Google's New AI Search Guide Calls AEO And GEO 'Still SEO'

Search Engine Journal covers a new Google documentation page titled “Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search.” The guide consolidates previously scattered advice into a single reference, including a mythbusting section that directly names optimization tactics Google considers unnecessary.

What’s actually new

The notable part isn’t the positive guidance — that’s largely familiar SEO territory (crawlability, semantic HTML, unique content, good page experience). What’s new is Google putting specific don’ts into official docs. The guide explicitly says you don’t need llms.txt files, AI-specific markup or Markdown, content “chunking” for AI consumption, long-tail keyword stuffing for AI systems, or any special structured data schema for generative AI search. Google also calls out seeking inauthentic mentions across blogs and forums as not particularly useful, since its ranking and spam systems already account for quality. On terminology, Google’s docs now formally state that optimizing for generative AI search “is still SEO” — making AEO and GEO branding distinctions a marketing choice rather than a technical one. The guide also introduces early guidance on agentic experiences, mentioning browser agents that inspect DOM and accessibility trees, and references the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) co-developed with Shopify.

What it means for your config

This is an SEO documentation update, not a developer tooling release, so there are no config file changes, migrations, or breaking changes to worry about in the traditional sense. That said, if your team maintains site configurations related to search optimization — robots.txt rules, structured data templates, or content pipelines that generate llms.txt files — this guidance is worth reviewing against your current setup. Google is saying those AI-specific files don’t receive special treatment in its systems. If you invested in generating llms.txt or chunking content specifically for Google’s AI features, this is Google telling you to stop prioritizing that work. For sites using structured data, Google clarifies it’s still useful for rich results but isn’t a lever for AI search specifically — so don’t add schema markup you wouldn’t otherwise need. The agentic experiences section is too early to act on for most teams; Google frames it as optional and forward-looking. If you’re in ecommerce, the Merchant Center and UCP mentions are worth tracking but don’t require immediate configuration changes.

Recommended next step

Read the actual Google documentation page (linked from the SEJ article) and audit any AI-specific optimization work your team has in flight. If you’re paying for AEO/GEO services that promote chunking, llms.txt generation, or AI-targeted markup specifically for Google visibility, you now have an official Google reference that says those tactics aren’t necessary. Note the important caveat: this guidance applies to Google’s AI features. If you’re also optimizing for ChatGPT, Perplexity, or other non-Google AI platforms, their signal weighting may differ — Google’s docs don’t speak for those systems.

---

Read the full announcement on Search Engine Journal → Google’s New AI Search Guide Calls AEO And GEO ‘Still SEO’