Google just published its AI guide, and it says you've been sold things you didn't need
For two years now, an entire industry has grown up around getting your business mentioned by AI. New acronyms, new services, new invoices. GEO. AEO. Whatever’s next.
In May, Google finally published an official guide on how to show up in its AI features. And the most useful part of it isn’t the advice. It’s the section where Google quietly dismantles a long list of things people have been paying good money for.
If you’ve had someone try to sell you AI optimisation lately, this is worth ten minutes of your time.
The single most important line in the guide
Google’s position is blunt. On whether AEO and GEO are separate disciplines, the guide says that from Google Search’s perspective, optimising for generative AI search is optimising for the search experience, and is therefore still SEO.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. There is no separate AI index and no secret AI playbook.
Why that’s true, mechanically
The reason matters more than the statement. Google’s AI features are built directly on top of its existing ranking systems. Same index, same crawling, same quality checks that have run Search for years. The AI layer just decides how to present what those systems already retrieved.
It works in two steps. First, retrieval: before writing an answer, Google’s normal ranking systems go and fetch relevant pages from the index. Then the model reads those pages and writes a response, linking back to them.
Which leads to the sentence every business owner should internalise: if your page doesn’t get retrieved, it doesn’t get cited. Retrieval is ranking. You cannot skip the queue by buying an AI-specific gadget, because there is no queue to skip.
What Google says you don’t need
Here’s the part that should save you money. Google names, directly, the tactics that have been sold hard for two years and says they aren’t required.
- llms.txt files. Google may crawl the file like any other text file, but it gives it no special meaning for AI answers. If someone charged you to set one up as an AI ranking tactic, they charged you for nothing.
- Chunking your content. No need to chop your pages into little fragments for AI to digest. Google says its systems understand a full page and can pull out the relevant bit themselves.
- AI-specific rewriting. You don’t need to rewrite everything to capture every long-tail variation. AI understands synonyms and meaning.
- Special schema or markdown versions of your pages. Structured data is still useful for rich results, but there’s no magic markup that unlocks AI placement.
That’s a decent chunk of the GEO service menu, crossed off by Google itself.
One I’d add from experience
Google also says something worth hearing about buying brand mentions. Some firms will offer to seed mentions of your business across the web to influence what AI says about you.
Google’s answer is that its AI features rely on the same spam systems as core search. The core systems focus on quality content, other systems block spam, and the AI features depend on both. Manufactured mentions get filtered like any other spam.
I’d go further. Even where you can find a workaround, don’t. It’s the AI-era version of writing your own reviews, and it’s exactly the kind of thing that looks clever right up until it doesn’t.
So what actually works?
Now we get to the useful part, and there are two things in the guide genuinely worth acting on.
Non-commodity content
Google draws a sharp line here, and it uses its own example.
A generic “7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers” article is commodity content. Anyone could have written it. So could the AI, without you.
Compare that to something like “why we waived the inspection and saved money, a look inside the sewer line.” That has a perspective baked in. It happened to someone. An AI can’t generate it from thin air, which is precisely why it’s worth citing.
Google calls this the single biggest long-term factor for visibility in AI search, ahead of any technical tweak in the whole document.
For a local business, that’s genuinely good news, because you have this in abundance and your competitors don’t. The awkward job you sorted last winter. The thing that always goes wrong with houses on that particular street. What you actually charge and why. Nobody else has that. Write it down.
Query fan-out
The other mechanism worth understanding. When someone asks a question, Google silently generates a set of related sub-queries and runs them all at once.
Google’s own example in the guide: ask how to fix a lawn full of weeds, and behind the scenes it’s also searching for the best herbicides, how to remove weeds without chemicals, and how to stop them coming back.
The practical upshot is rather freeing. Your page can turn up in an AI answer for questions you never explicitly targeted, as long as your content genuinely covers the topic with real depth. You don’t need to build a page for every keyword variant. You need one page that properly knows its subject.
Where I part company with Google slightly
I’ll be straight with you, because that’s how we work.
Google’s guide, like all its guidance, leans heavily on “just write good content for humans and it’ll be fine.” There’s truth in that, but it’s also a bit convenient. It implies the systems can simply tell what’s helpful, and anyone who’s watched a thin, well-optimised page outrank a brilliant one knows it isn’t that clean.
Structure still matters. Titles that match what people actually search still matter. Answering the question in the first line instead of the fifth paragraph still matters. None of that is manipulation. It’s just making sure the good thing you wrote can actually be found.
Read the scope of the claim, not just the claim
Here’s the habit thirty years in this trade teaches you. When Google says something doesn’t matter, check what it says it doesn’t matter for.
Take your Google Business Profile description. Google has confirmed it isn’t used as a ranking factor, and the independent research agrees. Case closed, you’d think. Except AI is demonstrably reading that field and using it to describe businesses to potential customers.
Both things are true at once. It doesn’t lift you up the map pack, and it shapes what AI says about you. Google told you the first bit. It didn’t especially go out of its way to tell you the second.
That’s the pattern to watch for. Google tells you what doesn’t affect rankings. That isn’t the same as telling you what doesn’t affect outcomes. The two get conflated constantly, sometimes by people repeating the guidance, occasionally by Google itself.
So take the guide for what it’s genuinely worth: an honest list of what you can stop paying for, and a clear statement that the fundamentals still carry the weight. Just don’t mistake “no effect on rankings” for “no effect at all.”
What to do on Monday
If you run a local business and someone’s been pitching you AI optimisation, ask them a simple question. Which of the things Google just said were unnecessary are you charging me for?
Then get on with the things that do work. Be indexed and technically sound, because retrieval is ranking. Write the content only you could write, because that’s the stuff worth citing. Answer the whole cluster of questions around your subject, not just the headline one.
Same as it ever was, really. Which is rather the point.
Want an honest look at what your website is and isn’t doing? Get your free audit, or email hello@inkon.co.uk. I read every message myself.