Good SEO is Good GEO: What Google Told Us in London

This week the Clicky team was at Google's London office for Mastering LeadGen in the AI Era on Tuesday 20 October. In The Evolution of Search & Search AI Max session, Google put up a slide with a 5-word line from Brendon Kraham, Google's VP of Search and Commerce: Good SEO is good GEO.

If you run a business, you have probably been pitched GEO, AEO or "LLM SEO" at least once this year, usually as a brand new service with a brand new price tag. So it was refreshing to hear Google say, in its own building, that the fundamentals have not changed. Here is what that means, what Google is asking marketers to stop doing, and where we think the nuance sits.

I will admit it was a satisfying moment. I have been telling our clients for over 18 months that there is no separate trick for AI search. The brands that appear in AI answers are the ones already doing the fundamentals properly: genuinely expert content, a technically sound site and a strong reputation across the web. Hearing Google make the same case on stage, in almost the same words, was good confirmation that we have been pointing clients in the right direction.

Why Google says SEO and GEO are the same thing

AI Overviews and AI Mode are not separate search engines. Google has been clear that they are built on top of its core ranking systems and draw from the same index as traditional results. If a page would not rank in normal search, it is unlikely to be pulled into an AI answer either.

The mechanism that matters is something Google calls fan-out. When someone asks AI Mode a long, layered question, it breaks that question into smaller sub-questions, searches for each one at the same time, and stitches the results together. That is good news for specialists: a page that ranks well for a narrow topic can now appear as a source in answers to much broader questions. But only if it already earns its place in the index on quality.

The numbers on screen

The session backed this up with some striking figures:

• Google handles over 5 trillion searches a year
• Search queries hit an all-time high last quarter
• Questions are now 3x longer than traditional searches
• Longer UK queries are up 14% year on year
• AI Mode queries have doubled every quarter since launch

The takeaway is that AI has not shrunk search. It has changed its shape. People are asking fuller questions and expecting fuller answers, which rewards brands that have genuinely deep, useful content.

What Google wants marketers to stop doing

Kraham set out his position in a Think with Google piece aimed at CMOs earlier this year, and the London session echoed it. In short, Google says 5 things are a waste of time and budget:

1. Treating GEO or AEO as a separate discipline. Your existing investment in solid SEO is the foundation for AI visibility, not something to be replaced.
2. Writing for bots. No keyword stuffing, and no chopping content into tiny artificial snippets for language models. Google's systems read language the way people do.
3. Manufacturing mentions. AI features surface what is said about you across blogs, videos and forums. Engineered, inauthentic mentions are not a reliable shortcut.
4. LLMs.txt files. For Google Search, they are simply not needed.
5. Generic content. The "Top 10 things to consider" article that any competitor could write has no edge in a world of infinite content.

What to do instead

The positive guidance is unglamorous, which is exactly why it works:

• Publish noncommodity content. Google's own example was a local running shop making a detailed video about why a specific customer's trainer collapsed. Real expertise and first-hand experience are things AI cannot fake and competitors cannot copy.
• Fix the experience. Fast pages, a site that works on every device, and main content that is easy to find. Visitors arriving from AI answers are often better informed and closer to converting, so a slow landing page is an expensive leak.
• Keep your feeds and profiles complete. Merchant Center and Google Business Profile both help products and services appear in AI responses as well as standard results.
• Measure what matters. Leads, sales and sign-ups, not vanity metrics. Search Console now reports impressions from AI features separately, so you can see whether your SEO work is translating into AI visibility.

Where paid search fits

The session also showed how ads now sit alongside AI answers: above and below AI Overviews, inside AI Overviews themselves, and within AI Mode, which has launched in the US.

The closing message of the day was that the only way to win in the age of AI is with AI. For us that means organic quality and AI-powered campaigns working together, not competing for budget.

Our take

We agree with Google on the principle. It is the advice I have been giving clients for over 18 months: be genuinely useful, be technically sound, and be the obvious expert in your space. But there are 3 caveats worth being honest about.

Google is talking about Google. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and other assistants retrieve and cite content in their own ways. Strong SEO helps there too, but brand authority and being referenced across the wider web matter more than ever.

Clicks are not what they were. Industry data shows AI Overviews can sharply reduce click-through rates for top-ranking pages. Visibility inside the answer is the new goal, and traffic alone is no longer a reliable measure of success.

"Good SEO" is a higher bar than many sites realise. Plenty of businesses have not actually been doing good SEO. They have been doing adequate SEO and getting away with it. AI search is far less forgiving of thin content and slow sites.

What this means for you

If someone is selling you GEO as a replacement for SEO, ask 3 questions:

1. What will you do that is different from strong technical SEO and genuinely expert content?
2. How will you measure it against leads and revenue, not just mentions?
3. Does it hold up across Google and the other AI assistants your customers use?

If the answers are vague, your money is better spent on the fundamentals. If you want a straight view on where your site stands in both traditional and AI search, get in touch with the Clicky team.

Sources: Think with Google, "Good SEO is good GEO" by Brendon Kraham (June 2026); PPC Land coverage of the piece; figures presented at Google's Mastering LeadGen in the AI Era event, London, October 2026.