Tomorrow is here:
Why AI just grabbed my full attention
So, I don't want this to be a doom-mongering blog post about how everything's changing and everything you knew is no more. But…
Everything is changing and everything you knew is no more.
And I’m not even talking about the CMA!
Here’s the situation.
I’ve started to hear anecdotes of clients registering with practices after finding them through AI searches. This may not sound groundbreaking but I can assure you that it is.
Why? Well, because we don’t know exactly how it works. And if we don’t know how it works, we can’t control it.
For the past 15 or so years, we’ve known that to corner the online market, we had to be good at SEO.
Smart practices have always recorded where new clients come from, and the truth is it's usually a combination of factors – a good recommendation, word of mouth, proximity, Google reviews and online searching.
But now AI is disrupting this system. We have people asking ChatGPT which vet they should use, we have Google summarising online searches with their AI tool, Gemini, and we have Meta AI offering to give you advice alongside your WhatsApp messages to friends and family.
The future is here, and it’s called generative engine optimisation – or GEO for short.
Our job is to evolve right alongside it. But how do we evolve to use something we don’t understand?
Let’s take a look.
Where we've been up to now – and where we’re going
A big part of our job as marketeers is making the client journey as seamless as possible, removing friction points.
For a long time, that’s meant catering to Google, ensuring that our website ranks high up in searches and our practice nails a top three position on the map pack.
You may have noticed that a Google search looks different these days. We acclimatised to Google’s structure over years of research and practice: there were paid Google ads, the map pack which was optimised via your Google Business profile and then organic listings, which were linked to on page SEO.
Now, slotting right in above all of these elements, we have the “AI overview”, Google’s AI summation of the internet’s response to your search.
From asking around, our response to this new feature has been startlingly compliant.
We’re all using it!
Even people who wouldn’t dream of asking Chat GPT to help them at work are accepting the AI overview at face value. We spent 15 or more years being trained by Google to scroll through their rankings of websites, understanding that the SEO game was predicated on ranking as highly as possible.
That’s all out of the window now. We're just looking at that first, AI-generated result.
And the scary thing is we have no idea what truly goes into creating that content. It doesn’t seem to be based on SEO rankings or the map pack. We've seen plenty of examples where the AI result is pulling from websites that don’t make it onto the first page of Google’s organic listings.
The algorithm is different – and anyone who confidently says they know how it works is… mis-speaking. This is all so new that we're just scrabbling to get to grips with it.
Now, just because no one's got the exact formula right now, that doesn’t mean we can’t try to optimise for it. And we're working day and night to do just that.
One clue is in how Google’s AI overview gives us citations, showing us the websites it’s using to form its answers.
Can we reverse-engineer this to work out what we need to do to make the cut?
Well, it’s early days, but it seems that sites like Three Best Rated and TopVet are commonly cited in response to searches such as “best vets near me”, so it could be that chasing mentions on free listing sites is an easy win.
The good news is, from the little we understand, a lot of the same principles apply to GEO that we’ve been working on with SEO for years.
The bad news is, we’d picked up shortcuts and cheat codes in SEO. We knew that while we might not have the time to nail a blogging strategy to rank organically, we could throw everything at Google reviews and our Google Business profile, get in the top three of the map pack and rest easy that we were front and centre for local Google users.
But with AI we’re starting from scratch, meaning there’s a renewed urgency to get the fundamentals right.
What does that look like? It’s having a good website, technically well-built, regularly updated with fresh, authoritative content. It’s backlinks and Schema and meta tags.
Frankly, it’s a lot of work. But it’s work that’s never been more important.
So, what do we do next?
Don’t be intimidated – we’re here to help
There’s so much more to unpack here. I’ve mainly focused on Google and the changes to internet searching, but ChatGPT is a whole other kettle of fish.
And these are just the issues we can see today. In an industry this new, it’s impossible to predict what tomorrow holds.
No one knows where this is ending up.
But we are reading and experimenting and researching every day to try and figure it out. Then when we think we have answers, we’re implementing them and seeing what works and what doesn’t.
Once we have something that works, we want to pass it on to as many independent practices as possible, to help you adapt to the new world.
That’s our mission at Practice Made Purrfect. While you're running your practice, we’re working day and night to master the bits that allow you to focus on doing what you do best – caring for patients and clients.
If you’d like to learn more about AI, GEO and the changes coming our way – or if you have any other queries that you think we can help with – I’d love to chat.
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