Google's brand new AI search engine, SGE (Search Generative Experience) is expected to be unleashed sometime in early to mid-2024. This will be a massive change in how search results are provided and is expected to lead to a reduction in the amount of organic search traffic most websites will receive. The only websites which will really benefit are those which feature in the SGE panel.
We have been testing the beta version of SGE (currently only available if you are located in the USA) and have experimented with how you can get your web pages ranked in SGE. The extensive screenshots in this post mostly use images of some of the websites we have created to show how it is possible to get your own pages ranked prominently in SGE results.
To be found through Google SGE, our findings are that your pages need to:
- You need to make sure the page content and phrase you want to rank for are as closely aligned as possible.
- The content needs to be informative, simple to read and be engaging for the reader.
- You need to get the message across as quickly and as simply as possible.
- Your page should be authoritative on its topic.
One further thing we have found is that we have managed to get pages, which do not currently rank as well as they should, to be prominent in SGE results. Invariably, these pages have long-form content with a clearly defined message and purpose at the start of the page.
* Please note that SGE is still experimental and is likely to change once it is pushed live. However, this is how SGE seems to work at the time of writing in December 2023.
What Is Google's SGE?
SGE, which is also known as Search Generative Experience, is Google's new search engine, which is currently still in testing / beta mode. It uses generative AI to answer the search question that the user enters into Google. The SGE Panel usually appears at the top of the screen, before any other search results.
Using the below screenshot and the numbering added to it, here are the main parts of the SGE Panel:
- The Answer - this can offer multiple links, as in the screenshot below, or it can be blocks of text, depending upon how SGE determines the perceived answer required.
- Results Panel - Three results are shown, with more scrollable at the right-edge of the panel.
- Follow-Up Questions - Suggested questions you may want to ask to get better results, and a search bar to ask your own follow-up questions. The follow-uop answers stay relevant to the original question entered.
- Drop-Down Buttons - More links are provided by the drop-down buttons throughout the SGE Panel. The links will help qualify the answer SGE has given.
When Do SGE Results get Shown?
At the time of writing, to get SGE results depends upon a number of circumstances. Firstly, you must be located in the US (for the UK, using a VPN, such as NordVPN, choose a US server so your location is US-based).
SGE does not appear for every search you make and when it does appear, it can take several formats. When SGE is deemed necessary, it will be automatically generated by Google.
If SGE is not available, but is a possibility, you may be presented with a "Generate" button.
Alternatively, you may be presented with a wide "Show More" button, which will show your SGE results.
The other main option is that SGE is not available at all for your search. This will usually be because the search term is either very narrow and not often searched for, or it is a search relating to money of health (YMYL - Your Money or Your Life), whose results could impact severely upon one's life, depending upon the answer given!
Where Could Your Website Be Found In The SGE Panel?
Visibility, thus traffic, for your web pages in SGE can be had in various ways.
- Answer Panel - Your page may be shown in the SGE answer itself, in either local search results, or a carousel. This will depend upon the nature of the search and whether it is deemed a local (geographic) search, or not. Your page may also feature in the expandable drop-down buttons, but these are always hidden, until expanded.
- Results Panel - This is where you want to mainly see your web page, as across all SGE searches, the Results panel is the most visible. However, only three results are ever visible without scrolling. there will be between 3 - 10 results maximum in this panel.
- Follow-Up Suggestions - The third main way to find your page in SGE results is if your page is a suggestion in a follow-up question. Your page may be chosen if it is fully relevant to the follow-up question (the answer will be on your page).
A further, but much more difficult, way to get SGE visibility and traffic is by using a bit of lateral thinking and asking SGE to recommend your business, product or service by asking a question where you ask it to suggest the best option for the topic you are searching for. In the below example, we have asked SGE a typical ungrammatical search phrase "best wordpress course cotswolds".
How Can You Get Your Web Pages Ranked In Google's Search Generative Experience?
Ranking in Google's SGE is currently a matter of trial and error - though we have found patterns which seem to be successful. The reason that I say it is trial and error is because SGE is still in limited beta mode for experimental users and is not available worldwide to everyone. Therefore, by the time SGE goes live as the new Google search engine, it will, no doubt, have undergone some further changes. We will keep an eye on these and update this post as things become clearer.
1. Establish Your Starting Point
Much of our testing has been done on two very different websites:
- Cotswold Websites - this website where we have primarily been testing our geographical service pages - e.g. "Web Design In Oxford", "WordPress Training Course In Wiltshire", etc.
- Ellie White - an eCommerce store selling Print on Demand products where we are targeting both product category and item level results - e.g. "bird prints", "dodo mug", "auricula wall clock", etc.
The one thing in common between both websites is that the page content is high-quality and long-form, providing helpful information, which is relevant to the search terms used.
However, one thing we discovered is that whilst some pages (especially geographical ones) have not been performing as well as they should in the current live version of Google's search engine, they have been performing far better than expected in SGE.
Whilst we expect to see top-ranking current search results be mirrored in SGE, this is not always the case. In most cases our top-ranking rsults also appear in SGE, but not always. Conversely, pages which do not rank prominently are often doing well in SGE results.
For example, the search term "WordPress web design gloucestershire uk" places our page at position 10 in normal Google search, whilst it has excellent exposure in SGE (see screenshot below).
However, to get into the all-important SGE carousel anel at the top-right of the screen, the page needs to be optimised specifically for SGE, not just basic SEO.
2. Answer The Question As Accurately As Possible
Search Generative Experience results appear to favour pages which directly answer the question posed in the search term.
Although this is counter-intuitive, if you are following Google's advice for creating content which is in natural, human language and does not repeat the main keywords, it is actually logical, if you think of the way AI-generated results are formed. AI results look to answer a query as precisely as possible and will find the best-possible match from authoritative websites to backup their answer. therefore, if you have a page which succinctly answers the question, there is a good chance that your website will be used as one of the primary sources for the AI answer and feature your page in the SGE Results Carousel.
We have just put this to the test:
On the Ellie White website, many of the products sold feature digital copies of the original watercolour paintings commissioned by the barrister, landowner and hobby naturalist, Taylor White, in the 18th Century. The collection of paintings is known as The Taylor White Collection and is housed at McGill University in Montreal.
Despite both "Taylor White" and "Taylor White Collection" being mentioned in a couple of long paragraphs on each product's page, the search term does not bring up any of our product pages in either the standard Google search results nor the SGE results.
Therefore, we created a page dedicated to "The Taylor White Collection". It is not a long page, but contains all the pertinent details about the collection and its history. Having submitted the page to Google Search Console, we waited 24 hours before making the exact same search again. The new page is number two in ordinary search results, but in SGE it provides the highlighted text, has links in both the dropdown and in the SGE Results Carousel. Additionally, SGE brings up a large banner image linking to the page directly below the answer.
With this one, optimised page, we have managed to get our page providing an SGE answer, in place of McGill University and The Royal Society - both highly prestigious and authoritative sources - which were the previous primary sources for SGE answers. This shows that simple content which directly answers a question can (at the time of writing) quickly and easily get your page into SGE results.
Even though a relatively short post has been able to jump from zero to the top of the SGE results, we believe that by the time SGE is live, it will take a combination of high-quality and long-form pages, which will be able to achieve these sorts of results. Short posts seem to be a backwards step to the old keyword stuffing days or yore and could be used by SEOs to rank pages with low quality content. It is unlikely Google will allow this to happen, but using this technique of directly answering a question and using good quality additional content could succeed in getting your pages to the top of SGE.
3. Simplicity and Readability
A few months ago, whilst publishing a book for one of our clients, we noticed something we had not seen before. The book in question used a large number of scholastic and academic quotations to back up the ideas and theories the author was posing.
Many of the links focused around quotations from the source papers and I saw that the hyperlinks were in a style I had not seen before.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8622118/#:~:text=In%20conclusion%2C%20these%20data%20suggest,controlled%20conditions%20after%20four%20weeks.
Notice the part of the hyperlink, which is in bold typeface and starts "..#:#:text=In%20conclusion%2C%20these%20......."
After the equals symbol you can see text separated by "%20" (the HTML code for a space). This is a line of text from the page being referenced. When the hyperlink is clicked, this line of text will be highlighted and scrolled to, wherever it is on the web page.
Similarly, in Google's SGE, the main part of the answer provided - much like a rich snippet in the current search engine - is a short section of text, which gives the answer to your query. The first link provided will lead either directly to this same text, or a version thereof. In other words, it is this text on the top-chosen web page which provides the main part of SGE's answer. If your page can provide the best answer to a query in a simple, yet readable way - at the top of the page - there is a good chance your page will be used as the main source for SGE's answer.
Something else which is noticeable with Google's SGE answers is that, even if they are long answers, there are dropdowns in the text next to each separate point. The websites provided under these dropdowns invariably back up the point being made in the SGE answer.
In the case of the query above "why do lurchers chase rabbits", we can see that in the second sentence of the answer (highlighted by Google), both chasing and rabbits are mentioned. The dropdown provides a link to the Home & Roost website - which is also given as the top link in the SGE Results Carousel.
Clicking through to the website from the SGE link, we can see that the SGE answer comes from two short paragraphs midway through the article. The first highlighted sentence (Google highlighting again) addresses the chasing and rabbits, whilst the next paragraph highlights lurchers. Please note also that the URL for the page uses the text in the page as a part of the URL itself:
https://homeandroost.co.uk/blog/dogs-and-rabbits/#:~:text=Dog%20Breed%20and%20Prey%20Drive&text=Many%20small%20dogs%20were%20bred,terriers%2C%20lurchers%2C%20and%20collies.
Looking at many such examples, the pattern for SGE's answers have the following characteristics:
- The sentences are short.
- They are easy to read.
- They are informative.
- They answer the question simply.
Where the search query is more complex, the answer is broken down into component constituents and each component has its own dropdown with links to backup that specific component.
One further thing to note is that the SGE answer does not always supply the pages' wording exactly. SGE will often rewrite the source page's sentences to better suit the answer it wants to provide. The above example shows this behaviour, if you compare the answer to the source page in the above example.
4. Let The Visitor Find The Information They Want Immediately
We recently rebuilt an eCommerce website from scratch for a business in the Far East, which sells rock climbing equipment worldwide. It is a highly competitive sector selling relatively low cost, but heavy, items. Their online visibility had not been great before the rebuild.
We concentrated on creating high-quality information pages, product category pages and product pages. These all had extensive descriptions, good headings and schema. As a result of the changes, most of their pages rank extremely well in both the current Google search and SGE. As you can see from the below screenshot, in SGE results, we have their information page, product category and individual product pages dominating the results and beating big-name brands in the climbing sector. In each case, the pages give the visitor the information they need instantly and the pages went from being effectively invisible to commanding the results.
Similarly, on the Ellie White website, we were ranking well in the current search results for auricula clocks, but did not get into the top three of the SGE Results Carousel. Making a few minor changes to the text in the product's short description changed this and the product is in the first place for all sections of the SGE result.
It goes to show that small tweaks can bring significant changes when it comes to Google's Search Generative Experience.
5. Submit Your Changes To Google Search Console
The only way to get the changes I have made recognised by Google was to submit them either through Google Search Console, or by using the Google Search API in the SEO plugin, Rank Math's Instant Indexing module.
To submit via Search Console, log into your Google Search Console account and enter the URL into the inspection field at the top of the page:
Once Search Console has done its checks, click the "Request Indexing" link to ask Google to reindex the page you have changed. If all goes well, you should see the results of the indexing in several hours.
Alternatively, if you use the SEO plugin, Rank Math, and have configured its excellent Instant Indexing module, you can take advantage of the Google Indexing API so that every time you make changes to a page on your WordPress website, Google is automatically notified of the change through the API. We have seen indexing changes in as little as one hour using Instant Indexing.
To manually send Google an API update, the simplest way is to go to your page / post / product, hover over it and click the "Instant Indexing: Google Update" link. This will start the notification process. You can also submit URLs in bulk through Instant Indexing. For full instructions on how to achieve this, read Rank Math's Instant Indexing document.
By the way, we highly recommend Rank Math as your SEO plugin for WordPress. Its features, especially in the Pro version, are the best available and more cost-effective than its competitors.
Summary of Google SGE In December 2023
As we have seen, Google SGE is a big change over the Google we have known and used for many years. By optimising your website for SGE now, you will be giving yourself a big head start, as the vast majority of website owners - nevermind SEO companies and web designers - have not even heard of Search Generative Experience.
With SGE in the state it is in here in December 2023, we have proven that it is possible to influence SGE into getting your page ranked above your competitors by using relatively simple and structured steps.
However, will this still be the case by the time SGE is released into the wild?
That is the question nobody can yet answer. There is the possibility that big changes may yet be built into SGE. For example, we know that since 6th December 2023, Google's brand-new Large Language Model (LLM) AI, Gemini, is being used in a range of Google products, including SGE. Gemini is said to be a big move forwards from the previous AI it used. You can therefore expect some significant changes to SGE as Gemini is implemented and tweaked.
Two main things to keep an eye on over the coming weeks and months, to see what changes are built into SGE include:
- Will simple changes to your pages lead to you being able to rank in the top three, as we have proven can be achieved at this point in time?
- Will the SGE answers to queries more or less quote the content of the pages it uses for its supporting evidence (this opens a big question about potential copyright infringement, which Google may need to address, as many publishers will not accept their content being used in the way SGE uses it).
Is Your Website Ready For Google's Search Generative Experience?
Having looked at Google's SGE in some detail, how will your website(s) fare? Are they ready for SGE? Will they rank on SGE?
If you are unsure, request your FREE website review. We will look at your website and let you know where we think things are going well, or not so well, and the changes which could be made to help its performance in search results. Request your free review today! 👇👇👇
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About The Author
Christopher White
Christopher White is the founder of Cotswold Websites. An accredited digital marketer and website designer, he has over 18 years of experience in creating bespoke websites.
With a background in international logistics and business analysis, Christopher uses his business experience to advise organisations how their website can and should work for them, along with helping them implement business strategies to use Digital Marketing techniques to boost their public exposure.