEO professionals who may be unaware that their strategies no longer make an impact, these changes represent a definite re-architecting of the web’s entire incentive structure.

It’s time to adapt.

While some were warning about AI passage retrieval and vector scoring, the industry largely stuck to legacy thinking. SEOs continued to focus on E-E-A-T, backlinks, and content refresh cycles, assuming that if they simply improved quality, recovery would come.

But the rules had changed.

Google’s Silent Pivot: From Keywords to Embedding Vectors

In late 2023 and early 2024, Google began rolling out what it now refers to as AI Mode.

What Is Google’s AI Mode?

AI Mode breaks content into passages, embeds those passages into a multi-dimensional vector space, and compares them directly to queries using cosine similarity.

In this new model, relevance is determined geometrically rather than lexically. Instead of ranking entire pages, Google evaluates individual passages. The most relevant passages are then surfaced in a ChatGPT-like interface, often without any need for users to click through to the source.

Beneath this visible change is a deeper shift: content scoring has become embedding-first.

What Are Embedding Vectors?

Embedding vectors are mathematical representations of meaning. When Google processes a passage of content, it converts that passage into a vector, a list of numbers that captures the semantic context of the text. These vectors exist in a multi-dimensional space where the distance between vectors reflects how similar the meanings are.

Instead of relying on exact keywords or matching phrases, Google compares the embedding vector of a search query to the embedding vectors of individual passages. This allows it to identify relevance based on deeper context, implied meaning, and overall intent.

Traditional SEO practices like keyword targeting and topical coverage do not carry the same weight in this system. A passage does not need to use specific words to be considered relevant. What matters is whether its vector lands close to the query vector in this semantic space.

How Are Embedding Vectors Different From Keywords?

Keywords focus on exact matches. Embedding vectors focus on meaning.

Traditional SEO relied on placing target terms throughout a page. But Google’s AI Mode now compares the semantic meaning of a query and a passage using embedding vectors. A passage can rank well even if it doesn’t use the same words, as long as its meaning aligns closely with the query.

This shift has made many SEO strategies outdated. Pages may be well-written and keyword-rich, yet still underperform if their embedded meaning doesn’t match search intent.

What SEO Got Wrong & What Comes Next

The story isn’t just about Google changing the game, it’s also about how the SEO industry failed to notice the rules had already shifted.

Don’t: Misread the Signals

As rankings dropped, many teams assumed they’d been hit by a quality update or core algorithm tweak. They doubled down on familiar tactics: improving E-E-A-T signals, updating titles, and refreshing content. They pruned thin pages, boosted internal links, and ran audits.

But these efforts were based on outdated models. They treated the symptom, visibility loss, not the cause: semantic drift.

Semantic drift happens when your content’s vector no longer aligns with the evolving vector of search intent. It’s invisible to traditional SEO tools because it occurs in latent space, not your HTML.

No amount of backlinks or content tweaks can fix that.

This wasn’t just platform abuse. It was also a strategic oversight.

SEO teams:

Many believed that doing what Google said, improving helpfulness, pruning content, and writing for humans, would be enough.

That promise collapsed under AI scrutiny.

But we’re not powerless.

Don’t: Fall Into The Trap of Compliance

Google told the industry to “focus on helpful content,” and SEOs listened, through a lexical lens. They optimized for tone, readability, and FAQs.

But “helpfulness” was being determined mathematically by whether your vectors aligned with the AI’s interpretation of the query.

Thousands of reworked sites still dropped in visibility. Why? Because while polishing copy, they never asked: Does this content geometrically align with search intent?

Do: Optimize For Data, Not Keywords

The new SEO playbook begins with a simple truth: you are optimizing for math, not words.

The New SEO Playbook: How To Optimize For AI-Powered SERPs

Here’s what we now know:

AI Mode is real and measurable.
✅You can calculate embedding similarity.
✅You can test passages against queries.
✅You can visualize how Google ranks.
Content must align semantically, not just topically.
✅Two pages about “best hiking trails” may be lexically similar, but if one focuses on family hikes and the other on extreme terrain, their vectors diverge.
Authority still matters, but only after similarity.
✅The AI Mode fan-out selects relevant passages first. Authority reranking comes later.
✅If you don’t pass the similarity threshold, your authority won’t matter.
Passage-level optimization is the new frontier.
✅Optimizing entire pages isn’t enough. Each chunk of content must pull semantic weight.

How Do I Track Google AI Mode Data To Improve SERP Visibility?

It depends on your goals; for success in SERPs, you need to focus on tools that not only show you visibility data, but also how to get there.

Profound was one of the first tools to measure whether content appeared inside large language models, essentially offering a visibility check for LLM inclusion. It gave SEOs early signals that AI systems were beginning to treat search results differently, sometimes surfacing pages that never ranked traditionally. Profound made it clear: LLMs were not relying on the same scoring systems that SEOs had spent decades trying to influence.

But Profound stopped short of offering explanations. It told you if your content was chosen, but not why. It didn’t simulate the algorithmic behavior of AI Mode or reveal what changes would lead to better inclusion.

That’s where simulation-based platforms came in.

Market Brew approached the challenge differently. Instead of auditing what was visible inside an AI system, they reconstructed the inner logic of those systems, building search engine models that mirrored Google’s evolution toward embeddings and vector-based scoring. These platforms didn’t just observe the effects of AI Mode, they recreated its mechanisms.

As early as 2023, Market Brew had already implemented:

Passage segmentation that divides page content into consistent ~700-character blocks.
Embedding generation using Sentence-BERT to capture the semantic fingerprint of each passage.
Cosine similarity calculations to simulate how queries match specific blocks of content, not just the page as a whole.
Thematic clustering algorithms, like Top Cluster Similarity, to determine which groupings of passages best aligned with a search intent.

🔍 Market Brew Tutorial: Mastering the Top Cluster Similarity Ranking Factor | First Principles SEO

This meant users could test a set of prompts against their content and watch the algorithm think, block by block, similarity score by score.

Where Profound offered visibility, Market Brew offered agency.

Instead of asking “Did I show up in an AI overview?”, simulation tools helped SEOs ask, “Why didn’t I?” and more importantly, “What can I change to improve my chances?”

By visualizing AI Mode behavior before Google ever acknowledged it publicly, these platforms gave early adopters a critical edge. The SEOs using them didn’t wait for traffic to drop before acting, they were already optimizing for vector alignment and semantic coverage long before most of the industry knew it mattered.

And in an era where rankings hinge on how well your embeddings match a user’s intent, that head start has made all the difference.

Visualize AI Mode Coverage. For Free.

SEO didn’t die. It transformed, from art into applied geometry.

AI Mode Visualizer Tutorial

To help SEOs adapt to this AI-driven landscape, Market Brew has just announced the AI Mode Visualizer, a free tool that simulates how Google’s AI Overviews evaluate your content:

Enter a page URL.
Input up to 10 search prompts or generate them automatically from a single master query using LLM-style prompt expansion.
See a cosine similarity matrix showing how each content chunk (700 characters) for your page aligns with each intent.
Click any score to view exactly which passage matched, and why.

🔗 Try the AI Mode Visualizer

This is the only tool that lets you watch AI Mode think.

Two Truths, One Future

Nate Hake is right: Google restructured the game. The data reflects an industry still catching up to the new playbook.

Because two things can be true:

Google may be clearing space for its own services, ad products, and AI monopolies.
And many SEOs are still chasing ghosts in a world governed by geometry.

It’s time to move beyond guesses.

If AI Mode is the new architecture of search, we need tools that expose how it works, not just theories about what changed.

We were bringing you this story back in early 2024, before AI Overviews had a name, explaining how embeddings and vector scoring would reshape SEO.

Tools like the AI Mode Visualizer offer a rare chance to see behind the curtain.

Use it. Test your assumptions. Map the space between your content and modern relevance.

Search didn’t end.

But the way forward demands new eyes.

Book Your AI Mode Strategy Session

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by MarketBrew. Used with permission.

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Jun 2 2025

How To Create An SEO Roadmap That Actually Drives Results via @sejournal, @coreydmorris

Many companies approach SEO reactively – chasing rankings, responding to algorithm updates, being distracted by AI, or focusing on quick wins – without a long-term plan.

But successful SEO strategies start with a structured roadmap that aligns with business objectives, technical priorities, and content planning.

Planning isn’t an exciting term, and many planning processes are never-ending, poorly defined, or difficult to translate into an impactful deliverable.

I get it. SEO is a discipline that requires a lot of iterative updates, testing, learning, and can have a seemingly infinite number of ways to stack your tactics to end at the same goal result.

I will point out, though, that if you’ve ever been disillusioned with the results you received or the (lack) of return on investment in time or resources, you may not have had a strong enough plan or detailed enough roadmap guiding the process.

To help give you a better opportunity to reach goals and reduce future regrets, I’m going to walk through what should go into a strategic, results-driven SEO roadmap, including:

Aligning SEO with business objectives and outcomes.
Setting realistic SEO goals with clear key performance indicators (KPIs).
Prioritizing SEO tactics and tasks.
Bonus: Seeing it through to success.

Aligning SEO With Business Objectives And Outcomes

This isn’t a new topic, and it is also not one that is exclusive to just SEO as a digital marketing channel. However, it is critical.

Digital marketing doesn’t have to be an expensive line item. It can (and should) be an investment, and investments expect a return.

If you’re a CMO or in marketing leadership, you feel this expectation daily.

If you’re deep in the details, wearing a digital marketing or SEO specialist hat, you likely have recurring conversations with those who are trying to quantify your efforts further.

Your plan needs to have a clearly defined set of goals. SEO (like most marketing initiatives) can’t fix brand, product, customer service, or retention problems in a business.

Whether in a dedicated SEO role, or a broader digital marketing one, or even in leadership, I can attest to how uncomfortable it can be when company politics, silos, and other barriers exist.

It is much easier to just do the things you can control and not wade into messes.

If you don’t have business outcomes defined and aligned with your SEO KPIs, though, at some point, someone is going to ask and want to connect the dots between the efforts and resources and how it impacts the bottom line of the organization.

I recommend getting people at the highest levels possible, as well as the broader business plans, metrics, and overall performance, connected with those doing SEO, to utilize in the roadmap.

That way, when down the road things are happening at a technical or detailed level and questions arise about the direction of the plan and resources, there’s a business-case foundation.

Setting Realistic SEO Goals With Clear KPIs

Sometimes goals are dictated to us, and in other cases, things are wide open, and we are asked to share what we think is reasonable in terms of conversions or KPIs.

If you are able to align with business goals, you should have a good measure and understanding of what SEO could and should drive toward.

However, that doesn’t mean that the work is done when it comes to translating that down further into SEO measures.

It is getting harder and harder to accurately project organic search traffic with the rise of zero-click searches on Google and reduced clicks from AI Overviews.

The days of broad strategies and focusing on a quantity of traffic and letting your site filter for quality are over.

I strongly recommend that SEO KPIs be focused on quality metrics.

Working backwards from the business outcomes, in alignment with your funnels and customer journey maps, back to the first possible touch point from SEO.

By looking at all the branches and anticipated ways someone might enter from SEO, you can categorize them and come up with a quality-first approach to your KPIs and expectations when looking at your current performance data and third-party research data.

You might find that the volume and expectations for what SEO can drive need to be tempered at this point, and this is the time to do it before getting way down the road in investment.

Prioritizing SEO Tactics And Tasks

Your roadmap so far is pretty metric and goal-heavy. That’s on purpose. However, the other big category that I often see tank, even the most data-driven approach to SEO, is prioritization and resourcing.

Years ago, when I had a national restaurant chain as a client, we had an awesome strategy mapped out. We did a test with a few locations and saw massive success.

When the roadmap and plan for the next year were ready to roll out, we were blindsided by resource constraints. The problem wasn’t with investment in the SEO functions or content creation, or even with the budget for the dev team. It was a priority for the IT and dev teams.

We didn’t know that they were booked out for the next six months on a big in-store POS system initiative and wouldn’t be able to touch our plan or anything more than a triaged website emergency.

While I pivoted the plan to local search and getting them to the top of Google Maps, it was a big letdown for all of us invested in the full plan, as we didn’t account for this type of challenge.

SEO is more than just SEO. It requires a range of other skills and disciplines. Maybe you have someone who wears all the hats (or it is you), but regardless of the situation, you’ve got to plot out all of the tactics and resources needed.

You can’t get it all done at once, but also in the pacing of the plan, you can’t allow things to get put on the shelf when other tasks are stealing attention.

Knowing the non-SEO factors that can have an impact on SEO is really important in crafting your plan.

If you’re struggling with the specific tactics that should go in your plan, or the cadence for them, find external checklists and support, but be careful not to rely solely on checklists as a substitute for your tailored strategy.

Bonus: Seeing It Through To Success

If you’re struggling with the planning process, a framework that I recommend is the START Planning Process (full disclosure: I created it).

It provides a five-step process for digital marketing planning and can be applied to a multi-channel approach or narrowed to just focus on SEO and help you get through the strategy, tactics, and rest of the steps needed to arrive at your ultimate plan and roadmap.

When you activate your plan and put the roadmap into place, there will be distractions. Internal distractions and disruptions will happen. External changes will impact your perfectly crafted plan.

When any of these things happen, they become what I like to call “trigger events.” They are opportunities to revisit your roadmap, see how they might change your priorities and focuses for SEO, and then get back to work.

Even if trigger events don’t happen, you want to make sure that your plan, resource scheduling, and tasks have built-in reflection points where you can take a step back, evaluate your plan, and recalibrate if necessary.

Wrap Up

SEO is hard work. It is changing with AI, and if we weren’t previously, we definitely are focused now on quality more than quantity.

Traffic sources are diversifying, and we are working hard to keep up with where things are going, balanced with what works still for our businesses and growth today. Whew.

I hate hearing that “SEO doesn’t work for my company” or for other reasons why it gets written off when I see it working for competitors or others in the same industry.

Yes, there are some limited cases where that’s true, and it isn’t something to consider.

In most others, though, so many symptoms of it not working are connected to a root cause of not having a roadmap or plan.

I’m a strong believer in the more we’re being distracted, the more – now than ever – that we need to be disciplined, documented, and working off of a solid foundation.

More Resources:

Featured Image: KT Stock photos/Shutterstock

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May 13 2025

How To Increase Google Discover Visibility Naturally Using These Ranking Signals via @sejournal, @rollerads

This post was sponsored by RollerAds. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

Want more visibility in Google Discover?

Not sure how to get into Google’s personalized news feeds?

Discover isn’t like search. You don’t rank for keywords.

You get selected.

And that means the best way to get featured isn’t to optimize for keywords; it’s to optimize for specific algorithmic signals.

In this guide, we’ll cover the core ranking signals that help Google determine which content belongs in Discover feeds, and how you can naturally boost those signals using tools like push notifications.

Google Discover Optimization Tips: Which Signals Tell Google Your Content Belongs in Discover?

Google Discover uses a different algorithm from traditional search results.

While it still considers many of the same quality indicators, Discover visibility depends less on keywords and more on how your content performs in the real world.

Here are the most important content quality signals for Discover.

1. E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust

A good rule of thumb is to follow the “E-E-A-T” guideline:

Experience: Firsthand, real-world familiarity with the subject.
Expertise: Deep knowledge and skill in your content niche.
Authoritativeness: Recognition from other trusted sources.
Trustworthiness: Accurate, unbiased, and reliable information.

2. Engagement Metrics

These tell Google your content resonates with users and may be worth promoting more widely.

3. Strong Visuals & Headlines

Discover is highly visual, so if you don’t stand out immediately, the users are likely to scroll past your content.

Take your time to polish headlines to get attention, but make sure they accurately reflect the content of your article, post, or whatever you’re writing right now.

Engaging headlines, images, and videos perform better, especially when those assets are optimized for mobile.

4. Technical SEO & Mobile Optimization

While you don’t need to “rank” per se, you do need a well-optimized site, which includes:

Fast load times: Consider page speed and overall efficiency. Use PageSpeed Insights to ensure your web pages are optimized for user performance.
Mobile-friendly layouts: Google Discover is only available on mobile devices, as there is currently no desktop version.
Structured data: Google relies on structured data to categorize content and provide relevant suggestions for users. To attract more engaged and relevant users, you need to add tags and structure data so that Google can better recognize and categorize your content.
Internal linking & link building: It will help you create your own network of content. This concerns old articles, too, as they might serve as a gateway to newer pieces of content.
RSS or Atom Feed: Allow users to follow you to receive updates quickly. Google generates a feed for you automatically, but you can connect your own.
Google Web Stories: Similar to Instagram, these stories appear under the Visual Stories banner on mobiles and serve to expand your reach. Stories are easy to create, engaging, interactive, and fun.

Track, test, improve. Use Google Search Console (GSC) to monitor your performance and statistics. Unlike Google Analytics, it has a dedicated tab for monitoring Google Discover traffic.

5. Freshness & Topical Relevance

Valuable content addresses and solves pain points.

For content to have a better chance of showing up in Discover feeds, it should be:

Accurate.
Timely.
Trending.
Helpful.
Continuously updated.

This is especially powerful if your content is tied to current events or spikes in interest, as shown in Google Trends.

To discover what users search for, try:

Google Search: Enter a query and scroll down to view related and popular requests.
Google Search’s Autocomplete: Start typing a search and observe the suggested autocomplete queries; these are the queries that many others regularly search for.
Google Trends: Identify how popular a content direction is in any part of the world. This is also great for identifying seasonality.

How Google Discover Works

Google Discover suggests your content, which should include all the positive signals mentioned above.
The Google app user engages with your content within Google Discover, adding to Google’s knowledge of how users interact with your website.
These engagements (visitor volume, time on page, user experience, etc.) indicate to Google that your content is well-suited for similar readers.
Google increases your reach and visibility on Google Discover.
Those new viewers engage with your content in a similar pattern.
The cycle repeats, spreading your optimized content to more Google Discover timelines.

This is known as a positive loop because your content consistently passes positive ranking signals back to Google’s Discover algorithm, thereby continuing to increase in engagement.

How Do I Create A Positive Loop & Show Up In Google Discover?

Now that you know what Google is looking for, here’s how to naturally boost those signals.

We know that Google Discover places your content based on:

High-clickthrough rates.
Long time-on-page.
Repeat visitors.

So, how can you increase those metrics?

By getting a dedicated reader base that is always ready to consume your new content.

Push notifications are a great way to alert your dedicated readers that new content is out.

And they will feed your Google Discover algorithm data.

How To Use Push Notifications To Boost These Google Signals

Many publishers avoid push notifications, believing they’re too promotional or might harm user experience (UX).

However, modern push notification platforms allow you to take a more hybrid approach, combining editorial updates with monetization to boost visibility.

Why Hybrid Push Notifications Help Boost Discover Visibility

Done right, push notifications help your content get discovered organically by:

Increasing CTR with a second wave of distribution.
Driving fast engagement shortly after publication.
Bringing back repeat readers to increase session depth.
Boosting behavioral signals that Google uses to judge quality.

In other words, push notifications support the very engagement metrics that can lead to more Discover visibility.

When users receive a mix of informative and promotional pushes, each message feels fresh, encouraging clicks and boosting your CTR.

Higher engagement signals to Google that your content is valuable, increasing the chances of it being featured on Discover.

And since Discover traffic is largely made up of new visitors, each one becomes a fresh opportunity to grow your subscriber base.

Once users opt in, you can keep re-engaging them, creating a cycle of rising visibility, CTR, and traffic.

Image created by RollerAds April, 2025

How to Implement Hybrid Push Format to Get on Discover Faster

In a recent case study, one RollerAds publisher increased their revenue from $0 to $60,000 per month by pairing great content with hybrid push notifications and Discover-optimized distribution. The key was creating content that signals quality and leveraging distribution to show it.

With a tool like RollerAds, you can gain a streamlined way to:

Send personalized push notifications for your latest content.
Mix promotional and editorial messaging without spamming your readers.
Increase engagement, retention, and revenue simultaneously.

Simply register your site, get a custom strategy from your account manager, and start boosting content visibility, without compromising user experience.

Even better? You can monetize this traffic directly with ad formats designed for Discover audiences, no intrusive pop-ups or poor user experience. Just clear, engaging content with a side of revenue.

For SEJ readers, use the code SEJ30 to add +30% to your funds before July 1st, 2025.

Just show the code to your account manager on RollerAds before your first payment.

Getting featured on Google Discover isn’t just about luck; it’s about strategy.

From creating high-quality, relevant content to optimizing visuals, headlines, and mobile performance, every step counts. However, to truly stand out and amplify your chances, pairing content strategy with smart tools, such as hybrid push notifications from RollerAds, can make all the difference.

Engaging your audience through push updates not only drives more clicks but also signals content quality to Google, boosting your Discover reach. With the right monetization tools, you can convert that traffic into substantial revenue.

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by RollerAds. Used with permission.

In-Post Image: Images by RollerAds. Used with permission.

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May 13 2025

Cracking the SEO Code: Regain Control of Search Visibility in the Age of AI [Webinar] via @sejournal, @hethr_campbell

Trying to regain lost visibility in AI-powered search results?

As AI Overviews and answer engines continue to reshape how search works, organic visibility can disappear overnight. If your traffic has taken a hit, you may need a more complete strategy to recover and grow.

Join us for “Own The Total SERP: How To Regain Lost Visibility Across Paid, Organic and Local SEO.” This webinar will introduce the TotalSERP strategy, a unified approach designed to help you reclaim visibility across the entire search landscape.

Why This Session Is Important

Search is no longer limited to paid or organic results. Success now comes from owning the full search engine results pages (SERPs), including local listings and AI-driven experiences.

On May 27, 2025, at 12pm ET, you will learn:
✅ How to gain total SERP visibility across paid, organic and local search
✅ How to use Gen AI to improve content and capture intent
✅ How to turn an integrated search strategy into measurable business results

This session is led by Bhavin Prashad, Associate Vice President of Digital Media, and Dan Lauer, SEO Strategist at DAC. They will walk you through the TotalSERP strategy and show how it can help you rebuild what Google’s algorithm and AI may have taken away.

What makes this session different

The TotalSERP strategy aligns your paid, organic, and local efforts into one consistent plan. It is designed to help you capture customers at every stage of their search journey.

Let’s help you take back control of your visibility and drive results across every part of the search experience.

If you cannot attend live, go ahead and register. We will send you the full recording after the event.

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Apr 29 2025

We Figured Out How AI Overviews Work [& Built A Tool To Prove It] via @sejournal, @mktbrew

This post was sponsored by Market Brew. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

Wondering how to realign your SEO strategy for maximum SERP visibility in AI Overviews (AIO)?

Do you wish you had techniques that mirror how AI understands relevance?

Imagine if Google handed you the blueprint for AI Overviews:

Every signal.
Every scoring mechanism.
Every semantic pattern it uses to decide what content makes the cut.

That’s what our search engineers did.

They reverse-engineered how Google’s AI Overviews work and built a model that shows you exactly what to fix.

It’s no longer about superficial tweaks; it’s about aligning with how AI truly evaluates meaning and relevance.

In this article, we’ll show you how to rank in AIO SERPs by creating embeddings for your content and how to realign your content for maximum visibility by using AIO tools built by search engineers.

The 3 Key Features Of AI Overviews That Can Make Or Break Your Rankings

Let’s start with the basic building blocks of a Google AI Overviews (AIO) response:

What Are Embeddings?

Embeddings are high-dimensional numerical representations of text. They allow AI systems to understand the meaning of words, phrases, or even entire pages, beyond just the words themselves.

Rather than matching exact terms, embeddings turn language into vectors, or arrays of numbers, that capture the semantic relationships between concepts.

For example, “car,” “vehicle,” and “automobile” are different words, but their embeddings will be close in vector space because they mean similar things.

Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or Google Gemini use embeddings to “understand” language; they don’t just see words, they see patterns of meaning.

Image created by MarketBrew.ai, April 2025

Why Do Embeddings Matter For SEO?

Understanding how Large Language Models (LLMs) interpret content is key to winning in AI-driven search results, especially with Google’s AI Overviews.

Search engines have shifted from simple keyword matching to deeper semantic understanding. Now, they rank content based on contextual relevance, topic clusters, and semantic similarity to user intent, not just isolated words.

Image created by MarketBrew.ai, April 2025

Embeddings power this evolution.

They enable search engines to group, compare, and rank content with a level of precision that traditional methods (like TF-IDF, keyword density, or Entity SEO) can’t match.

By learning how embeddings work, SEOs gain tools to align their content with how search engines actually think, opening the door to better rankings in semantic search.

Image created by MarketBrew.ai, April 2025

How To Rank In AIO SERPs By Creating Embeddings

Step 1: Set Up Your OpenAI Account

Sign Up or Log In: If you haven’t already, sign up for an account on OpenAI’s platform at https://platform.openai.com/signup.
API Key: Once logged in, you’ll need to generate an API key to access OpenAI’s services. You can find this in your account settings under the API section.

Step 2: Install The OpenAI Python Client To Simplify This Step For SEO Pros

OpenAI provides a Python client that simplifies the process of interacting with their API. To install it, run the following command in your terminal or command prompt:

pip install openai

Step 3: Authenticate With Your API Key

Before making requests, you need to authenticate using your API key. Here’s how you can set it up in your Python script:

import openai

openai.api_key = 'your-api-key-here'

Step 4: Choose Your Embedding Model

At the time of this article’s creation, OpenAI’s text-embedding-3-small is considered one of the most advanced embedding models. It is highly efficient for a wide range of text processing tasks.

Step 5: Create Embeddings For Your Content

To generate embeddings for text:

response = openai.Embedding.create(

model="text-embedding-3-small",

input="This is an example sentence."

)

embeddings = response['data'][0]['embedding']

print(embeddings)

The result is a list of numbers representing the semantic meaning of your input in high-dimensional space.

Step 6: Storing Embeddings

Store embeddings in a database for future use; tools like Pinecone or PostgreSQL with pgvector are great options.

Step 7: Handling Large Text Inputs

For large content, break it down into paragraphs or sections and generate embeddings for each chunk.

Use similarly sized chunks for better cosine similarity calculations. To represent an entire document, you can average the embeddings for each chunk.

💡Pro Tip: Use Market Brew’s free AI Overviews Visualizer. The search engineer team at Market Brew has created this visualizer to help you understand exactly how embeddings, the fourth generation of text classifiers, are used by search engines.

Semantics: Comparing Embeddings With Cosine Similarity

Cosine similarity measures the similarity between two vectors (embeddings), regardless of their magnitude.

This is essential for comparing the semantic similarity between two pieces of text.

Image created by MarketBrew.ai, April 2025

Typical search engine comparisons include:

Keywords with paragraphs,
Groups of paragraphs with other paragraphs, and
Groups of keywords with groups of paragraphs.

Next, search engines cluster these embeddings.

How Search Engines Cluster Embeddings

Search engines can organize content based on clusters of embeddings.

In the video below, we are going to illustrate why and how you can use embedding clusters, using Market Brew’s free AI Overviews Visualizer, to fix content alignment issues that may be preventing you from appearing in Google’s AI Overviews or even their regular search results!

Embedding clusters, or “semantic clouds”, form one of the most powerful ranking tools for search engineers today.

Semantic clouds are topic clusters in thousands of dimensions. The illustration above shows a 3D representation to simplify understanding.

Topic clusters are to entities as semantic clouds are to embeddings. Think of a semantic cloud as a topic cluster on steroids.

Search engineers use this like they do topic clusters.

When your content falls outside the top semantic cloud – what the AI deems most relevant – it is ignored, demoted, or excluded from AI Overviews (and even regular search results) entirely.

No matter how well-written or optimized your page might be in the traditional sense, it won’t surface if it doesn’t align with the right semantic cluster that the finely tuned AI system is seeking.

By using the AI Overviews Visualizer, you can finally see whether your content aligns with the dominant semantic cloud for a given query. If it doesn’t, the tool provides a realignment strategy to help you bridge that gap.

In a world where AI decides what gets shown, this level of visibility isn’t just helpful. It’s essential.

Free AI Overviews Visualizer: How To Fix Content Alignment

Step 1: Use The Visualizer

Input your URL into this AI Overviews Visualizer tool to see how search engines view your content using embeddings. The Cluster Analysis tab will display embedding clusters for your page and indicate whether your content aligns with the correct cluster.

Screenshot from MarketBrew.ai, April 2025

Step 2: Read The Realignment Strategy

The tool provides a realignment strategy if needed. This provides a clear roadmap for adjusting your content to better align with the AI’s interpretation of relevance.

Example: If your page is semantically distant from the top embedding cluster, the realignment strategy will suggest changes, such as reworking your content or shifting focus.

Screenshot from MarketBrew.ai, April 2025

Example of New Page Content Aligned with Target Embedding

Screenshot from MarketBrew.ai, April 2025

Step 3: Test New Changes

Use the “Test New Content” feature to check how well your content now fits the AIO’s top embedding cluster. Iterative testing and refinement are recommended as AI Overviews evolve.

Screenshot by MarketBrew.ai, April 2025

See Your Content Like A Search Engine & Tune It Like A Pro

You’ve just seen under the hood of modern SEO – embeddings, clusters, and AI Overviews. These aren’t abstract theories. They’re the same core systems that Google uses to determine what ranks.

Think of it like getting access to the Porsche service manual, not just the owner’s guide. Suddenly, you can stop guessing which tweaks matter and start making adjustments that actually move the needle.

At Market Brew, we’ve spent over two decades modeling these algorithms. Tools like the free AI Overviews Visualizer give you that mechanic’s-eye view of how search engines interpret your content.

And for teams that want to go further, a paid license unlocks Ranking Blueprints to help track and prioritize which AIO-based metrics most affect your rankings – like cosine similarity and top embedding clusters.

You have the manual now. The next move is yours.

Reveal What Google’s AI Really Sees

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Market Brew. Used with permission.

In-Post Image: Images by Market Brew. Used with permission.

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Apr 16 2025

AI Overviews: We Reverse-Engineered Them So You Don’t Have To [+ What You Need To Do Next]

This post was sponsored by DAC. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own. Authors: Dan Lauer & Michael Goodman

Is the classic funnel model (TOFU-MOFU-BOFU) still relevant in an AI-driven SERP?

What kinds of queries trigger Google’s AI Overviews?

How can you structure content so that AI pulls your site into the response?

Do you really need to change your SEO strategy?

For years, SEO teams followed a familiar SEO playbook:

Optimize upper-funnel content to capture awareness,
mid-funnel content to drive consideration,
lower-funnel content to convert.

One page, one keyword, one intent.

But with the rise of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, and now Google’s AI Mode, that linear model is increasingly outdated.

So, how do you move forward and keep your visibility high in modern search engine results pages (SERPs)?

We’ve reverse-engineered AI Overviews, so you don’t have to. Let’s dive in.

What We’ve Discovered Through Reverse Engineering Google’s AI Overviews (AIO)

From what we’re seeing across client industries and in how AI-driven results behave, the traditional funnel model – the idea of users moving cleanly from awareness to consideration to conversion – feels increasingly out of step with how people actually search.

How Today’s Search Users Actually Search

Today’s users jump between channels, devices, and questions.

They skim, abandon, revisit, and decide faster than ever.

AI Overviews don’t follow a tidy funnel because most people don’t either.

They surface multiple types of information at once, not because it’s smarter SEO, but because it’s closer to how real decisions get made.

AIOs & AI Mode Aren’t Just Answering Queries – They’re Expanding Them

Traditionally, SEO strategy followed a structured framework. Take a travel-related topic, for example:

Informational (Upper-Funnel) – “How to plan a cruise?”
Commercial (Mid-Funnel) – “Best cruise lines for families”
Transactional (lower-Funnel) – “Find Best Alaska Cruise Deals”

However, AI Overviews don’t stick to that structure.

Instead, they blend multiple layers of intent into a single, comprehensive response.

How AI Overviews Answer & Expand Search Queries

Let’s stay with the travel theme. A search for “Mediterranean cruise” might return an AI Overview that includes:

Best Time to go (Informational).
Booking Your Cruise (Commercial).
Cruise Lines (Navigational).

AI Mode Example for ‘Mediterranean Cruise’

What’s Happening Here?

In this case, Google isn’t just answering the query.

It anticipates what the user will want to know next, acting more like a digital concierge than a traditional search engine.

The AI Overview Test & Parameters

Source: Semrush & Google
Tested Data: 200 cruise-related informational queries

We started noticing this behavior showing up more often, so we wanted to see how common it actually is.

To get a clearer picture, we pulled 200 cruise-related informational queries from SEMrush and ran them through our custom-built AI SERP scraper. The goal was to see how often these queries triggered AI Overviews, and what kind of intent those Overviews covered.

The patterns were hard to miss:

88% of those queries triggered an AI Overview
More than half didn’t just answer the initial question.
52% mixed in other layers of intent, like brand suggestions, booking options, or comparisons, right alongside the basic information someone might’ve been looking for.

Using a different query related to Mediterranean Cruises, the AIO response acts as a travel agent, guiding the user on topics like:

How to fly,
Destinations with region,
Cruise prices,
Cruise lines that sail to that destination.

While it’s an Information non-brand search query, the AIO response is lower-funnel as well.

Again, less than half of the queries were matched intent.

Here are some examples of queries that were identified as Informational and provided only the top-of-funnel response without driving the user further down the funnel.

The Verdict

Even when someone asks a simple, top-of-funnel question, AI is already steering them toward what to do next, whether that’s comparing prices, picking a provider, or booking a trip.

What Does This Mean for SEO Strategies Moving Forward?

If AI Overviews and AI Mode are blending intent types, content, and SEO strategies need to catch up:

It’s no longer enough to rank for high-volume informational keywords. If your content doesn’t address multiple layers of intent, AI will fill the gaps with someone else’s content.
SEO teams need to analyze how AI handles their most important queries. What related questions is it pulling in? Are those answers coming from your site or your competitors?
Think beyond keyword volume. Long-tail queries may have lower search traffic, but they often align better with AI-cited content. Structure your pages with clear headings, bullets, and concise, helpful language—that’s what AI models prefer to surface.

The Future of SEO in an AI World: Hybrid Intent Optimization

The fundamentals of technical and on-page SEO still matter. But if your content is still built around single keywords and single intent types, you’re likely to lose visibility as AI continues to reshape the SERP.

The brands that adapt to this shift by creating content that mirrors the blended, fast-moving behavior of actual users are the ones that will continue to own key moments across the funnel, even as the funnel itself evolves.

As AI transforms search behavior, it‘s crucial to adapt your SEO strategies accordingly. At DAC, we specialize in aligning your content with the latest search trends to enhance visibility and engagement. Reach out to us today to future-proof your strategy with our award-winning TotalSERP approach and stay ahead in the evolving digital landscape.

https://www.dacgroup.com/” class=”btn-learn-more button-green medium-size”>Optimize Your SEO For AI Search, Now

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by DAC. Used with permission.

In-Post Image: Images by DAC. Used with permission.

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Apr 15 2025

AI & SEO-Driven Content Marketing: How To Calculate True ROI for B2B Companies in 2025

This post was sponsored by Heeet. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

How do you calculate the true cost of SEO content production?

Are you overspending or underspending on SEO compared to performance?

Can you connect SEO-driven awareness to pipeline and revenue?

How do you make SEO efforts more visible to your C-suite?

If you aren’t sure, that’s okay.

You may simply lack the tools to measure the actual impact of SEO on revenue.

So, let’s dive in and:

Break down the true steps to B2B conversion.
Highlight the tools to calculate the true ROI of your SEO-driven content in 2025.
Look past the simplified first and last-touch approach to attribution.
Leverage the need for multitouch solutions that track engagement with SEO content throughout the buyer’s journey.

Can I Connect SEO To Revenue?

Yes, you can connect SEO to revenue.

Why Should I Connect SEO To Revenue?

SEO plays a large role in future conversions.

In fact, SEO helps prospects discover your brand, tool, or company.

SEO also helps provide easy-to-discover content with informational intent, which helps to nurture a prospective lead into a sale.

Your prospect’s journey:

Starts at the first time they find your optimized webpage on the search engine results page (SERP).
Moves into nurture, where your B2B prospects typically perform months of extensive product research via traditional searches and AI results before a sale is closed.

The fact that informative content is found on SERPs is due to SEO.

But how is this tracked? How do you know which non-conversion pages are:

Part of the user journey?
Part of the overall ROI?

How Do I Tie SEO To Company Revenue?

Luckily, your C-suite likely recognizes the need for SEO content.

They are prepared to invest in a strategy incorporating AI search.

However, you need tools that validate the investment and clearly showcase it for your higher-ups.

How To Keep Revenue High When SERPs Are Changing

Gartner predicts that traditional search engine volume will drop 25% by 2026 and flow directly to AI chatbots and agents.

As AI continues to accelerate the evolution of SEO, it’s critical to ensure that high-performing pages:

Continue to rank in traditional SERPs.
Appear in Google’s AI overviews.
Get referenced by the Gen AI tools your audience relies on.
They are tracked, so these visits are attributed to a sale.

That’s why you need to understand why certain content is picked up by AI tools and the cost of generating the content to calculate the true ROI of your SEO.

Step 1. How To Create Content That Gets Seen In Traditional Search & AI Overviews

With the shift in consumer search behavior, your first step is to create, optimize, and measure the ROI of content sourced by leading AI tools.

That means appearing in AI Overviews and AI Answers that contain list-based content and product comparisons.

Search Your Brand & See What Each AI Tool Recommends

That’s the first step to determining whether your content or your competitor’s stands out.

Give these prompts a try:

What is the best solution for…
Give me the top tools for…
Best alternative to…
Is [competitor] solution better than…

Optimize Your Existing Content & Strategy To Feed AI’s Answer Base

The next step is optimizing existing content and adjusting your strategy so that you write copy that gives AI the answers it’s looking for.

With that said, following traditional SEO strategies and best practices championed by Google should help.

Just like traditional search, AI tools also favor:

Proper site and article structure with explicit metadata and semantic markup.
Content with lists and bullet points that are easier to scan.
Websites optimized for speed.
Updated content, keeping things fresh with context.
Content with backlinks from high-quality publications.
FAQ sections.
Mobile-responsive websites with indexable content when pulling sources to provide an answer.

These factors give your content more authority in your industry, just like the content outside your website that Google and LLMs look for to find answers from, such as videos on YouTube, reviews on G2, and conversations on Reddit forums.

Publishing enough quality content for all those channels to optimize for AI and be visible in traditional search is no small task. It requires substantial human resources, SEO tools, and time.

Step 2. Understand All Aspects Of The Real Cost Of SEO Content In 2025

SEO is a long game, especially in B2B, where the path from first click to purchase can span weeks or months and involve multiple touchpoints.

And now, with AI influencing how content is discovered, the cost of doing SEO well has increased.

To accurately assess the cost of SEO-driven content in 2025, you need to go beyond production budgets and organic traffic. Here’s how:

Break Down Your True SEO Investment

Start by identifying all the resources that go into content creation and maintenance:

People: Writers, designers, SEOs, developers, and editors.
Tools: SEO platforms, content optimization tools, keyword research databases, analytics software.
Distribution: Paid support for SEO content, social promotion, and email newsletters.
Maintenance: Refreshing old content, updating links, and improving page experience.

Monitor Content Performance Over Time

Track the performance of each piece of content using more than just rankings:

Organic traffic (from both traditional search and AI surfaces).
Time on page and engagement metrics.
Cost per lead and pipeline contribution (if possible).
Assisted conversions across all touchpoints.

Map Content to Buyer Journey Stages

Content doesn’t just convert, it nurtures. Tie content assets to specific stages:

Top-of-funnel (education, discovery).
Mid-funnel (comparison, product evaluation).
Bottom-of-funnel (case studies, demos).

Even if content isn’t the final touchpoint, it plays a role. Traditional tools miss this.

Adjust, Monitor & Pivot

No single metric will tell the full story. Instead:

Adjust: Re-optimize content based on AI overview visibility, CTR, and engagement.
Monitor: Watch how users arrive from search vs. AI sources.
Pivot: Invest more in formats and topics that show traction across both human and AI audiences.

Without full-funnel attribution, even the most engaged content may look like a cost center instead of a revenue driver.

That’s why accurate measurement, aligned with total investment and the full buyer journey, is critical to understanding the real ROI of your SEO content in 2025.

However, we know that:

AI Overviews and similar answer engines also play a big role in education and nurturing.
Attributing a sale to content read on an untrackable AI Overview is impossible, but it’s happening.

This is where the calculation gets difficult.

Step 3. Incorporate Multi-Touch Attribution To Your Revenue Calculations

Now that we’re here, you’re beginning to understand how tricky it is to tie ROI to AI Overview responses that nurture your prospects.

How do you accurately determine the cost?

Some people are creating their own attribution models to calculate ROI.

Most people are using tools that are built specifically for this new calculation.

The only way to accurately calculate cost in B2B SEO is to capture the engagement with content throughout the buyer journey, which conventional attribution models don’t credit.

Incorporate These Blindspots: Pre-Acquisition & The Post-Lead Journey

Another substantial blind spot in SEO measurement occurs when companies focus exclusively on pre-acquisition activities, meaning everything that happens before a lead is added to your CRM.

Consider the typical journey enterprise clients take in an account-based marketing approach:

After multiple organic searches, a prospect converts into a lead from direct traffic.
After being qualified as an SQL, they’re included in an email sequence that they never respond to, but return through a Google Ads campaign promoting a white paper.
They download it from an organic search visit and continue reading more blog articles to understand your product and the outcomes they hope to achieve.

Can your marketing team track how each channel (direct, paid search, and organic) influenced the deal throughout the sales process?

Multitouch attribution tools allow marketers to finally link SEO content to tangible business outcomes by tracking what SEO-driven content leads interacted with before a sale.

Heeet Makes SEO ROI Calculations Easy

After years of wrestling with these challenges, we built Heeet to fill the void: an end-to-end attribution solution that connects SEO efforts and interactions generated from content marketing to revenue by highlighting their impact throughout the sales cycle within Salesforce.

Our proprietary cookieless tracking solution collects more data, ensuring your decisions are based on complete, unbiased insights rather than partial or skewed information.

Traditional SEO measurement often relies on first-click or last-click attribution, which fails to capture SEO’s entire influence on revenue. Heeet places SEO on a level playing field by providing full-funnel attribution that tracks SEO’s impact at every customer journey stage.

We help marketers determine whether SEO-driven content is the first touchpoint, one of the many intermediary interactions along the lengthy B2B sales cycle, or the final conversion leading to a sale to pinpoint SEO’s cumulative influence on your pipeline.

Screenshot from Google, April 2025

Heeet actively tracks every touchpoint, ensuring that the actual impact of SEO is neither underestimated nor misrepresented.

Rather than neglecting SEO’s role when a prospect converts through another channel, Heeet delivers a complete view of how different personas in the buying committee interact with each piece of content and where they’re converting. This empowers businesses to make informed, data-driven SEO strategies and investment decisions.