Sara Guaglione of Digiday interviewed Ed Hyatt, director of newsroom SEO at The Wall Street Journal, about its strategy for “Google zero,” or a future where Google keeps audiences inside its walls.
Guaglione writes, “The first step any publisher’s SEO team should take is gathering data, Hyatt said. ‘Look at your log files and see how the crawlers are engaging with your website,’ he said.
“Then combine that data with SEO tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs and Profound to paint a picture of what impact this is having on site traffic, and how to optimize around certain queries or topics. In other words, finding a way to meet AI crawlers where they’re looking for content, he said.
“‘It will never be as good as first-party data, but it could certainly give you a much stronger understanding of your brand’s place in the market, whether it’s for AI Overviews, AI Mode [or other AI platforms]. It will help you get closer to the answer of, what’s our publisher’s place in this ecosystem?’ he said.
“For example, if an AI engine is crawling a publisher’s tech section at a much greater rate than any other section, it could mean testing a different strategy for that vertical, depending on a publisher’s goals (trying to or not trying to appear in AI answer engines).”
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