AI search optimization:
Google says do nothing special.
An industry has grown up around AEO, GEO and "AI SEO", selling files to publish and schema to add. Google's own documentation addresses this directly, and the answer is unusually blunt: there are no additional requirements and no special optimizations necessary.
What the documentation actually says
Google publishes a page called AI features and your website, plus a guide to optimizing for generative AI features. Between them the position is consistent and explicit:
Quoted from Google Search Central
"There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary."
"You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features."
Google has separately confirmed there is no AI-specific structured data to add, and that content chunking and AI-specific rewriting are not requirements. Its own framing of AEO and GEO is that they are still just SEO.
What that rules out
| Being sold | Reality |
|---|---|
llms.txt | Not used by Google. Publishing one costs nothing and does nothing. |
| AI-specific schema.org types | Do not exist as a requirement. Normal structured data still helps normal rich results. |
| Rewriting pages "for LLMs" | Not a documented requirement. Writing clearly helps humans and machines for the same reasons. |
| Chunking content into Q&A blocks | Not required. Do it if it genuinely suits the material, not as an optimization. |
| FAQ schema for AI visibility | FAQ rich results were retired in May 2026. The markup is harmless; it earns no SERP real estate. |
None of this is dangerous — it is mostly harmless busywork. The cost is the opportunity cost: a month spent publishing machine-readable files is a month not spent on the thing that does move the needle.
What actually controls your appearance
Because AI features operate inside Search, the controls are the ordinary Search controls. Google names
them directly: robots.txt governs crawling, and snippet directives govern how much of your
content can be shown.
- nosnippetSuppresses the text snippet entirely. Also removes you from features that need to quote you.
- max-snippet:[n]Caps snippet length. A restrictive value set years ago for a reason nobody remembers is worth auditing.
- data-nosnippetExcludes a specific element. Useful for boilerplate, harmful if it wraps your actual answer.
- noindexRemoves the page from Search, and therefore from everything downstream of Search.
This is the one genuinely actionable audit in the whole topic: check that you are not suppressing your own snippets. One line:
curl -sI https://example.com/ | grep -i x-robots-tag
curl -s https://example.com/ \
| grep -oE '<meta[^>]*name="robots"[^>]*>'If either returns nosnippet or a small max-snippet, that is a self-inflicted
ceiling — and it predates the AI features it is now also limiting.
The part that is genuinely different
Two things about AI surfaces are real, even though neither is an optimization you can implement.
Citation does not track position the way clicks do. A passage can be surfaced from well down the results if it answers the question cleanly, which is a modest argument for writing pages that state their answers plainly and early rather than burying them under three paragraphs of preamble. Note that this is an argument for clear writing, not for a technique.
Being referenced elsewhere matters more than anything on your own site. Every credible analysis of AI citation lands in the same place that ordinary SEO does: what other trusted sources say about you outweighs what you say about yourself. That is the same bottleneck as always, wearing a new hat, and it is not solved with a file in your web root.
The whole strategy, honestly
Be crawlable. Do not suppress your snippets. Publish things that are genuinely worth citing, and be specific enough that citing you is more useful than citing someone vaguer. Google's own summary is that creating content people find unique, compelling and useful will influence your presence in generative AI search more than any other suggestion — and that is not marketing language, it is the documentation.
We publish what we can verify, including when it is boring
If someone has quoted you a price for AI search optimization, send us what they proposed. We will tell you which parts Google documents as unnecessary — for free, because it takes ten minutes.
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