Google Says GEO Doesn’t Exist… Here’s What They’re Not Telling You

The marketing community has been panicking over this article directly from Google about how to manipulate large language models about how to get cited in AI. What you need to do, what are myths, what to avoid, what works, what doesn't work. People are saying that Google is lying. Can you believe such a thing? Google liars. That's what people are saying. People are saying that Google is lying. Other people are saying this is true. They are vindicated. what they've been saying for months or years. Look, it's all true. And I looked at this and I have some news. I have some news or some thoughts, which is a lot of it is true. Some of it is actually not true. And so on this episode of the show, we are going to look over this breakthrough post from Google and figure out what is true and what is something that Google doesn't want you to do that actually does kind of work. That's what we got. And debunking myths. All right. Google put out Google search central put out this post optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google search. Google says this guide is for website owners looking for official best practices from Google search on how to succeed in generative AI features in Google search such as AI overviews and AI mode. They don't say this but the truth is this also works for chatbt. This works for perplexity. This works for claude. They start with this section is SEO relevant for AI search and you never see Google use exclamation points in their documentation. And at this time they do. It literally says in short, yes, 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. Have you ever heard the concept rag thrown around retrieval augmented generation? Google defines it 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. And then you've heard me talk about this one a lot. That's the query fanout. 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, fan out queries might include best herbicides for lawns, remove weeds without chemicals, and how to prevent weeds in lawn. Basically, I'm going to break this down. It just means when you do a prompt to an LLM, it goes and it searches the web and it breaks your prompt into a couple of actual searches. These searches, it might do one, it might do three, it might do more. These searches are called query fanouts. It's like your query fans out. And that's why GEO is so rooted in SEO because for many queries, the LLMs are literally going to Google. They're literally going to Google or going to Bing, but most of the time it is Google. And now this is what drove people crazy. There's a section, what about AEO, answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization. Google says from Google search's perspective optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience and thus still SEO. All right. So Google literally said geo and AEO is still SEO. Is that true? You know before I give my conclusion on that. Let's let's go through the rest of this Google says apply foundational SEO best practices to generative AI search. Provide a unique point of view. Our AI systems take a look at a variety of sources. So, it can be helpful to have a unique viewpoint that stands out. For example, a firhand review provides a unique perspective based on personal experience, whereas a summary of existing content simply restates information already available elsewhere. Create the content yourself based on what you know about the topic and consider what in-depth experience you can bring to your content. Don't just recycle what others on the internet have already said or could easily be produced by generative AI model. The better question that you should ask yourself instead of like is this unique is is this going to give the searcher what they are looking for so they don't go back to the search results. This is called pogo sticking. Google hates it when a searcher goes to your page. They don't get what they want and they go back to the search results. Then there's creating non-commodity content. that's helpful, reliable, and people first, we talked about non-commodity content. On episode 1 of this show, Google's new SEO reality: Why non-commodity content is taking over. Great episode. Google says commodity content, which is like seven tips for firsttime home buyers, is often based on common knowledge, which could originate from anyone and typically adds a little unique insight for readers. In contrast, non-commodity content such as why we wave the inspection and save money, a look inside the sewer line, provides unique expert or experience takes that go beyond common knowledge and the ordinary. Here's the thing about this. The seven tips for firsttime home buyers, the most important thing is to just use a searcher's query in your page title, URL slug, and H1 and beginning of the first sentence. Then you want to have a title that people actually want to click on. If you have a boring title in the search engine results pages and you're competing with other people who are also relevant to the search and they have engaging titles, you're not going to get clicks and your SEO is going to be bad. That's the reality. Non-commodity content, as long as it is relevant to the searcher's query, will be more interesting. It'll be more interesting and perhaps more useful than boring stuff that everybody knows. Again, as long as it's relevant. All right, here we go. Organize content in a way that helps your readers. Write content for your human audience. Make sure the content is well written and easy to follow. People generally appreciate it when web pages are organized by paragraphs and sections along with headings that provide a clear structure to navigate content. 100% true. Also, I like to use short paragraphs. People hate reading long paragraphs. That's the truth. Add highquality images and videos. We talked about image SEO yesterday on the show. Episode 1046, image SEO secrets, 241,000 impressions from optimizing alt text. That was a good episode. And video as well. Share stuff that's going to be useful, that's going to help people understand your content. I mean, come on. If you're making bottom of funnel SEO landing pages where you are targeting searchers who know exactly what they are looking for, they just don't know your brand. They look they're looking for what your brand does, but they don't know that your brand exists. Show a real picture of what your brand does related to the keyword that you're targeting. This could be a screenshot from your SAS. This could be somebody in your services business doing implementation. This could be a photo of the dog food that you sell. Focus on what your users want and avoid overdoing it. While it might be tempting to create separate content for every possible variation of how people might search, for example, by focusing on other queries that people have asked or fanout queries, doing so primarily to manipulate rankings or generative AI responses in Google search violates Google's scaled content abuse spam policy. This is also an ineffective long-term strategy, as a high quantity of pages doesn't make a website higher quality or more relevant to users. Google's AI systems have advanced even further and improved upon our ability to understand the relevance of pages even when there is no exact match between the query and the pages primary content. Basically, Google is calling out all the businesses that are trying to manipulate LLMs by pushing out thousands of AI generated pages for every possible variation of a keyword. And the reality is one, it's very easy for Google to detect that. Two, it results in a pattern called melt AI where companies will get a short burst of huge organic traffic, then spike down and get less than when there's than where they started with. And three, when you're deciding what keywords to go after, you should be looking at if there's overlap in the SERs and if you can hit multiple keywords with one page rather than creating a page for every possible variation. There's a section on technical SEO for LLMs. Meet the search technical requirements. Follow crawling best practices. When it comes to semantic HTML, focus on human readability and don't worry about perfect code. If you're using JavaScript, be sure to follow JavaScript SEO best practices. Google is able to process content within JavaScript as long as it isn't blocked. That said, working on SEO with a website that uses JavaScript frameworks is generally more complex than when working with other kinds of websites. Actually, what I've seen is that Google will process content within JavaScript only if you have more authority than normal because it takes more resources. Provide a good page experience for people who arrive at your site. That's true because if you have a bad experience, you might have pogo sticking or people might see your brand in the SERs and then not want to click it because they don't trust you. Those are negative SEO signals and if you're not showing up in SEO, LLMs aren't finding you. Reduce duplicate content. True as well. And I was just talking about that. All right. This is this crazy section. Mythbusting generative AI search. What you don't need to do. This drove people crazy because Google literally calls out the grifters, the husters, the scammers, the people selling BS special optimization to get shown in LLMs. But the secret is there is one thing here that actually does work even though Google says it doesn't. So these are the myths surrounding answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization. LLM.txt files and other special markup. I was one of the first people to cover LLM.txt files and I just looked the top content marketing and SEO sites aren't using it. And over the coming weeks and months they continued not using it. LMS.txt txt files you don't need at all, just complete waste. Chunking content. There's no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI to better understand it. There's no ideal page length and in the end make pages for your audience, not just for generative AI search. That's true, too. So, you don't need LMS.txt. You don't need to think about chunking content for AI. Here's the truth. If you write content in a way that is best for searchers, clear, straightforward, direct, gives answers right away, the answers that are again clear to the searchers, you have comparisons, things that searchers would want, that's going to be better for AI, too. You don't need to rewrite content just for AI systems. Rewrite content for searchers. Now, this is the one that I was like, ah, Google, that's not true. And you know that's not true. So, Google says as a myth, seeking inauthentic mentions. Just like the rest of Google search, our generative AI features can show what's being said about products and services across the web, including in blogs, videos, and forum discussions. However, seeking inauthentic mentions across the web isn't as helpful as it might seem. Our core ranking systems focus on highquality content while other systems block spam. Our generative AI features depend on both. This could be planting fake reviews on Reddit or paying people who have top performing listicles to put you first or second, things like that. It's illegal, so it's dangerous. And if done poorly, it could get you hit within Reddit. That happens all the time. But the reality is inauthentic mentions actually works. That's like and that's the inauthentic mentions is almost a cornerstone of public relations. you have a PR professional who is getting you into publications who wouldn't have covered you otherwise just because people don't know about you or maybe you are the best solution but you have a really good brand messaging team and again a PR person or outreach person who's getting publications to share your solution as being great but this was the only one where I looked at it and I'm like h come on that one's that one's not true but you got to be careful when you do it because well you're not supposed to do it and I'm not encouraging you to do it I'm not encouraging you to go and plant fake reviews everywhere. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to encourage you to do that. What I will say is if you have good reviews, take them and share them as much as you can everywhere. That's what I will say. Share your video reviews on YouTube, on Instagram, on Facebook, on X, on LinkedIn. Share screenshots of the written reviews that you receive while also writing the exact written review with your post so that it's easier for LLMs to understand and see. Use language like your brand and the word reviews. And the last thing is over focusing on structured data, which means schema literally says structured data isn't required for generative AI search and there's no special schema markup that you need to add. However, it's a good idea to continue using it as part of your overall SEO strategy as it helps with being eligible for rich results on Google search. There's so many myths regarding schema. Just use it if your target keyword is using it in the SERs. I've talked about this so many times, but I'm happy that Google included that because this was one thing that a lot of husters would say on Tik Toks or LinkedIn, whatever, is you need schema to get shown in LLM. You need structured data to get shown in LLMs. You really don't. I also cover this on episode 143 of this podcast. Schema doesn't boost AI citations, new href study. I put up a post a couple hours ago and I want to finish with it. This is my overall take on all of this. To all the people saying Google is lying in their new anti- geo post, this is the reality. If you make a point of following Google's best practices rather than chasing shiny object shortcuts, you will get way better results. Good SEO is pretty straightforward. relevance, authority, reduced pogo sticking, decent click-through rates in SERs while still being relevant, off-site reputation management, which has always been an aspect of SEO. Chasing shortcuts requires a lot of expertise. The growth hackers on LinkedIn or X don't want you to know this. The I spent an hour and ranked number one for a competitive keyword that brought me $10,000 post will always do better than the I spent six months working my butt off and now my business is up to $10,000 MR from SEO post. But the reality is the 1-hour shortcuts either work only temporarily or are actually way harder to execute than the growth hackers on LinkedIn or X will lead you to believe. Good SEO is not hard or complicated, but tons of agencies lead you to believe it is so they can charge more for schema or geo optimization or whatever. If you want to save years learning how I do SEO that gets customers, users, warm leads, how to target, how to find people who are high intent looking for what you offer, they just don't know your brand exists. And then exact templates for how to make pages targeting these people. how I build links without buying links. Everything is white hat, how I structure my site, doing a technical SEO audit. It's all very straightforward stuff. It makes a lot of sense when you watch it and when you go through the course in my SEO course, compact keywords at compactkeywords.com. If you haven't checked it out yet, you're going to love it. That is everything for episode 147 of the Edward Show. 1,047 days in a row doing this podcast. If you watch us on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple podcast, thank you so much for listening. Let's all go do some great SEO and I will talk to you again tomorrow.