135: What Google Actually Says About AI Search (And What You Can Stop Worrying About)

In this episode, Jules White cuts through the noise around AI search by sharing what Google has officially said in their new guide on showing up in AI search features - and perhaps more importantly, what they say you don't need to do.

Jules walks through the key takeaways from Google's guide, explaining why your existing SEO foundations are still the right strategy for AI search, what non-commodity content means and why it matters more than ever, and which widely-shared AI search tactics Google has now officially called unnecessary.

Key Takeaways:

Why you still need Google: Jules explains why skipping Google and just trying to show up in ChatGPT isn't the shortcut it might seem, and shares the stats that show why Google is still central to how people search.

SEO and AI search work from the same foundations: Find out why AI Overviews pull from Google's existing search index, and why the SEO work you've already done is your AI search strategy — not something you need to start from scratch.

Non-commodity content and why it levels the playing field: Learn what Google means by non-commodity content, why your real lived experience is your biggest asset right now, and how to use AI to check whether your existing content is commodity or not.

The AI search myths Google has officially busted: Jules goes through the tactics you can stop worrying about — including special text files, chunking your content for AI, rewriting content in a specific way, chasing brand mentions, and adding special markup for AI search.

What to actually focus on: A clear, practical list of where to put your energy — from getting your SEO basics right and going deeper on your core topics, to keeping your Google Business Profile updated and making sure all content lives on your website first.

If you've been feeling overwhelmed by all the noise around AI search, this episode will give you the clarity and reassurance to focus on what actually works.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Google Search Central - Optimising your website for generative AI features on Google Search
• Google's guidance on AI-generated content
• Episode 009: Why understanding your core topics is crucial before you start creating content
• Episode 108: The different brain modes you need to get your website working for you
• Episode 125: Website accessibility basics - making images more accessible and SEO-friendly with Rachel Mess
• Episode 134: Is Google Business Profile Social Media? (And Why the Answer Matters for Your Business)
• Free Core Topics Guide - brainstorm the three to five topics your business needs to be known for
• Jules's Social Media is Optional philosophy
• Done-with-you Google Business Profile optimisation service
• Website Growth Club — step-by-step website and SEO support

Transcript

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Introduction & Why This Matters

Jules White: Hi, welcome back to the Website Success Show. It is Jules here, and today I want to talk about an official guide that's just been released from Google, specifically about how to show up in AI search.

Things like AI overviews, AI mode, AEO GEO, you might have heard it described as that. And I've read through this document, and I'm gonna go through and just point out some of the things that Google is saying.

I wanna focus on not just what Google says you have to do, because we've already talked about on the show, about the things that you have to do to get your website and your business showing up in search, whether that's AI search or SEO traditional search. But I'm gonna focus on the things that, that they're saying we don't need to do.

There's lots of noise out there at the moment, and lots of people, specifically marketing around AI search and AI visibility, you've probably seen this yourself, all of the noise out there, the new tactics, new hacks, things that you're apparently supposed to do, and quite a lot of it, Google has said in this document isn't necessary.

So you know, the things that I'm hearing are like, keywords are dead. SEO is dead, Google is dead, and it's just not true.

So I, I want to really dive into that today and just to help hopefully to give you some reassurance about this really.

So I was delivering a talk to a group yesterday and the, one of the questions that kept coming up was about AI search. How do I get recommended in AI?

Before we get into what Google has said in this document, I just wanna address the question that I do hear a lot is, which is that,

Can You Skip Google and Just Use AI?

Jules White: do I even need to care about Google anymore or can I just show up in ChatGPT? And often people think they can just skip Google and just get recommended in AI search.

And unfortunately it's not that simple. AI pulls from the internet, and if your website foundations aren't set up for SEO and aren't set up to sort of show up in Google, and by that I mean good unique content that shows your individual lived experience, that's well, well-structured and technically sound, then realistically you're not gonna be recommended by the AI bots.

They need to be able to crawl through and understand the content of your website just as much as Google's bots do as well. And I think it's really important as well to put this into perspective.

The reason that we still talk about Google when we're talking about search, we still focus on Google is because still over 90% of searches that go through a search engine happen on Google. I was looking at the stats yesterday and for the UK the stats are more like 97%.

Google's Official Guide: What It Says

Jules White: So Google is still very much part of this search conversation. Realistically, they always will be, I think.

So Google processes about 14 billion with a b searches per day worldwide and global AI usage is around 45 billion monthly sessions. And obviously not all of those conversations on AI are actually people searching for things.

So there's still a reason that we say I need to go and Google it. And if you optimise for Google, then this will also help you with showing up on other search engines like Bing and Yahoo and also to show up in AI search.

So now Google's getting much better. I probably should say first, historically, Google has not been great at producing articles that are really easy to understand, which is why I often read through these articles and try and translate them into normal person speak really, you know, take out the geek part of it really.

And the ones that are really heavily technical. But I think probably AI is helping with this as well, because these documents that are now being released from Google seem to be much easier to understand even if you're not techie.

So this document that I'm working from, from Google is called Optimising Your Website for generative AI features on Google search, which essentially means optimising your website to get recommended in AI search. Whether that is in ChatGPT, in Claude, Perplexity, or more importantly here, to be showing in the AI overviews and AI mode that you will see in a normal Google search engine.

And Google is such a fundamental part of the habitual way that people will search that we still need to make sure, like we can't ignore it. We, we have to be realistic about the fact that people will still continue to use Google.

I will link to the document in the show notes as well. So if you want to go and have a read through it yourself, then you certainly can do.

There are links in here to Google's specific best practices for SEO, which always is worth having a little read through. Fundamentally, what Google wants is a website that's readable and that has good content that would leave people feeling satisfied with what they've read and actually contribute something to the internet.

And unfortunately, we are at a point now where a lot of websites aren't doing that. And especially if people who are creating the content for websites are just churning out AI generated regurgitated stuff, really, then that's one of the big things that we need to be addressing as business owners to make sure that our unique lived experience is what's coming across in our own website, and that we don't just sound, and also look now like all of the other websites out there.

If everybody's using AI images, AI copy, and then using AI to actually lay out those pages as well, then actually standing out is, is not easy. So we wanna make sure that what we're putting out there connects with our customers, helps them understand our business, and helps them to choose us over everyone else who's out there on the internet.

With this guide, the first thing that Google makes it really clear on, on this, literally the first heading is, is SEO still relevant for generative AI search? And Google says in short, yes, the best practices for SEO continue to be relevant because our new generative AI features on Google search are rooted in our core search rankings and quality systems.

So basically what Google is saying there is all of those SEO foundations that you've been building, they're exactly what still matters for AI search. And the reason that the internet is such a fantastic place for gathering information and for being able to find information so easily is in no small part due to Google's ranking system and Google's search index.

For the last almost 30 years Google has been cataloguing the whole of the internet and a lot of what the AI agents are trained on has been trained on Google's search index and, on the results that they, that can be found on Google as well.

How AI Search Actually Works

Jules White: So if we're thinking about AI overviews, when someone searches and gets an AI overview, Google isn't just generating text there, it's not making it up. It's pulling from real web pages that are already in its search index, the same pages that are showing up in regular search, and then using AI to summarise and present that information in a concise way.

Now, it's not necessarily the pages or the, the websites rather, that are appearing right at the top of search that Google is pulling from. Sometimes it is, but I think this is one of the helpful things for smaller businesses is that you don't actually have to be ranking in position one to show up in the AI answers.

So if your pages are ranking well, and that doesn't necessarily as the same mean into page one, you are already in the pool of content that gets used in the AI answers. It's kind of like a researcher going into a library to find the best books on a particular topic, and then writing the summary.

The AI is the researcher, but the library is still like Google's Search Index. So your, your website needs to be a book that's worth pulling off the shelf to actually contribute to that summary.

Google uses a process called retrieval-augmented generation or RAG. You don't need to remember that phrase, it's basically just what I've just described there.

So Google's systems go out, review the information available and generate a more reliable and more helpful response, supposedly showing the links to the relevant webpages that support that information that it's actually delivered in the response there.

Query Fan Out Explained

Jules White: Now the second thing that Google mentions is query fan out. You may have heard this phrase mentioned.

So again, you don't need to worry about this as a technical term, but it's useful to understand this because when somebody asks a complex question in AI search, then Google's systems, and this is the same in ChatGPT or Perplexity or any AI agent, the system generates a whole related set of questions behind the scenes to get a more complete answer. So if somebody's asking, how do I get more clients for my salon without social media, Google might also be looking for things like best ways to market a salon locally, how to get more salon reviews, salon SEO tips, marketing without social media, those kind of things.

It will go off and be answering possibly thousands of questions or asking rather thousands of questions in the background. And this basically means that if you are covering your topics in depth, rather than just generally covering everything, then you are much more likely to show up across those related queries.

And that doesn't necessarily mean to say that you've gotta create a new page for each one of these questions, and you don't necessarily have to know about all of these questions, but it's something that just really becoming that expert in what you do and niching into something where you can stand out. And for, for a salon for this example, maybe it would be that you are niching because of the area you are in and the specialism that you, you offer.

Or if you're an online business, it might be that you really niche into who you help. So if you specifically help women entrepreneurs who are looking to scale their business, or if you are working with early stage founders who are looking for funding, those kind of ways of niching more specifically can really help you to be one of the answers that Google draws from when it's actually looking to generate these AI overviews.

So then Google moves on to talk about applying foundational SEO best practices to generative AI search. This section focuses on reframing SEO best practices to understand what matters most to AI systems today and how you can implement them in the context of generative AI search.

And ultimately, with the goal of improving your website's visibility in both generative AI search experiences and Google search overall. And I think that's fundamentally what we would all like to do, not just to show up in AI search and get recommended in AI, but also in Google search in general.

So we want our businesses, if we, if we've got a Google Business profile, we wanna be showing up in maps. If we've got podcast content or YouTube videos, we want to be showing up wherever our business exists.

And this is probably one of the most important and emerging things that we need to really focus on. And this is one of the things that's very interesting about this, this guide really.

Non-Commodity Content: The Key to Standing Out

Jules White: So it talks about the idea of non-commodity content. And I wanna spend a little bit of time on this because they've given a really clear explanation about commodity content here and what makes content stand out right now against all of the AI stuff that's out there.

So Google gives two examples. They give the example of non-commodity content, the kind of content that gives a firsthand review or provides a unique perspective based on personal experience rather than a summary of existing content out there that simply restates the information, regurgitates the information that is already readily available elsewhere.

So Google is telling us to create content ourselves based on what we know about our topic and consider what in-depth experience we can bring to our content. So Google is specifically telling us here, don't just recycle what others on the internet have already said or could easily be produced by generative AI.

So if you, if AI could easily create this content, then that is something that is commodity content basically. Google's given an example of seven tips for first-time homebuyers, which is the kind of content that anyone could write, any AI could write, it is based on common knowledge and nothing unique and no unique perspective really.

Whereas non-commodity content, Google's example here is why we waived the inspection and saved money: a look inside the sewer line. That's one person's actual experience, it's got a specific point of view, specific detail, and you can't fake it.

So coming back to a salon owner, commodity content could be something like, um, why you need a regular colour refresh, versus sharing a case study or something on a client whose hair was breaking off, how you turned it around over three appointments and the specific ways that you helped them. Now this is one of the things that has, has always been true.

I think really Google has always wanted content that delivers something that's not already out there, but it specifically matters for AI search because AI systems are specifically trained to draw from a variety of different sources. And when your perspective and the content that you create is unique firsthand experience, something that's not already just been regurgitated, you are much more likely to be one of those sources that it draws from because it's something new and it's lived experience.

Whereas if you are just using AI to create content and regurgitating what's already there and already exists in the AI world, why would it choose your article, your webpage above any other one? There's no reason for it to highlight yours specifically.

So this is another thing that's really good news for small business owners because I think it just helps to level the playing field really. It's not just about who's got the biggest website or the most pages or the most number of links, it's about who is genuinely going to offer the best solution for that person who's doing the search or having that conversation with AI based on real lived experience content.

Now, one of the things that came up yesterday on this talk that I was doing was somebody mentioning that they, they just want to be doing the thing they love to do in their business. They don't want to be tinkering around with their website, they don't wanna be kind of under the hood of things.

And I think it's a bit of an unfortunate thing, this really, because if you are a small business or small or even a medium business and you don't have either a full marketing department or a really good budget to have an agency do this for you, then unfortunately, usually you are your marketing department, particularly for solopreneurs, particularly for small businesses, maybe even with a small team. Somebody within the business has to take responsibility for this.

And if, I think this is actually a, a good example of it as well, even if you don't want to go into your website builder and actually implement it yourself, doing the work on the strategy and doing the work on creating the content, it should come from your experience.

And if anybody can do that, if you can outsource this to an SEO agency or you can outsource this to your web developer to actually create this content, or even a copywriter to a certain extent, if someone else can create it for you who doesn't have that real live lived experience as the expert in what you do, then most likely it's commodity content that you're creating there anyway.

Who Should Be Creating Your Content?

Jules White: Now I talked about in episode 108, I talked about the, the different brain modes that we need to get our website working for us and why this can often feel quite overwhelming. And I think this is a really good example of this.

If you are the CEO of your business, you need to be involved in this. If you are the expert in what you do, you need to be involved in creating this content for your website.

And even if that does mean working with somebody, having somebody interview you even to really draw this information out of you, but you are the best person to be the expert in what you do. And even if there's to say you get someone else to go in and actually implement that on your website, then it's really important for you to be involved in that process.

And I would always say that if you are outsourcing in any way in your business, it's good to understand what you are outsourcing. Because I have so many examples of people who have worked with people, either developers or SEO agencies or VAs, and they really don't know what they're outsourcing.

They're not necessarily checking things like making sure that the pages have been set up to be SEO-friendly, the pages on their website, that they're, they're not having bad practices and things that actually could be harming their, their website and their visibility in search. So I think just understanding some of this basic stuff, which if you are here, if you're listening to this episode, if you've listened to any of the other episodes of the podcast, then you are already taking that great step of just starting to understand the fact that your pages, you should have a specific thing that you're trying to target with your pages, that you know what you want to be showing up for and you, you know where your expertise is and why people should be choosing you over other people.

And if you don't know that, come and have a chat and we can actually work on that together, work out potentially where you are missing out on showing yourself as the expert in what you do and getting that information across on your website.

So all that to say, when you are thinking about content that exists on your website, one question I want you to ask yourself is, if Google didn't exist, if you weren't thinking about search and having your website show up in searches and having your website actually discoverable, would you still share this piece of content with a client or a potential client? And would that person find it helpful?

Because if you wouldn't share that with somebody, if you are embarrassed by the content that's on your website, then it's time to address that. This is one of the things that can really help us to have confidence in what we're doing, and have confidence that the marketing that we are putting out there as business owners is actually doing the job it needs to, rather than just creating content for the sake of it.

I firmly believe that we should be creating content with a purpose and a plan and content that actually serves us in our business as well.

So we've talked about non-commodity content, so creating something that could not easily be replicated by somebody else. One of the things that I didn't mention there that can be helpful with this is if you have a specific framework or a unique way of working or if you are developing thought leadership and you have a specific point of view about things, having those kind of pages on your website can be really helpful as well.

I'll link to this in the show notes as well. I recently published my social media is optional philosophy on my own website and that's something that's non-commodity content. It's my own thoughts and experience and my own opinion on why I fundamentally believe that there are better ways to market our business.

And you can check this yourself. So if you are not sure if a piece of content you've got on your website is a commodity piece or a non-commodity, then you can copy it.

So if it's a blog post or something, just scroll over it and copy all the content from that page, paste it into whichever AI agent you are using and ask it whether this is commodity or non-commodity content. And if it says it's commodity content, ask it how you can weave your own unique experience and unique perspective into it to help to make it into non-commodity content that can really serve your business.

Now, Google also mentions that creating non-commodity content should be helpful, reliable, and people-first. So it is fundamentally about making something that your readers will find helpful and reliable and provides that, as I say, that using unique experience goes beyond the ordinary that's just out there.

Now, Google also mentions that we should be organising our content in a way that helps our readers. So write content for your human audience and make sure the content is well written and easy to follow.

I think this is one of the fundamental things that is often missed on websites where we either have great big walls of text, or we have one single sentence that looks very AI-generated. People generally like it where websites are organised into paragraphs, have sections, have headings, and the headings provide a, a clear structure as well.

So you would've heard me talk about this lots on the podcast that headings are really important for helping the bots that crawl through our website to understand what our website is about. I've talked about this lots about, we should structure our websites like an English essay.

So we have one heading at the top would be a H1, and then we break that down into subheadings, which would be your H2, and then breaking it down further if we need to from then on.

Google talks about adding high-quality images and videos. So many people appreciate finding images and videos as they search for things online. AI search features can bring in relevant images and videos, which means more opportunities for your website to appear beyond webpage links.

So certainly if you've got high quality and ideally not AI generated and not stock photos, if you can help it, I kind of would have it in that order really of first and foremost, if you've got proprietary images that you've had taken well, either professionally or not. But if you've got images that look good and look professional, that are unique to your business that haven't been generated by AI and that aren't stock images, ideally that's the best, that's the best way to, to go with things because again, it's not commodity content, it's not content that people might see across all sorts of websites.

And I think especially with, with industries where trust is really important, so where if you're doing anything around health, mental health, physical health, money, so the, the, the topics that Google calls your money, your life topics, so where it's health, wealth or security, then using AI content and AI images immediately I think destroys trust. There are some guidance on here on image SEO best practices and video SEO documentation as well, so you can find the links to those which, that can all help.

So things like image file names, image alt text, image sizes as well can really help. And especially if you are a business like a photographer or a hairdresser, a salon, and you could actually specifically have your images showing up for those keywords that people are either typing into Google or talking about in AI search, then that can be really helpful.

Head back to episode 125 with Rachel Mess to listen to us talking about website accessibility basics. We talk about images and what we can do to make our images more accessible and more helpful from an SEO point of view, so definitely head back and have a listen to that one.

And then Google says, focus on what your users want and avoid overdoing it. Whilst it might be tempting to create a separate piece of content for every possible variation of how people might search, you don't need to focus on those fan out queries, you don't need to answer every single question. But particularly Google points out doing that primarily to manipulate rankings or to get featured in AI search results violates Google's spam policy.

So we, we saw this when, when AI first started coming out, so where websites were just churning out high volumes of pages that didn't necessarily improve their websites, didn't make their websites higher quality, didn't make it more relevant to users. It was just literally content for the sake of content really.

So again, this comes back to that thing of creating content with a plan, with a purpose that's, that actually serves our website users, and helps us to show up in search. And Google talks about using AI tools to assist in content creation, so we've got some guidance there.

There's a specific link to guidance on using AI-generated content and fundamentally making sure that we are not going against Google's spam policy, so we are not creating just loads of AI-generated content for the sake of it. We are not creating content that's inaccurate or is low quality or irrelevant.

So have a little read through that. That's actually a very short document, I'll link to that in the show notes as well. But what Google is saying here is don't create crap content that's not actually contributing anything valuable to the, to the user of your website.

Structuring Your Website for Search

Jules White: Google then goes on to talking about the structure of web pages, basically making sure that our websites are technically sound. There's lots within Google's guidance about how to make sure that your website is crawlable by Google and that webpages provide a good experience that you've not got loads of duplicate content.

A lot of this stuff, if you're using a website builder, you shouldn't need to worry too much about this. If your website can, can actually be indexed by Google, it's not very slow to load and it's easy to use and it has a good page experience then you may not need to worry about this too much.

There are things that you can do just to make sure the fundamental checks, this is one of the things I do when I'm doing a website audit is just making sure that like, there's nothing fundamental that's blocking your page. Now, I have seen people say that they've been through all of these checks, they, they've put things in place in the backend, they feel like they should be showing up and they're still not.

And if I then have a look, normally I find with that I look through and there, there are things that need improving. But at that point, once you've done all of those things and, and things still aren't improving, you're still not actually increasing your traffic at that point, you do have to ask yourself the question of whether this content is providing anything relevant to the internet.

Is it, is it something that Google would see as quality content? Which can be a hard question to ask yourself definitely.

And sometimes that's just where having an outside opinion on it and, and having an outside perspective. And it might just be there's some tweaks that you need to make that could just take your pages from being what Google might consider low quality to much more useful and helpful content.

Google talks about optimising your local business and e-commerce details as well, really important. We all know how important our Google Business profiles are.

Have a listen to last week's episode, which was 134, if you haven't listened to that one, about how passionate I am about Google Business profiles. There are lots of other episodes around Google profiles as well.

There's also Google Merchant Center, which is more specifically for e-commerce businesses so that your products can show up in the shopping results on Google search results.

Myth Busting: What You DON'T Need to Do

Jules White: And then we talk about myth busting. So this is about what you don't need to do and this is the section I'm more excited about really.

Because as I mentioned, there's so much noise out there about all these things. And now Google has officially said that a lot of these hacks are not necessary for Google search. So let's go through them.

So there's something called a TXT file, or other special types of markup files, which are supposed to help AI systems understand your content. And Google has specifically said that we don't need to create new machine-readable files, AI text files or special markup to appear in generative AI search.

So the AI bots can understand what's on our website unless it's specifically blocked or there's some weird hand-coded site that's causing some problem. Realistically, they don't need anything special for the AI bots to be able to understand your content.

And Google is coming out here to say that actually, yeah, that is true. You don't need, you don't need anything like that right now anyway.

So myth number two is that you need to chunk your content for AI. So this, this has been one of the pieces of advice that I've seen from the start, really lots of advice about breaking your content into short, digestible pieces, chunking it specifically so AI can process it more easily.

And Google is saying here that there's no need to do that. And if you think about it, these are bots reading through your website can understand multiple topics on a page.

They can pull out the relevant section. The advice is simply to make your page the right length for your audience, which sometimes that's short, sometimes it's longer, sometimes it's more detailed, so you're writing for your readers, not for the AI.

And that being said, often people would like to see pieces of content broken up into paragraphs. So you don't specifically have to do this for AI, and it doesn't have to just be short pieces of content, but this is all part of that page experience of just making it, making it easy for people to read. But you don't need little sections for AI, which is an interesting one, really.

Myth number three, you need to rewrite your content in a special way for AI. So Google's saying here, you don't need to write in any specific way for generative AI search.

AI systems can understand synonyms and general meanings of what someone is seeking, in order to connect them with the right content that might not use the same precise keywords, which is fantastic. So this means that if you are writing an article about, I use this example, so if you are writing an article about dogs, then it knows that when you mention pooch, pup, fur baby, that all of those are the same things.

So this is, as Google has become more and more clever, and as the bots have become more and more clever about this, this has been true for a while, and this is a confirmation that actually we just need to write clearly, write well. We don't need to use those exact phrases or keywords in a specific way.

That being said, I do still feel like it's important to have a focus when we are creating pages, have an idea of what you're wanting a page to show up for and use that term in the page title, page description, and the H1 heading. It's one of those things that we can say that, yes, you don't have to be specific, but if you don't have a focus, then it's very easy for our pages to not be specific enough, really.

Myth number four is you need to get your brand mentioned everywhere online. And this is a tactic that's been doing the rounds, getting your business mentioned in as many places as possible online, in forums, in blog comments, in communities to boost your visibility in AI search.

And Google is explicitly calling this out in this article. So they talk about inauthentic mentions, and they're saying that their system focuses on high-quality content whilst actively filtering spam.

So essentially this is about not just trying to get links for the sake of it. This is about getting genuine PR, genuine reviews, being cited in real articles by real publications rather than just gaming the system, which has always been part of SEO.

Like they're trying to get loads of backlinks and buying backlinks. And all of that kind of stuff has always been part of SEO, and each time Google does an update, it gets better at like understanding whether links are a genuinely helpful link, really.

So this is all about just focusing on getting your name out there, but in the right places and the places that are most relevant to what you're trying to link back to basically.

And then myth number five, you need special structured data markup for AI search. So structured data is a little bit of code in the backend of your website that helps Google understand specific things about your page.

So things like recipes or services or locations if you're a local business, um, or events, if you've got events going on in your business. Frequently asked questions is useful and it's useful to have this schema markup, but Google says that you don't need anything specific, any special types of schema or markup specifically for AI search.

So this is where we should have that fundamental structured data there, but we don't need to go over the top with this basically. So it is not gonna specifically help you with AI overviews, and they also say that it is a good idea to continue using it as part of your overall SEO strategy.

It does help you to be eligible to show up in rich results on Google, so getting the expanded snippets and things showing up on Google is helpful for that, but you don't need to do anything specific for AI search.

When we're talking about AI search, you might hear this as AEO, answer engine optimization, GEO, generative engine optimization, they're all sort of different ways of describing this, but I think we can still keep calling it SEO.

I've been calling it AI SEO. There's so many different ways, but what this whole article is saying is there's not a separate piece of discipline, there's not a separate thing that you need to do and you need to understand to show up in AI search.

So optimising for AI search is just optimising for search. It's the same foundations, it's not a separate thing that you need to learn.

And I think this is genuinely reassuring. Because what it means is the work you've been doing and even if you haven't started working on your SEO yet, the work that you do over the next few months to get this solid website and get it working for your business, creating good content, getting your SEO basics right, that is your AI search strategy.

And whatever happens with AI, you are fundamentally setting your website up in a way that allows you to be visible and to show up in AI searches. You're not starting from scratch and the work that you've done on your SEO already is not wasted time.

Where to Focus Your Energy

Jules White: So Google talks about what to focus on as well, given everything that Google has said here, where I'd focus your energy and none of this should feel new because we've been talking about this for a while. Certainly on the show, if you've been listening to the show for any length of time, this is what we've been talking about.

Getting the SEO basics right, so making sure your pages are actually indexed, that your headings are well structured on your site, your site loads well on mobile, these are foundations that feed directly into AI search. So really sort of focus on that.

Creating content from your real experience. Think about the questions that clients actually ask you, think about those problems that you solve every day for your clients, think about the case studies you could create that show your unique way of working and share those on your website, that's the non-commodity content that Google is looking for.

And it doesn't necessarily mean that you've gotta create a new page for every part of this. Think about how you can weave these experiences into your sales pages, your booking pages, even things like testimonials and your own unique perspective on the thing that you're trying to sell could be massively helpful for getting your business showing up in AI search and in traditional search as well.

Go deeper on your core topics rather than covering everything broadly. Now I have a few early episodes of the podcast where I talk about your core topics, so head back and listen to episode nine of the podcast, where I talk about how understanding your core topics is crucial before you start creating content.

I even have a free guide, I'll link to that in the show notes as well, that can help you to understand your core topics, to really get brainstorming on those specific three to five things that you need to focus on and keep talking about in your business over and over again so you can cover them well and become the go-to person for that specific thing in a specific niche. And it's much more powerful doing that than trying to be everything to everyone.

Keep building your Google Business profile if you're a local business. Google specifically mentions this as a way to appear both in AI responses and in regular search results, and I know I've seen this myself where Google Business profiles are being mentioned in chats with AI search as well.

I've seen it for both my own business and for client businesses as well. If that feels like a challenge, then I offer a service where we do a done-with-you optimization of your Google Business profile, that's something that can help you to immediately get some fantastic visibility in the local maps.

And then stop worrying about the hacks. If you've been worrying if you should specifically add different types of text files to your website or chunking your content or getting your brand mentioned everywhere, you can let that go.

Focus that time and that energy that you'd spend on those things creating genuinely useful content instead, and create that content that you own first and foremost. I think that's definitely something to mention where we're talking about content, I'm all about creating content we own first.

So create it for your own website, and then if you choose to use that in different places, like your Google profile or your social media, if you're using social media, then great, but everything that you do online should come back to your own website. It's the thing that you own, and no algorithm can take that away from you.

One little thing to mention that Google starts just literally, it's one sentence at the bottom of this report, which is about an emerging area that's worth being aware of, which is agentic AI. This is where AI can take actions on your behalf, like booking a reservation, comparing products rather than just answering questions.

So right now, this isn't something that most service-based businesses need to act on right now, but it is worth knowing, it's worth knowing it's coming. And Google says that they'll, they'll publish specific guidance on this as it develops.

I definitely feel like this is the way things will go. We'll eventually get to a point where AI will do this kind of stuff for us, though I'm not sure how I feel about it, about my AI bot going off and buying stuff for me.

And I think there's all sorts of implications with it, but it's something we don't need to worry about right now. We just need to be aware that it's coming at some point in the future really.

Summary & Key Takeaways

Jules White: So just to finish off and in summary of what we've talked about today, and this article from Google, three things to take away: AI search is being built on the same foundations as regular search.

Your SEO work is your AI search strategy.

Create non-commodity content, use your real experience, your point of view, your unique way of working, your processes, your frameworks, the things that only you can say and use that as the way that you can stand out. That's the exact thing that's gonna help your business stand out from all of the competitors out there and be the one that's mentioned in search.

And most of the AI search hacks out there are not necessary for Google search, so save your energy for what actually works.

And if you want to read the original article, I'll link to it as I say in the show notes, it's from Google Search Central and it genuinely is worth a read. And if you want help with the foundations, making sure your website is actually set up to show up in Google and in AI search, that's exactly the work I do with my clients and also over in the Website Growth Club.

So I'll link to those in the show notes as well. So thank you so much for listening and I'll see you soon.

Bye.