Google Unveils "AI Mode" Search 🤬

March 6, 2025

Heyyy super late edition today because I spent a bunch of time @ the vet and then in meetings (everything is fine).

I’m not sure I totally figured out the weekly-tag-opting-out-of-daily thing, so if you opted to get an email weekly but are getting this daily one, please LMK so I can pull more of my hair out about this, thanks! :)

Otherwise, here you go, another great email about SEO—a great industry!!!

A WORD FROM RANKS.COM

Need To Figure Out SEO While It’s Still A Viable Channel?

I’ve got a couple of spots to work with individuals or companies that need some SEO help. Things like:

• strategy

• creative link building

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• strategic acquisitions

Just book a spot on the calendar, no pressure, no sales-y chat:

AI Search

Google Just Hammered Another Nail Into The SEO Coffin /Dramatic

Google has just announced the next big AI addition to it’s search arsenal (article via Ars Technica), and that is: complete AI-only search results.

The quick summary:

Google has begun testing something called “AI Mode—” their latest search advancement that no one asked for.

It solves the problem of, uh, doing a search and clicking on the results?

The main thing:

So, this is… it’s not great.

Currently it is just an experimental feature that you have to way opt into, but if you are a site that relies on ANY search traffic and you thought we were playing on hard mode before?

Well, the easiest thing is to just show you what AI Mode looks like, but to sum it up real quick, if you have ever used Perplexity or Google’s NotebookLLM, it is a lot like that. It cites it’s sources, but no one will ever click those because it summarizes the entire page right there, like AI Overview but for Literally Any Query. Here’s a video of it in action:

RIP publishers with commodity content, I guess (or even non-commodity content, jeeze).

My Take:

Well, I'm not here to be Petey Pessimism or to drown you in the waters of Doom Ocean, but I’ve always said that Google hates sending your site traffic. They want it ALL.

And now that they’ve built their own AI trained on all those websites banished to The Shadow Realm, they can have it all. While Google claims that their mission is to help people discover interesting content and websites, their actions seem to say otherwise.

The obvious takeaway from this, at least to me, comes in two thoughts:

1. Diversify your traffic NOW (if you haven’t started to already) so you’ve got some momentum before you absolutely need it, and;

2. Figure out how to get traffic from LLMs, even Google’s shitty version where they are just summarizing everything, because that is clearly where your traffic is going to come from in 2-5 years (even though this is not a particularly great option—possibly more on that tomorrow).

Any implications I’ve missed? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

~

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until next time,

sean