For the past year and a half the marketing world has been living in a mild panic. First came AI Overviews — those generated answers at the top of the results that resolve a query before you click a single link. Then AI Mode arrived, turning search into something closer to a conversation. Meanwhile ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude started answering people directly too. And around all of it a new vocabulary sprang up overnight: GEO, AEO, AI SEO, “optimization for neural networks.” Along with the vocabulary came a market of vendors promising to get you into those AI answers.

Against that backdrop, a recent piece on Think with Google reads as almost provocative in its plainness. Brendon Kraham, Google’s VP for Search & Commerce, sums the whole thing up in one line: good SEO is good GEO. Or AEO. Or AI SEO. Or whatever you’re calling it this week.

Underneath that simplicity sit a few uncomfortable ideas. Let’s unpack what Google actually said, what it didn’t, and where the advice is worth taking with a caveat.

The core claim: the new search runs on the old foundation

Google’s logic is almost embarrassingly simple. The generative features — both AI Overviews and AI Mode — don’t live in a separate universe. They run on the same ranking and quality systems as ordinary search, and they pull current content from the same index. There is no secret “index for the neural networks.”

From that follows the conclusion the whole piece seems written for: your past investment in solid, foundational SEO isn’t legacy you need to rebuild — it’s the launch pad. If your site is fast, clear and genuinely useful to a human, it has every chance of showing up both in the regular results and in an AI answer. No broken magic required.

Google backs this with one figure from its own reporting: last quarter (per Alphabet’s Q1 2026 release) the number of search queries hit an all-time high. So the “people stopped googling” narrative is overstated. People google more — just differently.

What Google explicitly asks you to stop doing

This is where the piece gets genuinely interesting, because Google openly names the things entire agencies make a living on. In Kraham’s telling, it’s time to stop:

  • optimizing content for bots instead of people;
  • stuffing text with keywords;
  • chopping material into artificial “snippets” in the hope they’re easier to cite;
  • chasing unnatural brand mentions;
  • building special technical formats like an llms.txt file.

The argument is single-minded: modern systems understand language roughly the way a person does, so tricks aimed at the machine are useless at best. Generative features are perfectly able to find honest, living content in blogs, videos and forums — without hints in the form of service files.

llms.txt deserves a pause. It’s a proposed format — something like a “sitemap for language models” — that the SEO world has been arguing about for a year. And here the largest search engine literally writes: don’t spend time on it. More on that caveat below, because it’s less clear-cut than it sounds.

What Google suggests doing instead

The freed-up time, the company proposes, should go into the one genuinely scarce asset — your own expertise and point of view. In a world of infinite content, what sets you apart isn’t volume but authenticity: first-hand experience, in-house specialists, opinions you won’t find anywhere else.

The example from the article is great in its ordinariness. Picture a local running-shoe store that films a detailed breakdown of why one specific model falls apart over long distances. That video beats the standard “Top 10 running shoes” article, because it answers a real, narrow question from someone who has already felt the problem. Anyone can write the generic roundup (a neural network included). A breakdown of a specific failure, grounded in experience, can’t be faked.

On the practical side, Google reminds you about the Merchant Center and Google Business Profile pairing: filled-in product and company data helps you land in both AI answers and the classic results. And about basic site hygiene — correct display across devices, low latency, a clear content structure. There’s a subtle but important twist here: a user arriving from an AI answer is usually better informed and closer to a decision. So a clumsy interface or a slow load costs you more than before — you’re losing not “cold” traffic but an almost-ready customer.

How to measure success when the old metrics lie

The piece ends with its most sobering part — measurement. Google says two things outright. First: the company doesn’t evaluate third-party SEO tools and has no access to their internal metrics, so their “AI visibility scores” deserve a healthy dose of caution. Second: the only durable measurement strategy is to look at business outcomes. Not abstract visibility, but leads, sales and sign-ups.

At the same time, new honest reference points are appearing. Search Console now shows the number of impressions from search AI features, and the Merchant Center reports on how products surface in generative answers. It’s not a cure-all, just a baseline: a way to confirm that good content and sound technical SEO actually move the needle.

For specifics, Google names brands that have reworked themselves around the new logic — Lufthansa Group, Etsy and Royal Canin. Big names; worth keeping in mind that global corporations have resources a small business doesn’t, so copying their playbook one-to-one won’t work.

And now — where Google leaves things unsaid

Kraham’s piece is honest, but it’s still the view of a platform that benefits from you doing exactly what you always have: writing good content on your own site. Independent search specialists look at the same picture from a different angle — and in places they disagree.

The line of argument pushed by, for example, Search Engine Land goes like this: authority in the AI-search era is created less by what you publish on your own site and more by what gets said about you elsewhere. Neural networks learn from the broad web and assemble answers from many sources, so mentions on independent platforms start to carry more weight. According to a Semrush analysis, the sources AI cites especially often regularly include Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, YouTube and review platforms like G2. In other words, visibility now forms not only on your own domain but in other people’s places you don’t control.

This doesn’t contradict Google’s “be helpful” advice, but it shifts the emphasis. One excellent blog on your own site may not be enough if nobody is talking about the brand anywhere else. And here llms.txt comes back: Google says forget it, but some practitioners treat the format as cheap insurance — quick to add, and what if it becomes a standard in a year. The truth, as usual, is somewhere in between. It’s not a “magic AI-visibility button,” but it’s not grounds for a flat ban either. The honest answer for 2026: there’s no clear data yet that llms.txt affects how often you get cited.

What a small or mid-sized business should take from this

Strip away the corporate gloss and, for a small company — especially a European one working across several markets — a short and fairly practical list remains.

  1. Don’t buy separate “magic for the neural networks.” If someone is selling you secret ChatGPT optimization that bypasses normal SEO, that’s a reason to be wary. The foundation is one and the same.
  2. Write what only you can write. Your experience, your failures, your numbers and the reasons behind your decisions. The generic roundup a neural network will produce without you.
  3. Fill in what’s already at hand. Google Business Profile, product data in the Merchant Center, correct structured data — boring, but it works for both result types at once.
  4. Think about reputation beyond your site. Reviews, expert commentary, a presence where your audience actually lives. That’s the “external authority” the analysts argue about.
  5. Measure leads and sales, not “visibility.” The new Search Console and Merchant Center reports are a good reference point, but the final judge is money, not a vendor’s dashboard.

And above all — no promises. Nobody, Google included, guarantees a spot in AI answers: it’s an environment that shifts every month. The realistic goal isn’t “show up in ChatGPT by Friday,” but to methodically build the very foundation the new search rests on.

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