SGE will be devastating for e-commerce. Below is a list of the top 10 winner and loser domains from Authoritas's second (brand-focused) SGE study. 6 of the top 10 losers are e-commerce sites. The other four are large social networks - some of them direct competitors of Google. This trend continues with 8 of the top 20, and 15 of the top 30. Among the top 50 winners, there is not a single e-commerce site. I have said it before, and I will say it again: with SGE, Google will try to own 100% of the e-commerce market. The whole research is done via SGE. And the final conversion will happen via Google Shopping. Disclaimer: I removed one outlier domain (blog.google) because the numbers looked weird. #Google #SGE #ecommerce
(part 1) I agree that with SGE, Google will try to own 100% of the e-commerce market. Google is generating their own category pages with filters and comparisons - so category pages (or product listings) on e-commerce sites will loose traffic, while maybe their product pages will gain traffic. But I find the BRAND-focused study pretty misleading. The study is mixing brand and product search queries all together. While I think we are all sure that product search queries are heavily affected by SGE (see above), according to the study it looks like BRAND search queries are as well - which I don't think and don't see. The study just tells us, how many search queries COULD be affected by SGE, saying 91.4% of all queries where affected. In fact these 91.4% divide into search queries with "generate" and directly showing SGE. According to figure "SGE Penetration% by Type of keyword" "Brand", "Brand + generic term" and "Brand + product or service" had approx. 90% SGE type "generate_button" - so users have to click on the button to generate a SGE. In my opinion Google shows this "generate" button, when they are not sure, whether or not a SGE result will show more useful information, than the 10 blue links will - and let the user decide.
What are your thoughts on user adoption of SGE? Do people want to wait for the snapshot? Do they want to click most of the time? As is, it's 2x as likely that you have to click to generate, which takes longer, than if the snapshot was automatically generated. Even if automatically generated, you still have to click once more to unveil the result. Their earnings call after SGE launched will be interesting. So far, I think a missing ingredient are ads inside the snapshot. They showed it off in their demo snippets when they revealed SGE, but I haven't observed any ads inside the AI snapshots over the last 6-9 months.
Interesting, and from the data seen above it looks like Google is doing as expected, simply moving to keep more people on their search pages by allowing people to take even more actions directly within the search pages. But what is not seen in the above is if any of the smaller and or local ecoms have grown in visibility as a result, meaning it could also be said that some of the visibility could have been given to some of the smaller guys.
Malte, do you know of any similar study for B2B SaaS?
Does this track SERP feature rankings such as organic merchant listings?
Amazon has ocean of data and product reviews. They only need OpenAI or other LLM integration into their platform which could answer people's questions and recommend products based on reviews and people's buying intent. They are already experimenting with AI Chatbot feature. Other big guys will also find a way around it sooner or later.
Amazing data Malte, really interesting. I'm wondering, at some point won't Amazon, Walmart and others move to another solution (...Bing?)? If you can't be found with Google, then you need something else, what do you think? 🤔
Is there any resource where I can study how can I try ranking in SGE?
Very interesting Malte Landwehr! My prediction from early on is that Google will make a purpose-built AI shopping assistant featuring a universal cart, potentially buybox elements stripped from Buy On Google, and of course Shopping ads. Thanks for sharing these figures.
Head of SEO at idealo | Ex VP Product & Management Consultant
1moAs usual, I added the data from this study to my summary of now 7 large-scale SGE studies: https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/18zyqvr/everything_we_know_about_google_sge_search/