Natural referencing in 2024 no longer resembles what it was two years ago. The gradual rollout of AI Overviews by Google, confirmed during Google I/O 2024, is changing the distribution of organic traffic on informational queries. At the same time, the Core Updates of March and August 2024 have penalized practices that were previously tolerated, such as site reputation abuse. For those managing a website, these developments require a deep reconsideration of SEO strategies.
AI Overviews and decline in organic CTR: what changes for visibility
AI Overviews (formerly SGE) generate synthetic answers directly in Google search results. This block mechanically reduces the click-through rate to standard pages, especially on broad informational queries.
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The direct consequence: content that previously ranked on the first page with little effort now attracts fewer visitors. Short and generic queries are the most affected, as they more frequently trigger an AI block.
In contrast, very specialized, transactional, or brand queries remain less impacted by these modules. Shifting your content strategy towards these types of keywords becomes a concrete lever to maintain visibility. Several field reports, documented by Search Engine Land, confirm that long and specialized queries maintain a stable organic CTR. Additional resources are available on the Blog IT site dedicated to SEO, which details these dynamics.
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Core Updates 2024: sanctions against parasitic content
The Google algorithm updates in March and then in August 2024 targeted a specific practice: site reputation abuse. The principle was to publish low-quality guest content on high-authority domains to capture traffic without real editorial effort.
Analyses published by Sistrix and Glenn Gabe (GSQi) in spring 2024 document sharp declines in visibility for media and blogs that relied on this lever. High-authority sites lost a significant portion of their organic traffic overnight.
This tightening changes the approach to link building and guest article publication. Google no longer just checks the authority of the host domain: it evaluates the consistency between the published content and the site’s theme, as well as the editorial quality of the text itself.
What this means for a backlink strategy
Links from sites whose themes have no relation to yours become risky. An SEO article published on a high-authority culinary blog, for example, will no longer provide the same value as before and could even be detrimental.
- Prioritize backlinks from sites whose editorial scope overlaps with yours, even if their domain authority is more modest
- Ensure that each guest content meets Google’s E-E-A-T criteria (Expertise, Experience, Authority, Trust) with an identifiable author
- Regularly audit your link profile to identify sources that have become toxic after the updates
Crawlability and technical performance: the neglected foundation of SEO
Case analyses published by Yoast, OnCrawl, and Lumar in 2024 all point in the same direction: technical crawl optimization remains the most underestimated factor by medium-sized sites. Poorly indexed quality content generates no traffic.
The crawl budget, meaning the number of pages Googlebot explores on your site during each visit, directly depends on the technical structure. Orphan pages, redirect chains, or inconsistent internal linking waste this budget.
Technical signals to monitor as a priority
The Core Web Vitals remain integrated into ranking criteria. But beyond loading speed, it is Google’s ability to discover and index your pages that determines your visibility ceiling.
- Reduce click depth: each strategic page should be accessible within three clicks maximum from the homepage
- Remove or redirect thin content pages that dilute the crawl budget without generating traffic
- Use Search Console to identify crawl errors and pages excluded from the index
- Implement an up-to-date XML sitemap and an internal linking structure that reflects your editorial priorities
Conversational queries and mobile search: adapting content to real demand
Reports from SeoClarity 2024 and HubSpot (State of Marketing 2024) converge on one point: the share of SEO traffic coming from mobile and voice-assisted search continues to increase. Conversationally phrased queries, often longer, are taking up an increasing share of search volumes.
This shift has a direct implication for writing. Content optimized for “SEO strategies 2024” will not attract the same visitors as content answering “how to improve my website’s SEO this year.” The two formulations coexist, but the latter corresponds to an increasingly widespread mobile and voice usage.
Structuring your pages with subtitles that reflect these longer formulations, and addressing them directly in the early paragraphs, increases the chances of appearing in featured snippets. These zero positions withstand competition from AI Overviews better than standard results.
E-E-A-T and editorial credibility: what Google really checks
The E-E-A-T framework (Expertise, Experience, Authority, Trust) is not a strict algorithmic ranking factor. It is a set of criteria used by Google’s quality raters to manually assess the relevance of results, and these evaluations feed into algorithm adjustments.
In practical terms, an article without an identifiable author and without evidence of expertise will be disadvantaged compared to content signed by a recognized specialist in their field. Detailed author pages, citations from verifiable sources, and regular content updates contribute to building this credibility.
The available data do not allow for precise quantification of the weight of each E-E-A-T signal in ranking. Field feedback varies on this point. What is documented is that sites that strengthened their editorial transparency after the Core Updates of 2024 fared better against positioning fluctuations than those that changed nothing.
SEO visibility in 2024 relies on a balance between technical adaptation and editorial quality. Sites that merely optimize their tags without rethinking their content strategy in light of AI Overviews and Google’s new requirements fall behind, often without realizing it until the next update.