Enterprise SEO platform BrightEdge is actively monitoring millions of keyword search results, detecting real-time trends in Google’s AI Overview and organic search tied to the ongoing November 2024 Core algorithm update. The data suggests six preliminary observations on the direction of Google’s algorithm and what publishers and SEOs need to know now.
AI Overviews is a search feature, so any changes to Google’s core ranking algorithm will be reflected in AIO, especially because there are several ways AIO and the organic search results overlap.
1. Overlap Between Organic And AIO Citations
One of the more interesting trends that continues this month is an overlap between the websites cited in AIO and the organic search results. This shift, first noticed in September, was highly noticeable, especially within the top ten organic search results. High ranking organic content has a high chance of becoming a citation in AIO. This trend suggests that Google is increasingly aligning AIO citations with the organic search algorithm.
How Google is aligning organic SERPs with AIO can only be speculated because Google has not commented on this trend. It may be that AIO is grounding itself in organic search results that themselves are increasingly more precisely aligned to search query topicality.
Google’s information gain patent describes a way to rank websites that closely links Google’s organic search ranking with an AI-based search interface. These trends that BrightEdge noticed align with that kind of symmetry between AI Search and organically ranked answers.
2. Shopping Queries Ranked Differently
The trend for overlap between organic and AIO SERPs doesn’t manifest in shopping related queries.
But this trend doesn’t hold for shopping queries. Organic shopping SERPs and AIO results are increasingly uncoupled and going in different different directions. BrightEdge interpreted the data to mean that additional supporting results in AIO are why organic and AIO for shopping queries increasingly don’t match.
Google’s algorithm update won’t be finished until about two weeks from now. However BrightEdge’s Generative Parser technology is showing how the search results are trending that hint at what’s going on under the surface of the search results.
3. Downward Trends In Overlap
BrightEdge shared that ranking overlap between organic and AIO initially experienced a slight increase in volatility (+2.3%) leading into November 8th but that it subsequently started trending downward (-3.7%) on the following two days and the downward trend continued as the update was announced.
4. Increased Volatility In Overlap
After the release of the update the volatility between organic search results and AIO began to seriously spike. BrightEdge interprets the changes as suggesting that there is a pattern of redistribution. In my opinion this may reflect changes to both AIO and organic rankings which at some point should stabilize. The scale of the changes at the lowest ranking levels (positions 21-30) indicate a high level of volatility.
How SERPs Are Currently Trending Since Update Announcement:
Top 10 positions: +10.6% increase in volatility
Positions 11-20: -5.9% decline in volatility
Positions 21-30: +23.3% increase in volatility
5. Industry Specific Changes
It must be stressed that what BrightEdge’s Generative Parser is reporting represents real-time changes across millions of search results which are indicative of the scale of changes within the search results. BrightEdge next looks at specific industries and at this time is seeing significant shifts in e-commerce queries and notable changes in Education related queries.
Here are changes by industry: