The verdict
Google says its AI Overviews and AI Mode are built on core Search ranking and pull from the same index, with no extra requirements to appear. Most GEO proposals I am shown sell the things Google’s own guide says are unnecessary: llms.txt, chunked content, special schema, a page per question, bought mentions. Read the guide before you sign.
If you have been sent a proposal for GEO, AEO or “AI visibility” this year, the most useful thing you can read before signing it is about ten minutes of Google’s own documentation. It is short, it is specific, and a large part of it is a list of things it says you do not need to do.
If a proposal like that has made you wonder whether you are missing something, you are probably not.
What Google actually says about its AI features
Google’s guide to optimising for generative AI in Search, last updated in July 2026, says its AI features “are rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems”, and that they work “by relying on our core Search ranking systems to retrieve relevant, up-to-date web pages from our Search index.”
Its documentation on AI features is blunter: “There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.”
So the pages that get used in an AI answer are drawn from the same index, through the same ranking systems, as the pages in the ordinary results. That is the whole argument, and most of what follows is that sentence applied to a sales document.
Going through a typical proposal, line by line
- “We will create an llms.txt file.” Google: “You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search.” Search does not read them.
- “We will restructure your content into chunks.” Google: “There’s no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI to better understand it.”
- “We will add schema so AI understands you.” Google: “Structured data isn’t required for generative AI search, and there’s no special schema.org markup you need to add.”
- “We will create a page for every way people ask the question.” Google says creating content for “every possible variation” to manipulate rankings or AI responses breaks its scaled content abuse policy. I have written up why one page per fan-out query is the wrong plan separately.
- “We will get your brand mentioned across the web.” Google: “Seeking inauthentic ‘mentions’ across the web isn’t as helpful as it might seem.”
- “We will track your AI visibility score.” Google now gives you the real data for its own features. The Generative AI performance report in Search Console shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and it has been available to every site since 31 August 2026.
None of those lines is illegal or harmful in itself. The problem is paying for them as though they were the work.
What the traffic numbers do say
The pressure behind these proposals is real. SparkToro’s analysis of Similarweb’s US clickstream panel found that 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click to the open web between January and April 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024. The same work found AI Overviews on more than a fifth of searches, cutting click-through by roughly 60% where they appear.
But look at where that falls. It lands hardest on short informational answers: definitions, conversions, “how many”. Someone looking for a roofer, a lawyer or a product still has to go somewhere to act. For the local and ecommerce businesses I work with, AI answers have so far been a smaller factor than the things they were already getting wrong.
What I would spend the money on instead
The things Google’s guide asks for are the things SEO always asked for. Pages that can be crawled and indexed. Content that says something first-hand, with a real number or a judgement in it that a summary cannot replace. A clear signal of who wrote it. A site that does not bury the page that matters under a thousand that do not.
That is less exciting to buy than a new acronym. It is also the only version that holds up when the acronym changes, and it already has three versions: AEO, GEO and AIEO.
Where I will not pretend
Google’s guidance covers Google. ChatGPT, Perplexity and the other assistants do not publish a Search Console, and nobody outside them can measure them properly. Prompt-tracking tools give you an estimate built on prompts somebody chose. That can be useful as a trend. It is not a measurement, and I would not let it set a budget.
The short version
- AI Overviews and AI Mode use the Search index. Google says they are rooted in core ranking.
- No extra requirements, in Google’s words. No special files, chunks or schema.
- A page per question variation is scaled content abuse. Google names it.
- Bought mentions are not worth what they cost. Google says so directly.
- Use the Generative AI performance report. It is Google’s own data, and every site has it.
- The click loss is real but uneven. Informational queries lose most. Local and commercial lose least.
If you have a GEO or AI visibility proposal in front of you and want a second read before you sign it, that is exactly what SEO consulting is for. If you’re not sure what is actually holding the site back, an SEO audit answers that first.
