What does Google's AI search update mean for your store's traffic?

Transcript

Charles Travers: Hey guys, welcome back to another week of e-commerce marketing chats with myself Charles and the main man Jimmy. Jimmy, how’s it going, mate?

Jimmy Dalgleish: Good man. I just ⁓ just speaking before this call, you just let me know that Google’s had a another major ⁓ would you even call them? It’s not like a workshop, it’s ⁓ a a seminar and yeah, keynotes. Keynotes and kind of announcing what’s coming and what’s on the horizon. I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, so I’m to find out what your thoughts are on it and what you took from it as well. And

Charles Travers: Keynotes. Keynotes B.

Jimmy Dalgleish: yeah, we’ll see where that leads us and chatt all things e com like usual.

Charles Travers: Yeah, sounds good. Yeah, no, some big some pretty big updates. It was nearly a two hour two hour keynote from Google. going over a number of different changes, mainly related to to and then was a decent size segment in there related to search and and how AI integrates with with search and Google search. So ⁓ a few of cliff notes here. I’ve kind of my notes next to me here. So Kind of to summarize some of the the important takeaways, AI search now integrate into Google’s main search experience. So the you know the blue links, ⁓ traditional blue links still remain, but AI overviews and AI mode are kind of alongside each other now. So you may have seen when you type a certain search query, you’ll get the AI overview, but now you can also continue that conversation with the AI mode. So there’s No separation now between AI overviews and AI mode. and that’s something that I noticed probably a couple of weeks ago. Is yeah, you could ⁓ could basically just continue that or start that conversation once you’ve got an answer with AI overviews, then you can just ask it more in-depth questions with the AI mode integrated. And what was interesting is is actually that’s increased search activity. So basically in terms of the stats here, AI overviews two point five billion monthly users. Active monthly users. AI mode one billion monthly users, which has doubled every quarter since it launched. search queries all time high from last quarter. and people are shopping Google over a billion times a day. So in terms of actual search Yeah, yeah. In terms of actual search activity, on search specifically, you know, numbers have never been higher. However, having said that, there’s been a there’s a of changes. I think I don’t know what you’re seeing on your end, Jimmy, but like what I’ve noticed over time is

Jimmy Dalgleish: Die for ya.

Charles Travers: impressions are higher over say the last year organically but clicks kind of starting to trend down. There is a you know, I would be lying to s suggest that Although say like I’ve noticed on some accounts that like have improved. Like there’s been improvements in rank technically in rankings and impressions, which you would think would equate to more clicks. But because AI overviews is taking a large chunk often of that potential traffic, because the answer is is shown within the interface and people aren’t clicking through, we’re seeing a a drop i in clicks across the board. So know, it’s how we kind of navigate through that, and showing that moving forward, you know, the experience is not just about capturing clicks, but it’s also capturing visibility. So is getting visibility

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah. I think that that part of it will definitely hit organic more than paid. I mean, Google needs to click on paid to charge people per click. So I st and but it I’m finding like majority of ⁓ clicks that we would work on are e-commerce type queries. So you’re not really getting AI overviews when know you’re looking to to purchase something. You’re more getting the AI overviews when you’re asking kind of those informational type queries. So probably top of the funnel type searches for e-commerce where they’re not necessarily showing the shopping ads. so I like the paid side I I haven’t noticed like the drop-off in clicks, but when I do check the Google Search Console, I do notice some of the blog articles that

Charles Travers: Yes. Yes, for sure. Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: are do we’re doing quite well. They’re still doing well, but they’re not at the same volume that they were. whether a natural process, like they taper off slowly or drop in ranking slightly, I’m not sure. But yeah, I I definitely I’m not as tuned on that side as probably what you would be on the on the organic side of things. ⁓

Charles Travers: Yeah, no, from my experience that is definitely the case in terms of, you know, you do need to update your blogs over time in order to keep them competitive and naturally, you know, competing articles come out and could potentially be, you know, push down the the cert results. so yeah, that’s just that that is naturally the case and obviously now with AI overviews as well, you’re probably gonna get shown there rather than Always your blog post showing up as a blue link. it might show up as a blue link, but it’s further down.

Jimmy Dalgleish: I saw ⁓ I saw today too that the the ads are the ads are showing in the AI overviews now too. So that’ll be interesting to see how that goes as well.

Charles Travers: Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. yeah, I mean look, there’s a lot of changes. It’s The the other major change was they’re kind of building this kind of three block agentic commerce experience. So they’ve broken it down into to three areas. You’ve got universal commerce protocol, agents payments protocol, and universal car. and you know, in summary all of these experiences is to kind of keep the customer experience

Jimmy Dalgleish: Mm-hmm.

Charles Travers: Google search. So gonna be able to pay and check out with Google Wallet,

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah.

Charles Travers: And also you’re gonna be able to use agents as well. So you’ll be able to effectively look at things like when you make a search for a product, the agent can go off and see if there’s been any price drops, you’re gonna be able to do like price comparisons, you’ll be able to see the the price history of the product, if it’s out know, coming back in stock or out of stock, all of these kind of additional features. ⁓ to kind of improve the experience and more integrate more AI into the process. So that’s gonna be another case.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, and I I I think if people are looking to get on top of that too, the agent the agent stuff is in beta inside the merchant center. So it’s definitely worth having a play around with. They’ve also a couple of things announced from the Google Ads side. They are gonna do AI max search for shopping, which will be interesting to see how that goes. It’s it’s gonna be basically the shopping equivalent of Performance Max, which I’m keen to test out to see how it goes. I think it’ll go quite broad, but it’ll be interesting to see whether it brings in new traffic or not. The other big thing in this AI space that a lot of the students that I coach have brought up recently is the agentic sales channel in Shopify has just popped up. ⁓ So

Charles Travers: Yes. Yep.

Jimmy Dalgleish: ⁓ a lot of people are talking about that at the moment. At the moment, ⁓ well from what I’ve seen anyway, it’s only available if you ship into the US. So if you can’t activate everything on there yet, it I think it’s only available if you have shipping options into the US, but it’s basically trying to upload your catalogue to Chat GBT and I think They’ve got one other one on there. I forget what it is. It might have been Copilot. I can’t remember. Do you do you remember the second one, Charles? Yeah, so they’ve got two in there that you can have this agentic kind of communications with. So that’s coming. Like this is all coming. So if you wanna if you wanna stay on top of it, start integrating these things, the the business agent in merchant center and experimenting if you can.

Charles Travers: I think it is copilot, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think it is co pilot. Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: with the agentic solution in Shopify itself now too.

Charles Travers: Yeah. Yeah, no, it’s there’s there’s certainly a lot and it’s it it it’s changing. you know, it feels like every week there’s there’s this huge updates. We always say it don’t we here on the on the podcast. It’s just like keeping up everything is is is certainly interesting and ⁓ yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, no. I mean, we’re on the marketing we’re on the marketing side and it’s hard to keep up. So you can imagine how business owners are feeling with all this change. You know, they think they’re integrating the latest and then the next week, you know, ten things have surpassed what they’ve just set up. So ⁓ it’s a wild it’s a pretty wild time at the moment. But I think more anything, just I’m I’m seeing like a real need for like

Charles Travers: Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: business owners that can afford it to have someone hired specifically for implementing AI within their business, whether that’s their systems, ⁓ on top of or coming up with solutions for what they’re running right now. Like one of the solutions I’ve had for one of the things that I’ve been thinking about for one of the furniture companies that I work with, it would great if they had their own app where Someone could take a photo of their room and then the app would populate their products in the room. And then they could just click on the product that the app populated in that place and go ahead and purchase it. like these type of solutions. I think that that’s gotta be coming for the buyer side. You already see people are already taking photos of their room and putting them in Chat GPT and saying, hey, design it in this type of style. So ⁓

Charles Travers: Yeah, that’s a cool experience.

Jimmy Dalgleish: It it I can’t imagine it would be a leap for a business to create that and just have the AI put in their own products that they have on their website. I think you would have to have a lot of quality data in there though around I guess product measurements, sizes, just so th the scaling of when you put it in the room looked correct, because you don’t want someone taking a photo of their room and then the AI populating all the furniture and stuff in the room and it looks great and then they purchase it and nothing fits. how it was in the AI image. so I think the quality of your feed is going to be super important for this ⁓ stage of AI, like filling out as much data as you can about your products and yeah, sure everything’s kind of to date. AI is making that a lot easier too, I’m finding, to manage and edit in bulk as well.

Charles Travers: Yeah. No, I I think there was one of the the key things from this keynote was about the importance of kind of auditing and cleaning up your product feed. there talk about maximising the shopping graph coverage. which yeah, i i there’s a lot and structured data as well. I think getting the the fundamentals and the technical side of things sorted is is gonna be important. things which probably were often overlooked are things that are gonna help these kind of AIA agents be to of read and and interpret the data.

Jimmy Dalgleish: how have you gone in your mission Charles to update descriptions, product titles, like natively through the AI? A lot of the students that I’ve worked with now, they’re actually connecting to Claude directly through Claude have released a ⁓ sorry, have released a connector in the Claude connector library that will help you connect your store like directly to Claude now.

Charles Travers: Yeah. Yeah yeah, so I’ve just set that up.

Jimmy Dalgleish: So I’m curious to know what you’re using, if any, integration at the moment.

Charles Travers: Yeah, so I’ve just just set that up with a client, whereby yeah, I’ve connected to the Shopify ⁓ C P they have these kind of ⁓ C P connectors. so I am going through that process. I’m just waiting on them to literally click a link to activate it and I’ve effectively built a yeah, an app. an SEO app which is going to allow me to upload, you know, metadata at scale and effectively make any changes to various on page elements. it’s yeah the meta title, description, the H one. So I think they’ve made that easier since ’cause we were talking previously, weren’t we Jimmy, about you setting up an app

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, great.

Charles Travers: and integration and but I don’t think that was via the Shopify one of the Shopify ⁓ sorry, one of the clawed connectors. The the these MCP you

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, it wasn’t via that, no. It was ⁓ it was creating ⁓ your own custom app and then using the secret key and claw code just to connect directly that way.

Charles Travers: Yeah. So I think this process is actually easier. it’s gonna be able to yeah, allow you to make changes. I think that’s the way things are going. It’s clear that you’ve got these kind of large language models, whether it’s Claude, Chat GPT, and then you’ve got SAS basically connecting. So these kind of MCP servers that you can set up where you can connect to like I’ve got like SEM Rush. I need to set up there’s an auditing tool that I use, Screaming Frog that you to audit ⁓

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah yeah, me too, yeah.

Charles Travers: websites, it’s like a desktop application and I’ve now integrated that to to Claude as well. So you kind of connect you can connect all of these these different tools and then rather than actually having to log on to each of these tools now can use directly altogether within that kind of Claude interface or chat GPT. so I think that’s the way things are moving. I really do. I think it’s like

Jimmy Dalgleish: ⁓ okay.

Charles Travers: a lot of these SAS tools realise that if they don’t integrate into these big AI models they’re be in trouble and they’re gonna lose more and more users. So like we need to effectively you know join otherwise yeah mo a lot them will go out of business.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, I think so. I think ⁓ ’cause I I honestly I honestly think people will be able to build their own use case sessions. Like I know we’ve discussed this previously, but every time you’re waiting for an update on an app, or for a feature to be added, it you’re not gonna be waiting for a feature anymore. You’re gonna be building it yourself and getting rid of whatever you were using. Like it’s just how it’s gonna be. some I know people have waited years for features that never ⁓ were added and now they’ve just kind of built it themselves. and got rid of the old app that they were using completely. So I don’t feel sorry for the SaaS industry. I think the really good ones will survive. I think the ones that neglected their users, they’re done. So ⁓ ⁓ mean you and I have probably already dropped some ourselves that we were using that are longer needed. ⁓ So it’s

Charles Travers: Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: It’s changing fast, but yeah, it’s interesting. But I think the I don’t think business owners quite quite realise like how ⁓ I had a I had a student chatting me to me about they were trying to find some technical error on their Shopify store and with Claude connected, they can just start asking Claude and then Claude goes through the code and they’re like, Yeah, yeah, I found this and this is what’s causing it. And it’s like you can solve your own problems now. I will ⁓ to anyone listening, if you are connecting Claude Code and you’re doing any code changes or website changes, make sure you’re doing it on like a draft theme. Because if you’re doing it on your live theme, you can things can go wrong. and I’m saying that because one of the students something did go wrong and their website was just a white screen for like eight hours. so yeah you can you can mess things up if you don’t know what you’re doing. So just tread carefully. it’s a great tool but Just be aware that it’s not like not bulletproof. There there are things that can go wrong and it can change things that it probably shouldn’t change. So just make sure that you’re doing anything that you’re testing on a draft theme before you put it live.

Charles Travers: Yeah, no, I think that’s great. That that’s really good advice because yeah, you’re right. It’s it doesn’t yeah one one change and yeah, your website being down for eight hours is is is definitely not what you want, especially when you’re running an e commerce brand and you’re making money on the daily. So yeah. That’s definitely sound advice. ⁓

Jimmy Dalgleish: One of the one of the things that I’m looking to build out for my clients actually. So you know when you go to a website’s homepage for e-commerce specifically, they usually have somewhere on the the front page like the be the best sellers. I am just trying to build out at the moment is like a little widget, but instead of showing the best sellers, it it it it will have a a fallback to the best sellers, but If this person that has visited the website at any stage before, instead of showing bestsellers, it will show the products that they’ve actually viewed on the website previously. so they’re landing on the homepage, either products they purchased previously or visited previously are the first one showing. So I think that will especially for products with like large SKU sets. Like if you’re just putting in front of the customer the products that they’re usually buying or that they’ve purchased previously, I think the conversion rate will be a lot better. So I’m working on that little snippet for a few of my clients to basically update just your standard best sellers category into using a dynamic field based on hey, if visited the site before and we’ve got data on them, what products they visited, then ⁓ serve them those products and if the data isn’t there then just default back to the bestsellers catalog like it was before.

Charles Travers: Yeah, that’s cool. That’s a a couple of my clients they have like the collection page so they have the product grid and then they have s you know, a static row of best sellers, but it’s not kind of dynamic based on their own data. ⁓ so I like that approach. I think that that would work really well. Something that I thought about doing and it’s more from improving the rankings of a page is to have the like if you have a say ⁓ you have a and selling I don’t microphones, you’d have the best selling microphones. You wouldn’t have that you wouldn’t have best sellers of random other products that they’re selling on the site. Because if it’s all about microphones, then you’re more likely to rate for microphones basically. There’s a higher search intent. and Google can kind of establish that. So that’s that I’m looking to experiment with because they’ve just got best sellers and it’s the same best sellers on any collection page at the moment. And I want to change it for my clients so that

Jimmy Dalgleish: ⁓ okay.

Charles Travers: It is it’s the best sellers according to that collection. see w see what impact that has on on rankings and visibility.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah. Yeah, it’s it that would just be that would just be setting up another collection, choosing the product type as in your example and then sorting it by bestsellers, yeah.

Charles Travers: Yeah, yeah, for sure. guess the problem I the challenge I’m trying to figure out now is and this is more on the development side is how that they can integrate that when they’ve got thousands of collections ’cause have to go you know. they can they th there must be a way that this can be done a little bit more dynamically and and automate that process. ⁓

Jimmy Dalgleish: ⁓ yeah, what yeah, what you could yeah, I’m sure like if you ask Claude something like, Hey, I want you to review all my product types and make a collection for every single product type that we have Shopify and then I want you to basically make the conditions for the the is equals this this product type that you’ve chosen. to do the heading on and then just tell it to make sure it’s sorted by bestsellers. That’s something that AI should be able to do in bulk.

Charles Travers: Yeah, for sure, for sure. so yeah, just kind of experimenting on the kind of UX side of things. Like even for example, with a lot of their collections at the moment, they have at the bottom linking out to their blog and YouTube channel, which effectively you’re taking ⁓ the customer away further from the sale. You know, you want to you want to get customers closer to that sale, i.e. clicking through on one of those products on the page. so we’ve removed that and really just focused on the product grid. in my experience sometimes the the least

Jimmy Dalgleish: I wonder if there’s a way to I wonder if there’s a way to kind of open the YouTube channel in the actual website. That makes sense. so they could browse YouTube and it’d be in the actual Shopify store and then depending on what you were watching, like dynamically put down the bottom like products that are in the videos, that would be cool.

Charles Travers: Yeah, yeah. I don’t I’m not sure if there is a way. Usually obviously you can embed the video, but then there’s always a there’s always a button that clicks clicks you off to YouTube, isn’t there, within the video frame.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, I wonder if you can like embed the whole the whole channel experience. That would be cool.

Charles Travers: Yeah. Yeah. I mean like this there’s so many we always talk about this, there’s so many different things you can focus on and tweak and test. It’s it’s never ending, isn’t it, when you’re running an e commerce brand. I think it’s just trying to figure out what are the things that move the needle.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, I think like all the major platforms are trying to do everything they can to keep you on their platform. It’d be nice to reverse engineer some of that and s go the other way and say, Hey, can I use these platforms on my website and keep them on my website while they’re using them

Charles Travers: Yeah. Well yeah, I do think they’re defin yeah, that’s that’s true. Although I do think the focus does need to be on, you know before it was you know, there was a big focus on the higher a website converts more chance it is that you’re gonna drive more revenue. Well now it’s actually like the more visible you are on these s new emerging search platforms, you it it may be in the future that your website is not the the differentiating factor. It’s it’s that you’re Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, especially with a Gen Teek coming. They might not even ever reach your website, so

Charles Travers: Exactly, exactly. So, yeah, I think it’s certainly important to to look at these things and you know we’re and me me and Jimmy, we’re figuring it this out in real time as well. Like a lot of other marketers in the space, it’s like obviously Jimmy more on the paid side, me on the organic. you know, I’m constantly trying to to test things ⁓ and ⁓ and from as well that are You know, that’s the great thing about the the SEO and the community in general is that you know, they’re they’re very you know, they put out a lot of information and about their clients and I can also look at that and and apply of those principles for my own clients as well. So, ⁓ Yeah, but things are are changing in real time. And also there is a lot of it it’s also deciphering what is actually good, accurate information and what is basically a bunch of rubbish. ’Cause there is a lot of people spouting Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah. Assy I was ⁓ I was excited today. I ⁓ so I did kind of my first coaching call where I where I kinda coached someone on the the blog strategy that I used that we spoke about last week. around kind of leveraging ⁓ existing brands ⁓ influencers in the space, you leveraging their authority and kind of blogging about them to drive traffic to your site. And the the student that I kind of just ran through my process for this today, like He’s a really high level implementer. Like he gets things done fast. So to see like how he implements ⁓ we learn what he learnt from that particular call and to see if he can get kind of similar that I’ve got from ⁓ using blog strategy. so yeah, I never really coach anything outside of Google Ads. Obviously I do a lot more than Google Ads, but Google Ads is typically what I’m coaching other people on to get the best results from. But Yeah, it was something a bit different today. I coaching along the ⁓ organic blog strategy that I’ve been using. So yeah, something a bit different. Obviously I’m not a technical SEO. I mean I probably could be if I wanted to, if if I dived into it enough, but it’s not the world I wanna jump into. I’ll leave to Charles. But yeah, like I’ll see how we go, ’cause if if If he implements this blog strategy and it it gets a lot of traction for him, I might put together a masterclass on it. and with your help, Charles, from the SEO side, we might be able to just make it like a a pretty baller masterclass, especially for business. just here’s here’s a current account. the one that I was coaching today, he was the prime example of someone that had written like seven blogs and none of have a single click in the last three months.

Charles Travers: Yeah, that’s cool.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah. I think if people understand kind of the strategy behind knowing what to blog about, what to look for, how to how to blog effectively so you can get the traffic, they understand that they’re just gonna waste much less time than spending all these time writing these blogs and then just never getting any traffic from it ever. ⁓ I was talking today about a about a flywheel flywheel too. Like if

Charles Travers: Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean

Jimmy Dalgleish: If you write a good blog, then you can use a short snippet of that in your email marketing and say read the whole blog here. You can also put it on social media and make it a a clickbaity type title to get people to your site as well. it’s really good and kind of those advertorial type blogs, then you can use it for paid traffic as well. So there’s like a it’s like a whole flywheel you can do if you’ve got really good blog content that I think a lot of e-commerce or businesses are really missing out on.

Charles Travers: Yeah, no, I I totally agreed Jimmy. I think I don’t think I’ve ever taken on a new client and not looked at their blog and thought, this needs a lot of work. Like, you know, I literally just took on a new client this week and the last time they wrote a blog was December twenty twenty four and th looked at the the data on these blogs and they w they were driving very little traffic, if not yeah, none basically. So, Yeah, I think a lot of brands think that it’s just okay, write a blog, upload it to the website and reality is there’s a lot more to it than that, from kind of the the keyword strategy to the UX to the way that you kind of format the blog, are you writing about something that people are actually searching for? Because if you’re not, the likelihood is it’s not gonna show in in Google search and therefore no one’s gonna click on it. so these are all things to consider when you’re building building out a blog strategy. Otherwise you’re wast y as you said, Jimmy, you’re wasting your time. You’re you’re better off focusing on

Jimmy Dalgleish: I know and and bl writing writing a good blog and formatting it, like it’s not a it’s not a like quick process. Like a couple of hours of work that goes into that. So if you’re doing if you’re doing a couple of them, and you’ve you’ve done them, you’ve let them sit there for, you know, a couple of months to see if they’re driving traffic or not. I I you can usually tell whether a blog’s gonna generate traffic or not. Like usually I’m getting a click for a blog that I’ve just written. If it’s gonna do well, it’s getting clicks like in the first week that it’s been indexed. for the ones that I’ve written anyway. I don’t know if you find the same, Charles, or not, or whether it takes a a bit longer.

Charles Travers: No, I No, no, in my experience, ⁓ it’s it’s similar. you should be seeing a a decent spike in impressions and then clicks should follow. if you’re not, yeah. if if blog is live for a couple of weeks and it’s i it’s it’s barely getting any impressions, let alone clicks, then something needs to to change. So yeah, I I yeah, that that’s my experience as well, Jimmy. Is is typically you know quite quickly whether a a blog is gonna perform well or not.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, I agree. I think some people are being conditioned, especially with that they do in SEO, I’m gonna do this now and I might start seeing some results three to six months down the track. It’s not like that. So if you’re if not getting at least some traction in the first kind of week, then you’ve either written about the wrong thing or yeah, it’s just it’s probably not gonna be a a successful blog for you. So

Charles Travers: Yeah yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: But yeah, keen to find out more about people that were testing the strategy that we mentioned last week too. But we’ve already hit half an hour, Charles. That that went so quick. I said before the call, I don’t have too many things on the top of my mind that I want to discuss, but like always, thing just rolls into the next and yeah, we’re on another e commerce tangent chat. So it’s it’s always good catch up again. And is there anything else that you wanted to cover on on this particular episode, Charles?

Charles Travers: No, I think we’re yeah, I think we covered a few things and yeah. All good, Jimmy.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Sweet. Well, for those who want to check us out, you can check us out on the podcasting platforms on e commerce marketing chats or us out on Facebook at Shopify Marketing Secrets. Until next week, we’ll catch you guys then. See you guys.