This episode of Equity explores how Google's shift to AI-generated search results is fundamentally changing SEO and marketing. Guest Matt Thompson from Scrunch explains that brands must now optimize for AI agents and conversational queries rather than traditional keywords, and that most websites are not built for AI bot traffic, which now often exceeds human traffic.
Summarized by Podsumo
Google is all-in on AI search with AI Overviews and AI Mode, where queries are doubling quarter-over-quarter and becoming longer and more conversational, requiring new optimization strategies.
Scrunch's data shows AI bot traffic now surpasses human traffic on most customer sites, and AI referrals convert at 400% higher rates than traditional organic search because users do research beforehand.
Scrunch's Agent Experience platform reduces token count on web pages by 98-99%, stripping code and JavaScript to serve AI-optimized versions to bots, leading to 300-500% increases in brand mentions.
Unlike traditional SEO focused on keywords, AI search requires optimizing for 'query fan-out'—the semantic expansion of a user's query into multiple sub-queries across different AI platforms.
Google advises against building machine-only layers or rewriting for agents, but Scrunch argues this advice is Google-specific and ignores the 55-60% of AI search traffic that goes through ChatGPT.
"These agents or bots that are coming on behalf of a human from chat GPT or from Claude or from Grop or from Proplexity are coming to your site and they can't read or an agent language. They can't parse that information on your website quickly and easily. — Matt Thompson"
"We're seeing that AI referrals are converting at 400% higher than traditional organic search because they're coming to the website. The sale is already made. They've already done all of the research. — Matt Thompson"
"What we can do is we can Remove all of that. Scrunch the token based down by 98 or 99%. So what was a page that had 100,000 tokens will now have maybe 1,000 or 2,000 tokens. — Matt Thompson"