It's been over a month since Google wrapped up AI answers at the top of search results and received feedback on the feature incorrect answers.
or new study from the SEO Ranking SE platform shows that Google has now reduced how often AI summaries appear and changed which websites it uses to get answers.
Wednesday's study took 100,000 keywords across 20 topics, including business, politics and wellness, and did Google searches for the keywords. The researchers found that AI has significantly less of a presence in Google search results now than it did five months ago when they the same research.
Connected: Site traffic down? Google just made some big changes to search
Most of the 100,000 searches, over 90%, do not return an AI result now compared to over 63% that did in January, the researchers found.
The percentage of AI summaries that Google automatically generates has dropped by over 52%.
The “sharp drop” is probably due to Google's effort to make AI summaries more accurate and reliable, the SE ranking researchers wrote.
“The search engine is more selective when generating AI content than before,” they added.
Connected: Google's new AI search results are already hallucinatory
Reddit and Nerdwallet were on the top 10 list in January, but are now out. Same with Quora, Investopedia and Local.google.com (or Google Maps with local companies present).
In their place are five newcomers: Runner's World, Healthline, Run Repeat, Very Well Mind and Men's Health.
Runner's World and Healthline fall under the sports, exercise, self-care, wellness, and healthcare domains, which “may indicate that Google is prioritizing sites with deep expertise within specific topics,” SE Ranking researchers wrote.
Sites like Reddit and Quora still benefited from a Google update in August that prioritized discussions and forums. Reddit traffic has almost tripled in the eight months ending in April since the update.
Connected: Reddit traffic triples, posts prioritized in Google Search
Google is the global search engine leader, with more than 90% of the global market.
The top ten websites most linked to by Google's AI overviews, out of 100,000 searches, are:
- Runnersworld.com (linked 1200 times)
- Healthline.com (linked 1,114 times)
- Linkedin.com (linked 1027 times)
- Runrepeat.com (linked 933 times)
- En.wikipedia.org (linked 775 times)
- Youtube.com (linked 761 times)
- Forbes.com (linked 680 times)
- Webmd.com (linked 583 times)
- Verywellmind.com (linked 562 times)
- Menshealth.com (linked 547 times)