Google's GEO doctrine: “good SEO is good GEO”

On 17 June 2026, Google stopped answering the GEO question with evasions. Brendon Kraham, Vice President of Search & Commerce Global Ads Solutions — that is, someone senior enough that his sentences get reviewed before they are published — signed off the company's official position in Think with Google, and summed it up like this: “good SEO is good GEO (or AEO, or AI SEO, or whatever you want to call it)”.

For an industry that has spent two years buying courses, audits and "AI optimisation" tools, that sentence is a small bomb. It deserves an unhurried read: it holds a solid piece of technical truth, an obvious slice of commercial interest, and an important gap that Google is under no obligation to fill for you. One thing at a time.

What the doctrine says

The underlying argument is technical and hard to dispute: Google's generative AI features — AI Overviews, AI Mode — have no ranking of their own. They lean on the same classification systems as search always has. If your page is not a reliable source for the search engine, it will not be one for the AI summary built on top of it either. There are not two doors: there is one.

Everything else in the message follows from that. What Google asks for is exactly what it asked for before:

• A point of view of your own, and authenticity: first-hand experience, named experts, things only you can tell.
• Site experience: speed, working on mobile, a page that loads and can actually be used.
• Listings kept current: Business Profile and Merchant Center up to date, which is where the data Google takes as good lives.
• Measure against business goals — bookings, enquiries, sales — rather than against third-party tool metrics, which estimate from the outside what only Google sees from the inside.

The four myths Google takes apart

This is the most useful part, and Google spells it out in the technical guide it published a month earlier, in May 2026:

1. No special files such as llms.txt are needed for Google Search.
2. There is no need to chop up content into artificial fragments: there is no ideal length, the AI pulls the relevant part out of a normal text.
3. There is no need to stuff in keywords "for the bots". It is the same over-optimisation of 2010 under a new name.
4. Chasing forced mentions on forums and outside platforms helps less than it seems; spam is blocked by other systems.

Anyone selling you one of those four as the secret of GEO is selling smoke, at least as far as Google is concerned.

The measurement news almost nobody has covered

Tucked inside the doctrine there is a practical change that has barely been explained in Spanish: Search Console already shows impressions in AI features, and Merchant Center reports how products appear inside generative AI.

It is not a ranking, it is not a breakdown by query and it does not answer the question everyone asks ("what position do I come up in?"). But it is, as things stand today, the only measurement of AI visibility that comes from the source itself instead of being estimated from outside. If you run a property and you have not gone in to look at it, that is this week's first piece of homework: it is free and it is already in your account.

Now the small print: who is signing this

Time to put the sceptic's hat on. Google is an extraordinarily interested party in this particular debate, and it is worth saying out loud: if classic SEO is enough, nobody moves their Google Ads budget. The thesis "you need nothing new" protects the status quo of a company whose revenue depends on search — and on its advertising market — remaining the centre of the world. The figure Google attached to the message points the same way: Alphabet reported an all-time high in search queries in its first-quarter 2026 results. Translation: search is not dying, it is changing shape.

The contrast comes from a player with opposite incentives. In that same earnings season, Ariane Gorin, Expedia's chief executive, described answer engine optimisation as the company's fastest-growing channel. One of the two companies is describing the world and the other is describing its profit and loss account; the trouble is that both are doing both at once.

My reading: they contradict each other less than it looks. Google is talking about Google, where GEO genuinely is SEO. Expedia is talking about the whole shop window, where Google is no longer the only one handing out traffic. And that is where the doctrine falls short.

The llms.txt case, or why Google's doctrine only speaks for Google

This is the point where it pays to be precise, because half the industry is misquoting Google's sentence.

Google says llms.txt is not needed for Google Search. That is true, and it is Google's own turf. About ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity it says nothing, nor is it Google's place to. And there the facts are less comfortable than the sales pitch: none of those companies has confirmed that its assistant reads the file, and the server logs published in 2026 show that their crawlers barely request it. Presenting Google's position as if it were the whole industry's is a howler; presenting llms.txt as a proven lever is one too.

I have it implemented on this very site, and this is how I put it when somebody asks: it takes half an hour, it moves nothing on Google, and nobody else has confirmed they use it. With the full sentence you can make a grown-up decision. With half of it, you cannot.

The general rule that follows from this matters more than the file itself: a platform's official position describes how that platform works, not how the market works. Google is under no obligation to tell you how to optimise for ChatGPT, just as OpenAI will not explain how to show up in AI Overviews.

What I would do with all this

If you run a hotel, an agency or a rural guesthouse and you do not want to lose a single euro or a single afternoon:

1. Take the doctrine as sound on the essentials. Do not build a parallel "GEO strategy". The work is the same as ever, done properly: content with real experience behind it, a fast website, listings kept current. If your site is not yet readable by a machine, start there — I go through it point by point in the 7-point checklist.
2. Go into Search Console today and look at your impressions in AI features. It is the only first-party figure you are going to get.
3. Keep llms.txt if you already have it, add it if you don't, knowing what it is for and what it is not. Half an hour, zero euros, no effect on Google.
4. Do not confuse the layers. Google Search is one; the assistants that browse the live web are another; and what the assistant asks your own systems is a third. They are explained in the three layers of visibility, and almost every investment mistake starts with treating them as though they were the same thing.

Kraham's sentence will age well inside Google and badly outside it. That is the whole story: it is not false, it is partial. And whoever sells you either extreme — "GEO doesn't exist" or "GEO changes everything" — is selling you the half that suits them.