What Google’s Blog on “Optimizing for Generative AI features” Means

It’s been said by various Googlers over the last 12 months, but this statement (re-stated in their latest guide) is a super unambiguous one:

“From Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.”

Responses to this have ranged from “See, Google confirms it, we were right after all” to “Google lies, of course they’d say that, don’t believe them.” Both are a bit of a waste of time, but there are some points worth considering nonetheless.

1) Google does not want to give rise to a new shadow industry. They’ll get blamed for people already doing bad things in it.

Google’s relationship with the SEO industry has never been fixed or particularly comfortable. There is almost no incentive to create a new industry for them to try and wrangle, whether you believe it should exist or not.

“Thus still SEO” removes some legitimacy from the more active fraudsters, but it won’t stop things in their tracks. That said, Google’s blessing is not often as powerful in these conversations as some might expect.

There is also a concession here to the advancement and development Google itself has had to go through. Google re-iterates the importance of RAG and notes “query fan out”, two of the more recent additions to the SEO/AEO/GEO toolkit.

The “nothing has changed with AI search” dialogue isn’t all that credible to many, even if you think it is true, so saying “we won’t do anything different” is pragmatic. So my personal advice to you is drop this line - no one will judge you badly.

2) Nuance in technical detail is missing

Whilst Google is clearly advising against some of the more spammy-sounding practices coming from “GEO bros”, a lot of the guidance remains broad and essentially boils down to “build sites well and write great content”. As messaging goes, it is consistent if nothing else.

Does that mean there are no ways to optimise or approach things differently? No. Has any other Google guide stopped people testing and experimenting around the advice? Also no.

If they had said that we now need to treat machines differently through AI-specific optimisations, it would undermine much of the advice they’ve put out previously and potentially imply failings or gaps in the current process. 

If you’re walking away from this ignorant of creating better content structures, marking up content correctly, including real facts and using confident language, you’ll probably be worse off.

Also, this guide covers Google’s version of “AI Search” not the other contenders. 

One of the biggest considerations of a technical SEO today is that we need to optimise for many more different processes/pipelines which aren’t all operating at the same level.

3) Non-commodity content is what Google wants

There are two genuinely useful clarifications here. Firstly, optimising for agents, but secondly, and probably more importantly, a clearer definition of “non-commodity content”:

• Provides a unique point of view

• Helpful, reliable and people-first

• Organised in a way that helps readers

• Includes high-quality images and video

• Focuses on what readers want without overdoing it

• Uses AI-assisted processes in line with spam guidelines

Put even more simply: not AI slop.

The problem is that commodity content has increasingly started appearing in marketing strategies and has even been touted in earnings calls. What is “valuable” is highly subjective and the SEO industry has been successfully lying to itself that the content it has been producing for the last 5-10 years was actually valuable. 

This is before LLMs were good at creating facsimiles of “good content”. Scale changes this massively. 

AI slop is an existential problem for web content if the worst-case scenarios play out, so this part of the guidance does feel worth paying attention to.

What do we do with this?

Do we think AEO/GEO disappears from the conversation? No, at least not right now. That kind of U-turn would mean lost budgets, jobs and credibility. Rightly or wrongly, we’re not there yet.

None of this changes the fact that arguing over the differences between three-letter acronyms is still not a ranking factor.

This new post, whilst linking to guides with more specific recommendations, feels more aimed at shaping behaviour and perceptions. If that was the main goal or KPI of the guide, it feels 12+ months too late to get ahead of things.

Hindsight isn’t especially useful, and there could be plenty of reasons why this wasn’t published sooner. Maybe in 2-3 years this whole thing will have blown over, do you think?