{"id":728953,"date":"2026-05-22T16:40:16","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T13:40:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/googles-ai-search-guidance-is-naive-and-self-serving\/"},"modified":"2026-05-22T16:40:16","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T13:40:16","slug":"googles-ai-search-guidance-is-naive-and-self-serving","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/googles-ai-search-guidance-is-naive-and-self-serving\/","title":{"rendered":"Google\u2019s AI search guidance is naive and self-serving"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"ez-toc-container\" class=\"ez-toc-v2_0_85 counter-hierarchy ez-toc-counter ez-toc-custom ez-toc-container-direction\">\n<p class=\"ez-toc-title\" style=\"cursor:inherit\">Table of Contents<\/p>\n<label for=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-item-6a33b0ee2bad9\" class=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-label\"><span class=\"\"><span class=\"eztoc-hide\" style=\"display:none;\">Toggle<\/span><span class=\"ez-toc-icon-toggle-span\"><svg style=\"fill: #dd3333;color:#dd3333\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" class=\"list-377408\" width=\"20px\" height=\"20px\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" fill=\"none\"><path d=\"M6 6H4v2h2V6zm14 0H8v2h12V6zM4 11h2v2H4v-2zm16 0H8v2h12v-2zM4 16h2v2H4v-2zm16 0H8v2h12v-2z\" fill=\"currentColor\"><\/path><\/svg><svg style=\"fill: #dd3333;color:#dd3333\" class=\"arrow-unsorted-368013\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" width=\"10px\" height=\"10px\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" version=\"1.2\" baseProfile=\"tiny\"><path d=\"M18.2 9.3l-6.2-6.3-6.2 6.3c-.2.2-.3.4-.3.7s.1.5.3.7c.2.2.4.3.7.3h11c.3 0 .5-.1.7-.3.2-.2.3-.5.3-.7s-.1-.5-.3-.7zM5.8 14.7l6.2 6.3 6.2-6.3c.2-.2.3-.5.3-.7s-.1-.5-.3-.7c-.2-.2-.4-.3-.7-.3h-11c-.3 0-.5.1-.7.3-.2.2-.3.5-.3.7s.1.5.3.7z\"\/><\/svg><\/span><\/span><\/label><input type=\"checkbox\"  id=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-item-6a33b0ee2bad9\" checked aria-label=\"Toggle\" \/><nav><ul class='ez-toc-list ez-toc-list-level-1 ' ><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-1\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/googles-ai-search-guidance-is-naive-and-self-serving\/#Heres_why_you_should_take_all_of_Googles_latest_guidance_on_optimizing_for_AI_search_with_a_grain_of_salt\" >Here&#8217;s why you should take all of Google&#8217;s latest guidance on optimizing for AI search with a grain of salt.<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-2\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/googles-ai-search-guidance-is-naive-and-self-serving\/#Meanwhile_in_Redmond\" >Meanwhile, in Redmond<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-3\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/googles-ai-search-guidance-is-naive-and-self-serving\/#Going_point_by_point\" >Going point by point<\/a><ul class='ez-toc-list-level-3' ><li class='ez-toc-heading-level-3'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-4\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/googles-ai-search-guidance-is-naive-and-self-serving\/#%E2%80%9CIs_SEO_still_relevant_for_generative_AI_search%E2%80%9D\" >\u201cIs SEO still relevant for generative AI search?\u201d<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-3'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-5\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/googles-ai-search-guidance-is-naive-and-self-serving\/#Non-commodity_content\" >Non-commodity content<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-3'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-6\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/googles-ai-search-guidance-is-naive-and-self-serving\/#llmstxt_files_and_other_%E2%80%98special_markup\" >llms.txt files and other \u2018special\u2019 markup<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-3'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-7\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/googles-ai-search-guidance-is-naive-and-self-serving\/#%E2%80%98Chunking_content\" >\u2018Chunking\u2019 content<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-3'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-8\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/googles-ai-search-guidance-is-naive-and-self-serving\/#Rewriting_content_just_for_AI_systems\" >Rewriting content just for AI systems<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-9\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/googles-ai-search-guidance-is-naive-and-self-serving\/#SEO_best_practices_still_help_They_just_dont_cover_the_whole_map\" >SEO best practices still help. They just don\u2019t cover the whole map.<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-10\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/googles-ai-search-guidance-is-naive-and-self-serving\/#A_new_world_a_lot_of_opinions\" >A new world, a lot of opinions<\/a><ul class='ez-toc-list-level-5' ><li class='ez-toc-heading-level-5'><ul class='ez-toc-list-level-5' ><li class='ez-toc-heading-level-5'><ul class='ez-toc-list-level-5' ><li class='ez-toc-heading-level-5'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-11\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/googles-ai-search-guidance-is-naive-and-self-serving\/#Topics_on_this_page\" >Topics on this page<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul><\/nav><\/div>\n<h2 class=\"subhead\" itemprop=\"alternativeHeadline\"><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Heres_why_you_should_take_all_of_Googles_latest_guidance_on_optimizing_for_AI_search_with_a_grain_of_salt\"><\/span>Here&#8217;s why you should take all of Google&#8217;s latest guidance on optimizing for AI search with a grain of salt.<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p><\/p>\n<div class=\"bialty-container\">\n<p>Every time Google ships a new Search Central document, two camps in our industry move at the speed of light. The first camp screenshots their favorite paragraph, posts it to LinkedIn with \u201cSEE? IT\u2019S JUST SEO\u201d in the caption, and goes back to doing exactly what they were already doing. The second camp screenshots a different paragraph and posts it with \u201csee, here\u2019s the proof they\u2019re lying to us.\u201d Both camps treat Google\u2019s guidance like <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/download-scripts-themes-apps\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"9\" title=\"Download Scripts &amp; Themes &amp; Apps\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">script<\/a>ure, depending on which verse confirms what they already believed.<\/p>\n<p>Google\u2019s recently updated guide on\u00a0<a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/developers.google.com\/search\/docs\/fundamentals\/ai-optimization-guide\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search<\/a>\u00a0was a feast for the first camp. The\u00a0<em>\u201cit\u2019s just SEO\u201d<\/em>\u00a0folks ate well that week. AEO and GEO got declared \u201cstill SEO.\u201d Chunking got dismissed. llms.txt got dissed. Rewriting for AI got nullified. If you\u2019ve spent the last two years on LinkedIn telling everyone that nothing has changed, Google handed you a gold star and a victory lap.<\/p>\n<p>But I want to remind everyone of something the first camp likes to forget: two years ago, we held thousands of pages of Google\u2019s internal Search ranking documentation in our hands.\u00a0<a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/ipullrank.com\/google-algo-leak\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The leaked Content Warehouse documents<\/a>\u00a0showed, in Google\u2019s own words, how the public guidance and the internal reality diverge. The same company that publicly insisted certain signals didn\u2019t exist had them named, weighted, and documented inside their own engineering wiki. That wasn\u2019t a leak from an enemy of search. That was Google\u2019s own engineering documentation, and it showed exactly how much we should trust public guidance about what is and isn\u2019t important.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m not saying every line of Google\u2019s new guide is a lie. I am saying that Google has a long, well-documented history of nudging the industry in directions that benefit Google first and the open web\u00a0<em>maybe<\/em>. It\u2019s to Google\u2019s benefit for SEOs to remain the janitors of the web cleaning up technical debt, formatting structured data, and politely waiting for the next algorithm update rather than evolving into a discipline that operates across multiple platforms and influences how content is engineered for systems Google does not control.<\/p>\n<p>As I\u00a0<a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/ipullrank.com\/misinformation-about-chunking\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">argued in my refutation of the misinformation about chunking<\/a>, the influence Google has spent two decades accumulating is finally fragmenting. Competitive AI platforms are stealing attention. Referral traffic is shrinking. Investment is moving to channels Google doesn\u2019t own. The leverage Google had to define what \u201cgood content\u201d means is weaker than it has been in twenty years \u2014 and you can hear it in how protective the language has gotten.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"meanwhile-in-redmond\" class=\"wp-block-heading\"><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Meanwhile_in_Redmond\"><\/span>Meanwhile, in Redmond<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>For a clean contrast, look at what\u2019s been coming out of Bing.<\/p>\n<p>Krishna Madhavan and his team have spent the last several months publishing posts that read like the opposite of Google\u2019s guide. Keep in mind that there is near parity in both platforms\u2019 offerings.<\/p>\n<p>Where Google\u2019s posture is \u201ctrust us, keep doing what you were doing,\u201d Bing has been publicly explaining how their index is changing, what grounding actually requires, and giving publishers tools to measure how their content participates in AI answers.<\/p>\n<p>In\u00a0<a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bing.com\/search\/February-2026\/Elevating-the-Role-of-Grounding-on-the-AI-Web\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Elevating the Role of Grounding on the AI Web<\/a>, Jordi Ribas openly names what\u2019s happening: agents are doing the browsing now, they\u2019re drawn to structured and verifiable content, and a new optimization discipline called Generative Engine Optimization is emerging in response. No dismissive air quotes. No \u201cit\u2019s all still SEO.\u201d They just call it what it is.<\/p>\n<p><a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bing.com\/webmaster\/February-2026\/Introducing-AI-Performance-in-Bing-Webmaster-Tools-Public-Preview\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools<\/a>\u00a0goes further. It is, in Microsoft\u2019s own words, \u201can early step toward Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) tooling in Bing Webmaster Tools.\u201d Citations across Copilot and Bing\u2019s AI summaries. Page-level citation activity and\u00a0 Grounding queries, you know, the actual phrases AI used when retrieving your content. The thing every working AI Search practitioner has been asking for, Bing shipped it.<\/p>\n<p>Then, in\u00a0<a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bing.com\/search\/May-2026\/Evolving-role-of-the-index-From-ranking-pages-to-supporting-answers\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Evolving role of the index: From ranking pages to supporting answers<\/a>, Krishna\u2019s team explains in plain detail that \u201cthe unit of value shifts from documents to groundable information \u2014 discrete, supportable facts with clear provenance.\u201d They state directly that \u201cchunking\/transformations must preserve meaning and claims used in the answer.\u201d They acknowledge that the metrics, the unit of analysis, and the responsibility of the system have all changed.<\/p>\n<p>Read those three posts in order, then go re-read Google\u2019s \u201cmythbusting\u201d section. You will struggle to believe you\u2019re reading documents about the same <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/technology\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"4\" title=\"Technology\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">technology<\/a>.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"going-point-by-point\" class=\"wp-block-heading\"><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Going_point_by_point\"><\/span>Going point by point<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>With that framing, let\u2019s walk through Google\u2019s claims.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-is-seo-still-relevant-for-generative-ai-search\"><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"%E2%80%9CIs_SEO_still_relevant_for_generative_AI_search%E2%80%9D\"><\/span><strong>\u201cIs SEO still relevant for generative AI search?\u201d<\/strong><span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>\u201cWhat about \u2018AEO\u2019 and \u2018GEO\u2019? \u2018AEO\u2019 stands for \u2018answer engine optimization\u2019 and \u2018GEO\u2019 for \u2018generative engine optimization\u2019. These are both terms you may see used to describe work specifically focused on improving visibility in AI search experiences. From Google Search\u2019s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s just SEO\u201d is naive, and it\u2019s naive for the same reason it has been naive every previous time someone trotted it out.<\/p>\n<p>SEO as a discipline is not a list of tactics. It\u2019s a mindset, a set of organizational expectations, a budget line, and a reporting structure. SEOs have been trying to expand that mindset for years to bring in content engineering, to influence product, to own technical architecture, to participate in video, brand, and design. We mostly haven\u2019t won those fights, because the org charts in most companies treat SEO as a downstream cleanup function.<\/p>\n<p>This is also the same trick the industry has played on us for fifteen years. Mobile was \u201cjust SEO.\u201d Voice was \u201cjust SEO.\u201d Schema was \u201cjust SEO.\u201d AMP was \u201cjust SEO,\u201d and we ate years of implementation work for a system Google quietly deprecated. Every time a new surface appears, the discipline absorbs the work, and every time, the line item that pays for it doesn\u2019t grow proportionally. Folding AI Search into \u201cSEO\u201d isn\u2019t a clarification. It\u2019s the continuation of a pattern that has been excellent for Google and lousy for the people doing the work.<\/p>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>The skill set has diverged whether the title has or not.<\/strong>\u00a0The traditional SEO toolkit is keyword research, technical auditing, internal linking, structured data, content optimization tools, link building, and rank tracking. The work of AI Search adds information retrieval theory, vector distance measurement, RAG pipeline analysis, content engineering at the passage level, agent and protocol design (MCP, A2A, UCP, ACP), brand citation tracking across LLM platforms, and synthesis evaluation. There is overlap. There is also vast surface area that has never appeared in any SEO job description ever written. Pretending the skill set is the same is how organizations underhire for the actual problem.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The audience changed, too.<\/strong>\u00a0Traditional SEO optimizes for one machine and the humans clicking its results. AI Search optimizes for a retrieval system, a synthesis pipeline, possibly an agentic browser, and a human reading an answer that may not contain a link to your site at all. Those are different consumers with different criteria, different measurement, and different reporting. Pretending the audience hasn\u2019t changed is how you end up running the wrong tactics against the wrong KPIs for the wrong stakeholders.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The strategic cost of \u201cjust SEO\u201d is concrete.<\/strong>\u00a0When a brand asks \u201chow do we show up in ChatGPT?\u201d and you treat that as an SEO problem, you start optimizing pages and chasing indexing. The actual answer often has very little to do with your website. It involves your presence in Wikipedia, <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/social-mediaa\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"1\" title=\"Social Media\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Reddit<\/a>, third-party publications, and the licensed data partners that feed model training and grounding. That isn\u2019t on-page work. That is brand, PR, third-party data, and information architecture across the open web. An SEO budget rarely funds that work. A GEO or AEO budget can.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>When AI Search lands in an organization with a different name, it gets different expectations and a different budget. It gets cross-functional sponsorship. It gets executive attention. It gets the cross-discipline collaboration SEOs have been requesting since I started in this industry two decades ago. \u201cAEO\u201d and \u201cGEO\u201d are not magical incantations, but the labels create the room SEO has not been able to create for itself.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, the practitioners doing this work keep getting handed more responsibility. More platforms to optimize for. More systems to understand. More research papers to read. More tooling to build. None of that comes with new headcount or higher salaries when leadership sees it as \u201cstill SEO.\u201d Google reframing this work as the same old discipline isn\u2019t a neutral observation. It is the rhetorical move that keeps the work uncompensated.<\/p>\n<p>And note: Google itself doesn\u2019t actually run on \u201cit\u2019s just Search.\u201d AI Mode, AI Overviews, and classic ranking are different systems run by different teams on different infrastructure with different evaluation criteria.\u00a0<a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/ipullrank.com\/google-algo-leak\">The leaked Content Warehouse docs<\/a>\u00a0made those distinctions visible. Their public posture flattens the inside of their own org for the benefit of the outside narrative. We don\u2019t have to accept the flattening.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s what \u201cit\u2019s just SEO\u201d actually delivers to organizations: more scope, same budget, no new authority. That\u2019s a fantastic outcome for the platforms that benefit from our unpaid labor. It is a terrible outcome for the people doing the work.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-non-commodity-content\"><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Non-commodity_content\"><\/span>Non-commodity content<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>\u201cCreate valuable, non-commodity content for your audience\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>This part is fine. Make good, unique content with a real point of view. Nobody serious disagrees. Moving on.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-llms-txt-files-and-other-special-markup\"><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"llmstxt_files_and_other_%E2%80%98special_markup\"><\/span>llms.txt files and other \u2018special\u2019 markup<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>\u201cYou don\u2019t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in generative AI search.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>True for Google. Also missing the point.<\/p>\n<p>llms.txt is genuinely useful for Claude and a handful of other systems that have explicitly committed to reading it. Anthropic has documentation suggesting it. There are observable benefits to publishing it in environments where it\u2019s actually consumed. Telling people to ignore it because Google doesn\u2019t read it is exactly the kind of single-platform myopia I keep pointing at. Google\u2019s guide describes one ecosystem. Your strategy needs to account for several.<\/p>\n<p>The honest version of this guidance would be: \u201cGoogle doesn\u2019t process llms.txt in any special way. Other systems may. Make your own call.\u201d Instead, Google quietly conflates \u201cwe don\u2019t use it\u201d with \u201cyou don\u2019t need it.\u201d<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-chunking-content\"><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"%E2%80%98Chunking_content\"><\/span>\u2018Chunking\u2019 content<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>\u201cThere\u2019s no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI to better understand it. Google systems are able to understand the nuance of multiple topics on a page and show the relevant piece to users.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I\u00a0<a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/ipullrank.com\/misinformation-about-chunking\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wrote 4,500 words on this<\/a>\u00a0in January and I\u2019d rather not relitigate the whole thing here. The short version is this: chunking is what RAG systems\u00a0<em>do<\/em>\u00a0to your content, whether you optimize for it or not. The question is whether your content survives the chunking process with its meaning intact, or whether it shatters into incoherent fragments. The vector math doesn\u2019t care about Google\u2019s preferences. A passage that focuses on one idea will, in nearly every measurable case, retrieve better than a passage that tries to cover three.<\/p>\n<p>Bing acknowledges this directly: \u201cchunking\/transformations must preserve meaning and claims used in the answer.\u201d Google\u2019s own\u00a0<a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/research.google\/blog\/muvera-making-multi-vector-retrieval-as-fast-as-single-vector-search\/\">MUVERA research<\/a>, their work on\u00a0<a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.google\/products-and-platforms\/products\/search\/search-on\/\">passage indexing<\/a>, their patents on pairwise passage selection \u2014 none of it is consistent with the guidance that chunking doesn\u2019t matter. The systems retrieve passages. Treat your passages like they matter, because the systems do.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-rewriting-content-just-for-ai-systems\"><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Rewriting_content_just_for_AI_systems\"><\/span>Rewriting content just for AI systems<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>\u201cYou don\u2019t need to write in a specific way just for generative AI search. AI systems can understand synonyms and <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/general\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"3\" title=\"General\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">general<\/a> meanings of what someone is seeking, in order to connect them with content that might not use the same precise words. This means you don\u2019t have to worry that you don\u2019t have enough \u2018long-tail\u2019 keywords or haven\u2019t captured every variation of how someone might seek content like yours.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>This is the line that bothers me most, because it is antithetical to how these systems actually decide what to use.<\/p>\n<p>A retrieval system selects passages by computing vector distance against the query embedding. A synthesis pipeline then performs pairwise comparisons between candidate passages to decide which ones get sent to the model. The system is not \u201cunderstanding\u201d your content in the human sense \u2014 it\u2019s computing a similarity score, ranking by it, and making committed selections. Specificity, entity salience, semantic coherence, and structural clarity all show up in those scores. Write loose, generic, multi-topic prose and your passages lose those comparisons to passages that are tight, specific, and self-contained.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cJust write naturally for humans\u201d sounds like good advice until you realize the systems have a measurable preference, and you can win or lose on the margins by writing for both. We have empirical evidence that adjusting passages improves their retrieval scores. We have access to public APIs that let us verify this on the content we publish. The guidance to ignore all of that and trust the systems to figure it out is asking you to compete with one hand tied behind your back.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"seo-best-practices-still-help-they-just-dont-cover-the-whole-map\" class=\"wp-block-heading\"><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"SEO_best_practices_still_help_They_just_dont_cover_the_whole_map\"><\/span>SEO best practices still help. They just don\u2019t cover the whole map.<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>I want to be careful here because this discourse gets reduced to extremes:<\/p>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>SEO best practices help.<\/li>\n<li>Technical structure matters. <\/li>\n<li>Crawlability matters. <\/li>\n<li>Page experience matters. <\/li>\n<li>Unique, non-commodity content matters. <\/li>\n<li>None of that is going anywhere.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>But \u201cSEO best practices\u201d was always shorthand for \u201cwhat Google likes.\u201d That was a fine proxy when Google was 90% of the traffic, and the rest didn\u2019t matter. It is not a fine proxy in a world where ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, and a long tail of vertical agents are all making their own retrieval decisions on different infrastructure with different priorities. Some of those systems use Bing as their grounding layer. Some build their own indices. Some lean on llms.txt. Some don\u2019t. Some are shipping webmaster tooling. Some are publishing the math behind their retrieval. The shared layer is shrinking, and the surface area you have to actually optimize is growing.<\/p>\n<p>The thing Google\u2019s guide doesn\u2019t say \u2014 because it can\u2019t \u2014 is that the systems competing with Google have different opinions, different infrastructure, and different incentives. Optimizing for all of them at once requires a broader practice than what\u2019s described in any Search Central document. That practice is being built right now, in public, by people who refuse to accept that the only opinion that counts is Google\u2019s.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"a-new-world-a-lot-of-opinions\" class=\"wp-block-heading\"><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"A_new_world_a_lot_of_opinions\"><\/span>A new world, a lot of opinions<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>Google\u2019s guidance on AI Search is one opinion. It is the opinion of the company with the most to lose from a multi-platform world. Read it. Take what is useful. Apply it where it applies. Don\u2019t mistake it for the truth.<\/p>\n<p>The truth is that we are in a new world. The infrastructure for how information is retrieved and presented is being rewritten across multiple platforms simultaneously, and the consensus we once had about how to optimize it no longer exists. Bing is publishing what they\u2019re doing. Anthropic is publishing what they\u2019re doing. The research community is publishing what they\u2019re doing. Google is publishing what it wants you to do.<\/p>\n<p>That last one is not the same as the others. Treat it accordingly.<\/p>\n<p><em>This article was originally published on <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/ipullrank.com\/google-ai-search-guidance\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the iPullRank blog<\/a> and is republished with permission.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<div class=\"ttd-topics-display\">\n<div class=\"ttd-topics-content\">\n<h5><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Topics_on_this_page\"><\/span>Topics on this page<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h5>\n<div class=\"ttd-topics-links\">GoogleSearch engine optimizationArtificial intelligenceGenerative Engine OptimizationMicrosoft BingGoogle SearchLinkedInMicrosoft CopilotChatGPTBing Webmaster ToolsRetrieval-augmented generationMicrosoftClaudeWikipediaAI OverviewsLarge language modelModel Context ProtocolPerformance indicatorRedditGeminiIPullRankPerplexity AIAnthropicGenerative AIInformation retrieval<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"ttd-topics-show-extra-button\">+20 more<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<blockquote><p><strong><span style=\"color: #ff6600;\">If you liked the article, do not forget to share it with your friends. Follow us on\u00a0<span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><a style=\"color: #ff0000;\" href=\"https:\/\/news.google.com\/publications\/CAAqBwgKMN63nwsw68G3Aw\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">Google News<\/a><\/span>\u00a0too, click on the star and choose us from your favorites.<\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>If you want to read more like this article, you can visit our <span style=\"color: #ff9900;\"><a style=\"color: #ff9900;\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/technology\/\" target=\"_blank\" >Technology<\/a><\/span> category.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"color: black;\"><a style=\"color: #ff9900;\" href=\"https:\/\/searchengineland.com\/google-ai-search-guidance-naive-self-serving-478432\" target=\"_blank\" >Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s why you should take all of Google&#8217;s latest guidance on optimizing for AI search with a grain of salt. Every time Google ships a new Search Central document, two camps in our industry move at the speed of light. The first camp screenshots their favorite paragraph, posts it to LinkedIn with \u201cSEE? IT\u2019S JUST&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":728954,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2026\/05\/google-ai-search-guidance.png","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-728953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/728953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=728953"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/728953\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/728954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=728953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=728953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=728953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}