"Danny Sullivan, director at Google Search, said any GEO tools that advise designing content solely for rank and visibility purposes lose "track of the big picture." "Are you doing things that are useful for human beings?" he said. "That's what we want to reward.""
"Sullivan shared an example of popular advice from SEO/GEO experts that could soon go stale: that large language models favor bite-sized content. "Maybe they've seen that this seems to work in some edge cases in some places," but the model will inevitably change, he said. "All that work you did to please the system may not carry through to the long term.""
"Sullivan said the core principles of SEO generally apply to new forms of AI search. "Plenty of sites succeed because they don't do SEO, or hire SEOs," Sullivan said. "They don't think about it because they're just focused on making great content." General website and structured data hygiene always make sense, ensuring Google's search crawlers can actually get to the relevant content, Sullivan said, especially as AI answers still have a lot of traditional search results at their core. AI formats are also getting better at multi-modal queries - a user might ask "what's in this video?" for example. "If you've still been a text-only kind of player, more images and videos may help you. But they would have helped you anyway," Sullivan said."
Companies are rushing to sell GEO (AI SEO) services that promise improved ranking, but optimizing content solely for rank and visibility risks becoming obsolete as models change. Durable practices include focusing on usefulness to human users, following core SEO principles, and maintaining website and structured-data hygiene so crawlers can access content. Tactics that exploit short-term model behaviors, such as favoring bite-sized content, may fail when models evolve. AI search is increasingly multimodal, so adding images and videos can help reach users. Be skeptical of shortcuts and prioritize long-term, user-focused content strategies over gaming algorithms.
Read at Search Engine Roundtable
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