Your Site is Not Ready and You are Not Alone.
On May 19th, Google announced the biggest change to its search page in 25 years. The search box is now “AI powered” and searches are handled by Search Agents.
I attended a presentation about a week ago by a software company selling AI Website data reports. One point they made in their presentation stuck with me. When SEO was catching on, there was one player, Google. Other search engines that came along adapted Google’s requirements and standards. SEO work had one playbook and everyone followed the rules.
Not true with AI. I can share that on any given day our Cybervise site has 19 different AIs trying to capture information. They all work differently. No unified playbook. We are not going to wait for someone to give us the rules, we need to move our websites to the next level.
No One is Ready for This Amount of Change
The good news is no one is ready for the amount of change needed to their website. It is estimated that, best case, 70% of business websites have the info that AI needs. The more realistic number is 95% of business websites are unprepared.
Where to Begin – How Do We Make the Shift to AI-Preparedness
Do you have content on your site meant only for Google? I am identifying content on our Cybervise site done only for SEO. Getting rid of it or rewriting. More deleting going on then rewriting. Keeping what will help current and potential customers.
Here is what I am focusing on with our Cybervise site:
- Crawling and Indexing – making sure anyone who needs to get to our website can and that they see as much as possible. That includes watching speed and code updates.
- Fresh Content – this is now an ongoing activity. I am looking at the list of pages that AIs are visiting making sure everything is current. Also, purging old stuff. Volume of content is not helping. Its just more to keep track of.
- Gathering Data about our AI Gaps – I have several reports running on our site. I am pulling together all the data and we will use this to launch a website improvement project yet this summer.
Small Projects To Help Get Your Site a Little Closer
- Check Your Bolds – I have been using Google Gemini to check content for some SEO issues. It does not like to see text wrapped in multiple style tags. For example, you have a heading, say an H2 that is also bold and italicized or underlined. Gemini has trouble picking out the actual H2. Dial down the text formatting. Move styles that you feel are crucial to the external style sheet. (Corinne is really good at this! Reach out if you need help. )
- Internal Linking – As I review AI Audit reports for many websites, internal links is a common problem. This means linking to other pages on your website within the text of your webpage. Not your menus, but a text link on the page. You want 3-5 pages on your website linking to each one of the pages on your website. Here is what I would do. Take a page on your site, decide how you would describe the main topic of that page. Use your site search to search that topic. From the results, go to 3-5 other pages and link that topic back to your chosen page. Take a couple of pages at time and work through your site.
- Identify Fragile Parts of Your Website – As you read this I am sure that something is popping in your head. Something on your site that doesn’t always act the same. The thing on your site you are constantly having to fix. New Agents are going to be visiting your site. New crawlers and bots. Anything that breaks easy will not survive this. Make a plan to replace it. Examples: Old Hosting Server. Themes no longer supported. Anything with a display issue.
- Think about AI Data. – There is really great data out there. Data that will give you a road map to fix your site. Google just announced that they will be providing AI reports through Google Search Console. They are rolling out gradually and you have to earn enough mentions to register a report. In the meantime, you might want to look at other sources. Bing Webmaster Tools is also planning on adding AI reports (they help power ChatGPT). You can implement that for free. But AI data is expensive (FYI- the company I mentioned above, starting price is $2500/month.) aDo it when you are ready to work on your website. Don’t spend money on data you won’t use in the next couple of months.
WordPress 7.0 – AI Foundation
You may have noticed a major core update about 2 weeks ago. WordPress 7.0 is supposed to be the new AI version. WordPress has made it easier to connect APIs and workflows to your site. This will benefit sites that have interactive components. Where you can connect to AIs to allow Agents to perform tasks on behalf of a human. WordPress’s new tools have nothing to do with getting your content mentioned in AIs. That will be your job and that’s what we need to start working on.
Google’s Guide to Optimizing for Generative AI Features on Google Search
In May Google released its documentation on how to prepare your website for AI. It has always been my practice that if Google gives you instructions, use them. Take a peak at this document. If you read nothing else, look at the myth-busters section. This demonstrates how fast things are moving. I see a lot of best practice advice that we heard over the past year, now showing up here as a myth to ignore.
Need to Talk this Through? Cybervise is here.
There is a lot to do. Focus on getting a plan together and making a start. Schedule a check-in meeting or a Free Consultation and find out what your site needs.
