Google Says SEO Search Is Still SEO Exercise and Names GEO and AEO Hacks It Considers Unnecessary

This IDC Market Note discusses Google's May 15, 2026, publication of the company's first formal guide to optimizing for generative AI search. The publication is best understood as one move in an ongoing battle for AI search dominance, not a neutral set of best practices. While Google is the first major LLM provider to issue public guidance of this kind, the document also serves its own interests by dismissing much of the GEO and AEO consulting/technology market and reasserting that AI Overviews and AI Mode are still SEO. Site owners are told to ignore llms.txt files, content chunking, AI-specific rewriting, paid mention campaigns, and most schema work, and E-E-A-T quietly disappears as a named framework. Skeptics will note that this advice arrives precisely as Google reduces brands to citation snippets in zero-click results and that guidance from one vendor cannot define optimization across a fragmenting AI search landscape that also includes ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude.