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Google’s official guide confirms that optimizing for AI search, including AI overviews and AI mode, is still just SEO.
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The company’s named tactics that site owners can skip, such as: E.g. llms.txt files, content chunking, AI-specific rewriting and special schemes.
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What still wins remains unchanged: helpful content, clear page structure, strong internal links and real expertise.
Everyone has been looking for AI SEO shortcuts, but Google just made it clear that the fundamentals still determine who wins. In an official guide published on Search Central on May 15, 2026, Google answered the big question directly. Is SEO still relevant to AI search? In short, yes.
What Google actually said
Google’s view is simple. Its AI features, AI Overviews and AI Mode, are based on the same core ranking and quality systems as regular search. They pull from the same index using on-demand generation and query fanout.
So optimizing for AI search is just optimizing for search, which means that the terms AEO and GEO are still SEO in Google’s formulation. There is no separate playbook or secret checklist.
This video walks you through the guide:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwYfX2w3Y_I
Hacks you can drop
The guide includes a blunt myth-busting section that lists what you don’t need to do for Google’s AI capabilities. This list includes creating llms.txt files or other specialized AI markup, breaking content into small pieces, rewriting pages to track every keyword variation, tracking inauthentic brand mentions, and adding special AI-only schemas. An entire consulting industry sold these tactics. Google says you can ignore them.
Read Google’s official guide here:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide
Whatever still wins
The advice that endures is the boring one that has always worked. Create unique, unconventional content with a real point of view that a model can’t simply piece together from everyone else’s pages.
Make sure the pages are crawlable and technically clean. Use clear internal links so Google can find and link to your most important pages. And show real expertise. Above all, Google values ​​a test: Would a real visitor find this satisfactory?
The only caveat
There is a limit worth knowing. This guide only applies to Google’s own AI features. Other engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot use different retrieval systems, so some of the tactics Google rejects may still be relevant there.
Follow the discussion on X:
https://x.com/search?q=Google%20AEO%20GEO%20still%20SEO
The takeaway food is stable, not flashy. The companies that win in AI search will be the ones that create the most useful content, not the ones that chase the latest hack.
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