Google still sends the customers

I talk about GEO a lot. Maybe too much. So here is something that cooled me down a bit this week.

Semrush tracked 400 US commercial keywords in banking, software and ecommerce. A year ago about 46% of them showed a Google AI Overview. Now 88%. For ecommerce alone it went from around 33% to 85%.

So the AI answer now sits on top of almost every search where someone wants to buy something.

But look at the clicks. Marie Haynes checked 12 months of GA4 data from 100 sites. ChatGPT sessions were 0.62% of what Google organic brought. And Google still drove 96.5% of the conversions.

PPC Land put these studies together yesterday, worth a read: https://ppc.land/google-ai-overviews-reach-88-of-commercial-searches-as-ai-clicks-stay-thin

Small samples, yes. US desktop only. But for me the message is simple.

Don't drop Google to chase ChatGPT. The page that gets quoted in an AI answer and the page that ranks on Google is the same page. A product page with real photos, your own text, price, delivery and returns works for both.

What changes is that being number one is not enough anymore. If the AI box answers first, your page has to be the one it took the answer from.

So no new tricks. Just the same boring work on your best pages, done properly.