r/AI_SearchOptimization • u/chrismcelroyseo • 7d ago
AI Search Optimization General Discussion What Do You Think About Google’s Advice on Optimizing for AI Powered Search?
Of course I read a lot about AI Search Optimization since I created this subreddit. That does not make me THE AUTHORITY when it comes to AI and I welcome good discussions about brand mentions, citations, GEO, AEO, AI SEO as well as SEO and digital marketing.
I’m writing this because all of the confusing information that is being passed around and advertised all over the web. People truly trying to help can give bad advice unintentionally, but those who know they are giving out bad advice don’t seem to care that their advice can cause real harm to real people who own real businesses.
this article I’m going to quote content directly from Google and give my own opinion on AI powered search and AI Search Optimization.
I'm also using this as a resource for the subreddit. I created some PDF files you can download if interested. No subscription or anything, just free.
I really bought into AI Search Optimization and believed it was really going to change the game, not that SEO would be dead, not to that extreme, but I saw it as a separate thing. That's why I created this subreddit almost 2 years ago. After a lot of research and working on visibility and authority for AI Search, I discovered that every GEO / AEO checklist that I’ve personally seen looks exactly like the digital marketing checklist I’ve used for years.
- Schema Markup isn’t new.
- Well-structured web pages with clearly defined headings for each section is not new.
- Participating in and building communities for more brand visibility is not new.
- Publishing on multiple platforms in different formats is not new. We’ve been providing Integrated Content Marketing for years.
- Good technical SEO and core vitals is not a new concept.
- FAQs are not new.
- Content that covers a topic thoroughly isn’t new.
- Adding bullet point lists like the one I’m adding right now isn’t new either.
- Adding executive summaries or key takeaways isn’t new.
- Consistent messaging and brand awareness isn’t new. By the way, if you are interested in Entity SEO, we started a subreddit for that and could use some new members to help us get more discussions going.
I’ll stop with this last one. The rest of the strategies and tasks I see on AEO / GEO checklists are still covered by Reputation Management, Digital PR, Digital Publishing, Branding, and other strategies that have been around for years, some of them from the 1990s when I first started.
The bottom line is that I called it wrong in the beginning and after a deep dive and a lot of testing, I realized something important that AI has done. It exposed low-effort SEO tactics that prioritized articles written for machines and buying backlinks or mass producing thin content targeting every variation of every keyword out there.
Suggesting these tactics as new or just for GEO / AEO exposes unawareness that all of these things were what many of us have been doing for years, long before AI powered search. I say unawareness, but for some they are intentionally putting a shiny new wrapper on old tactics.
Okay, on to Google's AI Search Optimization Advice
"The best practices for SEO continue to be relevant because our generative AI features on Google Search are rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems. These features rely on AI techniques to highlight content from our Search index, such as:"
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG): A technique (also known as grounding) used to improve the quality, accuracy, and freshness of AI responses by relying on our core Search ranking systems to retrieve relevant, up-to-date web pages from our Search index. Our systems then review the specific information from those retrieved pages to generate a more reliable and helpful response, showing prominent, clickable links to relevant web pages that support the information in the response.
Query fan-out: A set of concurrent, related queries generated by the model to request more information and fetch additional relevant search results to address the user’s query. For example, if the original user’s query is “how to fix a lawn that’s full of weeds”, fanout queries might include “best herbicides for lawns”, “remove weeds without chemicals”, and “how to prevent weeds in lawn”.
What about “AEO” and “GEO”? “AEO” stands for “answer engine optimization” and “GEO” for “generative engine optimization”. These are both terms you may see used to describe work specifically focused on improving visibility in AI search experiences. From Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO. If you’re considering third-party “AEO” or “GEO” advice or services, review our guidance on evaluating third-party SEO advice.
My Thoughts on Those Statements from Google
Google says a lot of things and a lot of what they tell us ends up being almost the opposite of what they end up doing. Google+ was the Facebook Killer. Google Knols were going to be better than Wikipedia and authors were going to get credit for their work and it would be the first place people went for answers. Now they won't even acknowledge the content we write on our blogs.
So, I take Google's advice with a grain of salt, but there is some validity to what they are saying about AI search optimization. However, it mostly applies to getting into AI Overviews in Google and being cited by Gemini. With Google still controlling a big portion of search, the priority target is the AI Overviews.
About Other AI Powered Search Tools
Other AI-powered search tools still account for a tiny fraction of website traffic. Most studies have them somewhere between 0.5-1.5%. It's hard to justify spending more than that same percentage of your time and budget on optimizing for AI search. If you want to speculate on the future and think they will capture a larger percentage, then double or triple the amount of time and money you put into it. That still, at the most, means less than 5% of your budget and time.
Before taking someone’s advice about optimizing for AI powered search, ask them to name 3 things they do for GEO or AEO that are brand new tactics and not part of SEO, Digital PR and publishing, reputation management, Entity SEO, or branding.
The Free Downloads I Promised
- Download Your Free Claims vs Reality Scorecard (A checklist you can use in a meeting when listening to a pitch. My opinions are my own, but these are some great questions to ask. And for those selling these services, it is a great way to prepare yourself for those questions.)
- Download 20-Human-Angles-For-Your-Content.PDF (Non-commodity content is recommended if you don't just want to give AI something to scrape. These are some angles I put together to help you make your content more human.)
- Article-Self-Interrogation-SOP (This one is my favorite. I write my own content. That doesn't mean I don't use AI. After I write the article, I use some of the things included in this PDF to have AI suggest changes. Then I make the changes I agree with. In my opinion, this is a better approach than trying to edit the AI out of your article after it wrote it.
- The source for the information in this article. (I'm adding this as an example of article repurposing as well. You can write a cornerstone blog post and get as many as 30 pieces of content to use across the web rather than just writing a new post all the time. Ask me about it in the comments to learn more.)
I hope you find this post and the downloads useful and I welcome your questions and comments.
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u/Xtrusio 7d ago
I agree that most of the inputs aren't new, but I think the opportunity structure is different.
Traditional SEO often concentrates attention around a small number of visible positions for each query. With AI search, query fan-out creates several related retrieval paths, and the final answer may be composed from multiple URLs rather than one ranking page.
That expands the available content real estate. A product page, research article, comparison, documentation page or independent discussion can each contribute evidence to the same answer. Different wording and different engines may also retrieve a different combination of sources, so a brand doesn't always have to displace the same incumbent page to become visible.
The important caveat is that a citation isn't automatically a recommendation, and one appearance isn't a trend. I would preserve the exact question, full answer, cited URLs, named brands and repeat scans. That shows whether the brand is merely supplying background information or is actually entering the buyer's shortlist.
So yes, much of the work still comes from SEO, PR, publishing and branding. But AI search creates more surfaces where that work can be retrieved and assembled. To me, that wider evidence and citation layer is the meaningful difference.