Do you really need AI SEO? Google says no!

You’ve spent months, years, maybe even decades climb­ing your way up Google’s rank­ings — only for Chat­G­PT to swoop in and start shout­ing about your com­peti­tors. Erm, excuse me?

AI has thrown chaos into almost every indus­try, and SEO is no excep­tion. Sud­den­ly, the inter­net is full of shiny new acronyms like AEO (AI Engine Opti­mi­sa­tion) and GEO (Gen­er­a­tive Engine Opti­mi­sa­tion), mak­ing busi­ness own­ers won­der if every­thing they’ve done up to now has been a colos­sal waste of time.

But should you actu­al­ly be doing any­thing new to rank high­ly with our AI “friends”? Thank­ful­ly, Google says no. Let’s dig in.

What are AEO and GEO?

• AEO = opti­mis­ing con­tent specif­i­cal­ly for AI-pow­ered search engines and AI Overviews.
  
• GEO = mak­ing sure your con­tent is picked up, cit­ed or sur­faced by gen­er­a­tive AI engines like Chat­G­PT or Gemini.
  

Sounds fan­cy, right? The idea behind both is that we need shiny new tac­tics for online con­tent to get noticed by AI.

But the real­i­ty? These acronyms might just be anoth­er way of mak­ing SEO in the AI age sound more com­pli­cat­ed than it actu­al­ly is. Google cer­tain­ly thinks so.

What has Google said?

Google’s own Gary Illyes has been refresh­ing­ly clear: you don’t need to do any­thing dif­fer­ent from your cur­rent SEO strat­e­gy to rank in AI-pow­ered search.

In a recent talk (sum­marised by Kenichi Suzu­ki and report­ed by Search Engine Jour­nal), he con­firmed that stan­dard SEO is all you need to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode.

In oth­er words: stop pan­ick­ing, keep calm and car­ry on optimising.

What does this mean in practice?

So, what does that mean for busi­ness­es try­ing to keep up with the ever-chang­ing world of search?

AI is part of search already

AI in search isn’t new. Google has been weav­ing it into its rank­ing sys­tems for years — from RankBrain (help­ing inter­pret unusu­al queries) to MUM (analysing text, images and video across 75 languages).

What’s changed is how vis­i­ble AI is. With AI Overviews now pop­ping up at the top of results pages, busi­ness­es are ask­ing: Do I need a brand-new SEO strat­e­gy to show up here?

The answer: nope. The same rules apply.

Quality still comes first

Illyes was blunt: Google doesn’t care if your con­tent is writ­ten by a human, AI or a choco­late-fuelled copy­writer (hi 👋). What mat­ters is quality.

That means con­tent that is:

• Help­ful – answer­ing the ques­tion your audi­ence is actu­al­ly asking.
  
• Reli­able – backed by sources, data or expertise.
  
• Read­able – struc­tured for humans, not just algorithms.
  

So, if your con­tent is gen­uine­ly use­ful, you don’t need to pass some secret “AI SEO” test. You’re already doing it right.

What’s different about AI Overviews?

Behind the cur­tain, AI Overviews do work a lit­tle dif­fer­ent­ly. They use tech­niques like:

• Query fan-out – gen­er­at­ing mul­ti­ple relat­ed search­es to build a fuller picture.
  
• Ground­ing – dou­ble-check­ing answers against indexed sources to reduce errors (those infa­mous AI hallucinations).
  

But here’s the deal: both process­es still rely on the same index, the same Google­bot, and the same rank­ing sys­tems as tra­di­tion­al search.

So, if your con­tent already fol­lows good SEO prac­tice, you’re golden.

What this means for your business

When new acronyms appear, the temp­ta­tion is to throw every­thing in the air and start again. But the real­i­ty is sim­pler (and far less stressful):

• Stick to the basics – key­word research, on-page opti­mi­sa­tion, qual­i­ty backlinks.
  
• Focus on qual­i­ty con­tent – blogs, web copy, guides that actu­al­ly help your customers.
  
• Don’t fear AI – it’s a tool, not a threat. Use it to draft or research, but always add the human touch.
  

As Google has con­firmed, there’s no such thing as “AI SEO.” There’s just SEO. Busi­ness­es that pri­ori­tise use­ful, engag­ing con­tent will con­tin­ue to win — whether the search results come from a bot, a brain, or a blend of both.

The takeaway

AI might change how search looks, but it doesn’t change what ranks. Qual­i­ty, clar­i­ty, and con­sis­ten­cy still win.

So, before you get dis­tract­ed by the next acronym, ask your­self: Is my con­tent gen­uine­ly help­ing my audi­ence? If the answer is yes, you’re already giv­ing Google and its AI friends exact­ly what it wants.

And if you’d like a hand cre­at­ing con­tent that’s both SEO-friend­ly and human-friend­ly, that’s where I come in.

👉 Get in touch and let’s talk about blogs, web copy, and con­tent strat­e­gy that works now – and in our AI-pow­ered future.