Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) Statistics
Artificial Intelligence SEO is making waves in the SEO industry, with some claiming that SEO is once again “dead.” With many agencies offering GEO (generative engine optimisation) as a service, and some claiming to have the “secret formula” to dominate AI search results.
We wanted to take a data-driven approach to explore Artificial Intelligence Search and conduct an experiment to uncover the key ranking factors. But before diving into the details, it’s crucial to understand the extent of AI’s influence on search results.
AI Search Results vs Googles Search Results
Something that should be analysed and checked is, how much of a difference is there in GEO search results against Google’s search results?
Although I assume most of the readers of this article use Search GPT or another LLM for queries. As of writing SearchGPT only makes up 2.1% of market share as a search engine, while Google still dominates with 90% of market share.
Beyond Market Share
Market share alone doesn’t paint the entire picture—growth is equally important, particularly given how recent ChatGPT’s emergence in the search engine landscape is.
Since March 2024, SearchGPT has experienced an astounding 700% year-over-year increase in market share! This surge places SearchGPT in third place, just behind Bing. If this growth trend continues, it will surpass Bing by the end of the year.
This would establish SearchGPT as a key contender in the search engine market. For context, Google and Bing have held the top two positions since 2009, so this growth positions SearchGPT as a serious player.
Googles AI Overview Dominance
1. Google Only utilises the top 10 search results in its AI overviews
No real surprise here. If you want to appear in Google’s AI Overview, you need to be in the top 10, so the “secret” would be to simply utilise SEO best practices.
2. AI overview Correlates with a 34.5% lower Click Through Rate
Being also aware of user intent would be important. AI overviews have on average 153 words, this means for queries that are more complex and require a longer answer like in-depth technical questions, then AI overviews should not be a concern as they would not be able to answer a query sufficiently in 153 words.
3. AI Overviews only appears for about 5% of bottom of the funnel queries
I suspect this number might be higher now, as this was conducted back in June 2024. This would also be influenced by the country you are in as AI overviews show differently geographically. An important takeaway from AI overviews is that it usually targets top of the funnel keywords that generally don’t have much of a commercial impact on businesses SEO efforts.
4.
The Controls
So to make this fair we used the same queries for both Google and also the Ai tool. The AI tool we used was ChatGPT given its the largest market dominator in AI as of writing. We conducted this experiment over 50 queries and compared the positioning.
We also wanted to take it a step further and try to identify the ranking factors. We included only 10 ranking factors, they were:
- Content length
- Website age
- Referring domains (Semrush)
- Backlinks (holistic)
- Reviews
- Pages
- Root URL or Subfolder
- Geographical Relevance
- Page Load Speed
- DR (Ahrefs)
