Google Is Showing AI Overviews for Personal and Business Brands

James Dooley (0:01)

Google now shows AI overviews for brand names.

Today, I'm joined with Kasra Dash, and we're going to be talking about the Google AI overviews now being seen, which there wasn't previously, for personal brand names, as long as they're big enough, and also for business brands. So Kasra, what's your thoughts on this?

Kasra Dash (0:22)

Wow.

I didn't expect this, stupidly, because I think it makes sense, but I think this will probably make or break certain brands. Obviously, we were checking out a load of brands like GoDaddy, Bing, Namecheap, a few others, that it was pulling in. And in certain cases, not all the time, but in certain cases, it was actually mentioning why you shouldn't go with certain brands as well. So that's going to hurt people's conversion rates and click-through rates, especially for navigational searches as well.

James Dooley (1:00)

Yeah, for sure. I mean, it was quite funny looking at a couple of the different brand names when it came up in the Google AI overview. Like, probably one of the funniest ones for me was Bing. How it started showing up the TV show of Bing alongside the search engine, as if like Bing search engine is not big enough. We're now going to show a Bing TV show that stopped publishing in 2019 And it's like, do you mean the Bing TV show that's not been running for seven years or the Bing search engine? I thought that was quite a funny one. But then obviously, like you've mentioned there, has been one or two big brands. And because they're showing everything of like why they're amazing, but also why you might not want to use them, the why you might not want to use them, that is crazy for a navigational term for a brand name to then have that AI overview show why you might not want to use them is scary.

Like how important do you think online reputation management now is going to become because of this?

Kasra Dash (2:00)

I think a lot of people will need to start investing in branding and having a positive sentiment online. One thing I will say though is that I don't think that there's anything different between this and if you've got a couple of two-star reviews on Trustpilot or a few low reviews on Goot GMBs and stuff like that as well. So I think there is that side of it where we've already had it.

What would you recommend to someone that would want to own their actual brand and get a positive sentiment online?

James Dooley (2:38)

I think for me, what I'd be looking to do is, maybe you, I don't want to send you that because we're talking about Google AI overviews, but go into ChatGPT and start searching like who is brand name, why should I use brand name, why should I not use brand name. Go into like your Vanquo-esque kind of operating system, pull, extrapolate all them synthetic queries that show up in query for now, and then try to optimize. So not just the brand name reviews, brand name testimonials, brand name awards. It's like, is brand name safe, is brand name legit? And I just try and own everything I possibly can in a positive sentiment. So there can't be any outliers that it starts to pull in anything that's negative press.

I think now, online reputation management has become more important than ever.

But I also think it's become harder than ever, because now it's not just about owning the one, like the first 10 results on page one just for brand name. I think there's so many more variations and attributes. Like I said, like reviews, like awards and everything else that needs to come with it. But what would you do Kasra Dash? If you're wanting to make certain, if you type in your brand name, so whether it's Kasra Dash or whether like say it's the masterminders event, you go and search that and AI overview shows up. What are you going to be wanting to try to do to make certain it's a positive sentiment?

Kasra Dash (4:04)

So I would first of all understand who my target audience is, and I would own that moniker. So for example, like if somebody searches the masterminders and it says it's not for beginners, I don't really care.

I don't want beginners coming to the masterminders. I want it to be a high level audience. Or let's say for example, I'm a hosting company and I don't want to get into the realm of enterprise hosting because it's too complicated. You need DDoS protection, you need multiple servers and all these advanced Kubernetes setups and stuff like that. I'm like, okay, that's fine. I'm going to make certain that AI never recommends me to an enterprise company, and I will own that.