Calculating exact (dominant) user intent for all 546,000 queries would be extremely compute-intense, so I looked at the common abstractions informational, local, and transactional.
Abstractions are less helpful when optimizing content, but they’re fine when looking at aggregate data.
I clustered:
Informational queries around question words like “what,” “why,” “when,” etc.
Transactional queries around terms like “buy,” “download,” “order,” etc.
Local queries around “nearby,” “close,” or “near me.”
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
Result: User intent differences reflect in form and function. The average length (word count) is almost equal across all intents except for local, which makes sense because users want a list of locations instead of text.
Similarly, shopping AIOs are often lists of products with a bit of context unless they’re shopping-related questions.
Local queries have the highest amount of exact match overlap between query and answer; informational queries have the lowest.
Understanding and satisfying user intent for questions is harder but also more important to be visible in AIOs than, for example, Featured Snippets.
How Do The Top 20 Organic Positions Break Down?
In my last analysis, I found that almost 60% of URLs that appear in AIOs and organic search results rank outside the top 20 positions.
For this Memo, I broke the top 20 further down to understand if AIOs are more likely to cite URLs in higher positions or not.
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
Result: It turns out 40% of URLs in AIOs rank in positions 11-20, and only half (21.9%) rank in the top 3.
The majority, 60% of URLs cited in AIOs, still rank on the first page of organic results, reinforcing the point that a higher organic rank tends to lead to a higher chance of being cited in AIOs.
However, the data also shows that it’s very much impossible to be present in AIOs with a lower organic rank.
Where the top 20 domains that are visible in AIOs and search results rank (Image Credit: Kevin Indig)
Scenarios
I will work with my clients to match the AIO’s user intent, provide unique insights, and tailor the format. I see options for the progress of AI Overview that I will track and validate with data in the next months and years.
Option 1: AIOs rely more on top-ranking organic results and satisfy more informational intent before users need to click through to websites. The majority of clicks landing on sites would be from users considering or intending to buy.
Option 2: AIOs continue to provide answers from diversified results and leave a small chance that users still click through to top-ranking results, albeit in much smaller amounts.
Which scenario are you betting on?
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal