Google answered this question in May. Then it answered it again in June, and the second answer got almost no coverage.
If you’ve been pitched a “GEO retainer” or an “AEO package” on top of your existing SEO spend, you need both halves of this story before you decide whether to keep paying for it.
Google told us the answer twice. Most coverage only caught the first one.
On May 15, Google Search Central published its first official guide to optimizing for AI Overviews and AI Mode. The headline line got quoted everywhere: optimizing for generative AI search is, from Google’s perspective, “optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.” Not a new discipline. Not a new toolbox.
Every SEO outlet ran some version of that story within about a week. GEO is dead. AEO was always just SEO. Cancel your retainer.
Then on June 5, 2026, Google updated its “Do you need an SEO?” hiring guide, the document meant to help businesses vet who they’re paying, and named AEO and GEO by acronym for the first time. It also published new guidance on evaluating third-party SEO tools and vendors.
Almost nobody connected these two documents. Most coverage treated May 15 as the final word and moved on. That’s the gap. You don’t write a term into your official hiring guide to bury it. You write it in so people have language to hold vendors accountable.
What Google actually ruled out
The earlier of the two, the May 15 guide, has a mythbusting section, and it’s specific. For Google Search, you don’t need:
- llms.txt files or other AI-specific markup
- Content “chunked” into small pieces for AI systems
- Special schema built for AI features
- Inauthentic brand mentions bought to game citations
AI Overviews and AI Mode run on retrieval-augmented generation and a technique called query fan-out, both pulled from Google’s existing Search index. There’s no parallel system to optimize for. If a line item on your invoice is one of the four items above, you’re paying extra for something Google just said does nothing.
What the June update actually changed
Here’s where the flat “GEO is dead” take falls apart. Google didn’t remove AEO and GEO from its vocabulary in June. It formalized them, inside the exact document businesses use to evaluate who to hire.
That’s a different signal than “this doesn’t exist.” It’s closer to: this is real enough that we’re giving you a standard to check it against. A couple of smaller outlets caught this read (LuminaForge, OptimizeAISearch among them). The dozens of posts that ran the “still SEO, GEO is fake” headline in May mostly didn’t circle back.
So the actual question isn’t whether GEO is real. It’s whether the specific work your agency is billing as GEO is real, or whether it’s SEO with a new name and a bigger number attached.
The part every “still just SEO” post is skipping
Google’s ruling covers Google Search. Full stop. It says nothing about ChatGPT, nothing about Perplexity, nothing about Claude. None of those systems pull from Google’s index, and Google has no authority to declare what earns a citation inside someone else’s model.
ChatGPT alone has somewhere around 800 million weekly users. Treating “Google says it’s still SEO” as a complete answer to “is AI visibility a real discipline” skips the fact that Google only got to rule on its own homework.
Our position: the four tactics Google named are dead weight, specifically for Google Search. Paying extra for llms.txt files or AI-specific schema in the name of “GEO” was never buying you anything there. But whether distinct work is worth doing to earn visibility inside ChatGPT or Perplexity is a genuinely open question, and it’s not one May 15 or June 5 closed.
Honestly, a lot of this just confirms what we already knew. Strip away the AI hype and good content is still content people actually want to read. People do still scroll past the AI Overview and click a result. On one site we manage, organic traffic has climbed even though nothing changed operationally, we just kept publishing blog posts, written by a real person, that answer specific questions for a clearly defined audience. That’s not a fluke. A six-month tracking study running October 2025 through April 2026 paired AI-written and human-written articles on the same domains, same topics, same word count, so the only real variable was who wrote it. At matched search position, the AI articles pulled an 8% lower click-through rate. No GEO tricks in either bucket, just who wrote it.
Maybe having enough respect for your audience to sit down and actually write something becomes the “new hot thing” again soon. Would you bet the models pull from pages nobody reads? Or from the ones people scroll past the AI Overview to reach, the ones that hold someone’s attention and bring them back? The data leans toward the second answer. Even with AI Overviews cutting clicks broadly, the clicks that do happen convert 23% better, because that person already read the summary and still wanted more.
How to actually audit your invoice
Skip the philosophy for a minute and use Google’s own list as a checklist against whatever you’re currently paying for:
- Is any line item literally llms.txt files, content chunking, special AI schema, or mention-buying? Those are the four Google named as unnecessary. If that’s the deliverable, it’s not doing what it’s billed as doing.
- Is what you’re getting original, non-commodity content, or is it existing content reformatted and relabeled?
- Is anyone actually measuring citations on ChatGPT or Perplexity, or is “AI visibility” reporting just Google Search Console with a new cover page?
- If the answer to that last one is “just Google,” ask why it’s priced separately from your SEO retainer at all.
If you want a faster gut check than combing through invoices, that’s basically what KlokView is built to surface, or dig into our specifics yourself in the AI search optimization hub.
Where this leaves you
The hacks Google named in May are done. They were never doing much anyway. What’s left, real expertise, original content, and someone actually checking whether you show up where your buyers are looking, was never a separate discipline to begin with. It just has a name now, and Google handed you the language to check who’s actually doing it.