If you’ve used Google or other search engines lately, you’ve probably noticed that the results, and the way books and authors appear in them, are changing. Searches no longer return just a long list of links — they include rich data, FAQs, AI summaries, and other new answer formats.
These changes are both a challenge and an opportunity — authors who adapt and earn placement in the new, richer results stand to sell more books and grow their audience. Meanwhile, authors who don’t adjust could see declines in their search-driven traffic and sales.
What do you need to do to make sure you benefit from these changes?
This article aims to answer that question by looking at the key ways search is changing, and the steps you can take to prepare.
How is the book-search experience changing?
Search has long been a key part of the journey readers take from discovering a book to purchasing it. In many cases, when readers first discover a book or an author — by talking to friends over dinner, browsing new titles at the library, or scrolling through Instagram — they turn to search to learn more about it.
In the past, book and author searches returned a list of links — retailers, author websites, review sites, newspaper articles, and other related sites — like the one below.
Several years ago, Google and other search engines began returning richer results including book previews, videos, and data cards. You can see examples of this type of content in the results for a search for Claire Lombardo’s book Same as It Ever Was:
You’ve probably seen other rich formats, too. For example, results for book searches often include a “People also ask” module. This module surfaces related questions with answers pulled from third-party sites and cited with links.
More recently, search engines started including AI-generated answers in their results. In these AI-generated answers, the focus is not on linking to outside sites or pulling data — these are personalized responses to users’ questions, written by the search engine.
AI answers represent a major step in the evolution of search engines — a step away from their history of referring users to other sites to get answers, toward a world where search engines answer many questions on their own. Reflecting this new, broader pattern of use, AI search engines like Google’s AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude are increasingly called “answer engines.”
As search engines become answer engines, they’re able to play a new role for readers: They’re better able to help readers discover new books and authors. If you ask a search engine for book recommendations, it will refer you to a site that publishes book reviews and recommendation lists. If you ask an answer engine, it will offer recommendations itself.
In this example you can see that Google’s AI overview recommended Same as It Ever Was:
What’s the impact of all these changes for authors?
Google recently reported that, overall, traffic to websites from their search engine is holding steady, with an increase in quality clicks for sites that appear in the new, richer results. At the same time, we know that many individual sites, pushed down or out of the results by AI answers, are seeing reduced search traffic.
Google’s data suggests that for authors who can adapt, the changes to search can be an opportunity. Authors who show up in rich results with their books, and who are recommended in answers or citations, stand to attract new readers and book sales.
What authors need to do to adapt
What should you do to make sure your work is showing up in rich results, AI overviews, and other key features of the new generation of search engines?
While the search landscape is changing constantly and there are no guarantees, there are a handful of strategies that we recommend:
Measure your search traffic and set goals. A key first step toward getting more readers from search and answer engines is to measure your search traffic and set goals for improvements. Use free tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to see how much traffic you’re getting and which keywords bring readers to your site. The data isn’t always exact, but it’s still the best way to spot trends and track your progress.
Continue traditional SEO. Don’t give up on traditional SEO tactics. Though search results are richer now, many of the fundamentals of ranking and earning traffic are unchanged. This means it’s still important to focus on factors like:
- Meta descriptions: Meta descriptions are short summaries of a page on your site. They’re not used to determine ranking, but search engines sometimes display them in results. You can improve your click-through rate by making your meta descriptions more compelling.
- Backlinks: Links to your website from other sites are key signals search engines use to assess your website’s credibility and rank it in their results. You can build backlinks by publishing content that’s high-quality (so more likely to earn links), or by actively reaching out to other sites for opportunities to collaborate on interviews, guest posts, or book reviews that link back to your site.
- Site usability: Search engines want to make sure they’re referring their users to sites that provide a high-quality experience, so you want to make sure your site performs well on key usability criteria — that it’s secure, fast, accessible to all, and working on all devices.
- Sitemap: A sitemap is a file on your site that lets search engines know about pages on your site and when you’ve updated them. It’s a basic way to make sure your content is getting seen by search engines. Many website platforms, including BookBub’s Author Websites, automatically generate sitemaps.
Ensure key content (like books and series) has the right underlying code structure. Even if you didn’t write any code to build your website, your site is powered by code that search and answer engines read. By adding structure to the code around your content (schema tags are one way to do this), you can increase the chances of that content showing up in rich cards and answer engine results. Google outlines the importance of structured content (data) on their site:
Google Search works hard to understand the content of a page. You can help us by providing explicit clues about the meaning of a page to Google by including structured data on the page.”
For authors, structured code is particularly important for books, series, reader magnets, author bios, mailing list sign-ups, and book trailers (BookBub’s Author Websites website builder adds these tags automatically).
Build citations for your books. Citations — the links that answer engines often cite near their answers — play two important roles. First, since the citations appear in the results, they drive traffic. Perhaps more importantly, the citations influence the answers that answer engines display. How do you build citations? Similar to building backlinks, two things are key:
- Create a website featuring your books and content about them.
- Encourage honest, high-quality reviews and discussion of your books on other reputable sites. A good way to see which sites influence the answer engines is to ask the engines questions about your books or genre and see which sites are already cited.
Build links from key sites. A handful of key sites — Reddit, Wikipedia, and YouTube, for example — appear frequently in answer engine citations, so these should be part of your strategy for building citations and backlinks. Given that answer engines already trust and rely on content from these sites, organic, honest, high-quality citations on these sites are likely to help increase the visibility of authors’ sites and books. You can focus on these by participating — reviewing and commenting on other authors’ books on those sites, and making readers and authors aware of your new books so that they are more likely to discuss your work.
What if I have concerns about the use of AI?
Although answer engines are gaining traction quickly and promise authors a new discovery channel, many authors have concerns about the AI technology underlying answer engines.
At BookBub, we’re trying to help authors navigate these concerns. Those who use Author Websites, our new website builder, can choose to instruct AI crawlers not to train on their website content. This feature will reduce the risk of your content being used for training. At the same time, Author Websites automatically adds schema tags to books and other key elements on your site, making it more likely that your books show up in rich search results. Together, these features allow you to optimize your site for search and answer engines while giving you the option to ask AI engines not to train future models on your work.
While there are lots of changes happening in search — and authors still have many questions about AI — with the right optimizations, you can increase your chances of showing up in rich search results, reaching more readers, and selling more books.
