Google’s official guide confirms that optimizing for AI search, including AI Overviews and AI Mode, is still just SEO.
The company named tactics site owners can skip, such as llms.txt files, content chunking, AI-specific rewriting, and special schema.
What still wins is unchanged: helpful content, clear site structure, strong internal links, and real expertise.
Everyone has been hunting for AI SEO shortcuts, but Google just made it clear that the fundamentals still decide who wins. In an official guide published on May 15, 2026, in Search Central, Google answered the big question directly. Is SEO still relevant for AI search? In short, yes.
What Google Actually Said
Google’s view is simple. Its AI features, AI Overviews and AI Mode, are built on the same core ranking and quality systems as regular Search. They pull from the same index using retrieval-augmented generation and query fan-out.
So optimizing for AI search is just optimizing for search, which means the labels AEO and GEO are, in Google’s framing, still SEO. There is no separate playbook and no secret checklist.
This video walks through the guide:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwYfX2w3Y_I
Hacks You Can Drop
The guide includes a blunt mythbusting section listing what you do not need to do for Google’s AI features. That list includes creating llms.txt files or other special AI markup, chopping content into small chunks, rewriting pages to chase every keyword variation, chasing inauthentic brand mentions, and adding special schema just for AI. A whole consulting industry has been selling these tactics. Google says you can ignore them.
Read Google’s official guide here:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide
What Still Wins
The advice that holds up is the boring kind that always worked. Create unique, non-commodity content with a real point of view that a model cannot just assemble from everyone else’s pages.
Keep pages crawlable and technically clean. Use clear internal links so Google can find and connect your key pages. And show genuine expertise. Google stresses one test above all: would a real visitor find this satisfying?
The One Caveat
There is a limit worth knowing. This guidance covers Google’s own AI features only. Other engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot use different retrieval systems, so some of the tactics Google dismisses may still matter there.
Follow the discussion on X:
https://x.com/search?q=Google%20AEO%20GEO%20still%20SEO
The takeaway is steady, not flashy. The businesses that win in AI search will be the ones building the most useful content, not the ones chasing the latest hack.
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