Greetings, everyone. As tempting as it is for us to focus on the most surreal week in X (fka Twitter) history, we’re instead going to look into a study that analyzed 25,000 sets of Google Search results to determine the role of SEO in the age of AI Overviews.
The study in question was conducted by an outfit called ZipTie. They “developed a module to track Google AI Overviews.”
This study’s biggest finding is that a #1 ranking website for a given search term has a 25% chance of appearing in Google’s AI Overview for that query. As you move further down the rankings, the odds of Gemini’s output including a search result go down.
Websites that are not search results for a query sometimes appear in AI Overviews because Google invisibly runs related searches and uses the collective results to synthesize its overviews. We know this because of documentation that became known to the public during Google’s antitrust trial.
If there’s a lesson here, it’s that organic rankings are still important, regardless of how much SEO is Dead clickbait is floating around. ZipTie sums things up by writing “traditional SEO foundations remain important, but the content strategy on top of those foundations needs to be completely reimagined for an AI-first world.”
Our first closing link is about the rise of scripted, made-for-YouTube entertainment. YouTube’s popularity as a website is well established (it’s the second-most visited website after Google, with nearly five times as much traffic as third-ranked Facebook), but its dominance on televisions is less well known. The graph above this paragraph specifically looks at television viewing habits. In any case, the Bloomberg article we have for you is called YouTube Is Swallowing TV Whole, and It’s Coming for the Sitcom. You can try this on for size if you want to see an example of a YouTube sitcom.
Our second link has a list of the announcements made at the TikTok World event from Tuesday. Third, from Buffer, is The Best Social Media Scheduling Tools in 2025. Finally, from Hootsuite, a post that goes over the most ideal image resolutions for various social media platforms.
That’s all for this week. Take care.