FrameworkTechnical AEO

Google AI Search Optimisation

What Google actually says, and what it debunks.

Answer first

Google’s official guidance is blunt: AI features pull from the same standard search index, so there are no AI-specific shortcuts, file formats or markup. Optimising for AI Overviews and AI Mode is optimising for human value, clarity and SEO fundamentals, and explicitly not the fads being sold around it.

How AI features work

  • The index is shared, AI features use publicly crawlable content from the standard Google index, not a separate one.
  • Retrieval and grounding, to reduce hallucination, AI features find high-quality pages, extract the relevant information and format it into a natural answer with supporting links.
  • No guarantees, meeting every guideline makes you eligible, never guaranteed, to be cited.

What NOT to do (Google’s own mythbusting)

  • You do not need llms.txt, markdown copies of pages or AI-specific markup, standard HTML is preferred.
  • You do not need to chunk content into tiny fragments, the systems understand multiple topics on one page.
  • You do not need a flattened "AI writing style", write naturally for humans.
  • More pages for every keyword variation violates the scaled-content-abuse policy, a few comprehensive, authoritative pieces win.