A client recently came to us because traffic to their site had dropped significantly. This organization relies on traffic from organic search to bring in prospective members and prospective course attendees. Looking at their analytics, we learned that it’s specifically traffic from Google that had dropped significantly. What was going on?
If your site is experiencing a drop in referrals from Google, it’s probably because, as of the end of 2024, 60% of Google searches are zero-click. A zero-click search is when someone conducts a Google search, gets the answer they’re looking for without clicking, and calls it a day because they’ve gotten the answer(s) they need. Google used to refer us to the sites that had the answers we were looking for. Now Google gives us the answers.
So what’s the answer? Today, the answer is AEO or Answer Engine Optimization and GEO or Generative Engine Optimization. AEO and GEO are the art and science of optimizing your website content for the AI answer engines like Google, ChatGPT, CoPilot, Claude, Bing, etc. We used to focus on SEO and search ranking, but today, it’s about providing Google and ChatGPT with the answers to visitors’ questions, and providing the content that the AI engines can consume and include as part of their reasoning.
Does this mean SEO, or search engine optimization, is no longer important? Absolutely not! Sites that have deep, quality content, are quick to load, formatted well for search engine indexing, have lots of incoming links, and have high page rank are the sites that the AI engines are more likely to reference and cite. In other words, AEO and GEO are additional layers to your SEO strategy and today, they’re no longer optional.
But will optimizing your site for the AI answer engines bring back the Google traffic? Sadly, I think not. As long as the answer engines provide quality responses to our queries (and the answers are getting better every day), we consumers will increasingly rely on the answer engines and NOT click on the site that was the source of the content in the first place.
The challenge then for associations is to be THE SOURCE for the deep, hyper-specialized content that exists within the association’s content archive, among the subject matter experts within the staff and community, and in the heads of the community, the members themselves.
In other words, if I’m looking for general, consumer grade content to a question, I will likely get a high quality and accurate response from ChatGPT. But if I want the latest research, best practices, or obscure references, I need to go to the community where this deep knowledge exists – associations! Under this scenario, associations must double down on being found as the community where the deep knowledge exists, and educating members and prospective members on how and why the community and specialized knowledge cannot be gotten from an AI engine.
I know, this is easier said than done, but this is the existential challenge for associations today.
So, is your association ready for the AEO and GEO wave? How are you distinguishing your association from the AI engines as the place for specialized knowledge AND community?