If you've gotten a cold email or a sales pitch promising to get your business "optimized for AI search" or "ranked in ChatGPT," you're not alone — a whole cottage industry has sprung up around AI Overviews and AI Mode in Google Search, selling audits and retainers under labels like AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization). In May 2026, Google published its own official guide to the topic, and it undercuts a lot of that pitch directly. The short version: there is no secret AI checklist. The web fundamentals you were already supposed to be doing are still the thing that matters.
What Google Actually Said
Google's guide to optimizing for generative AI features, announced on the Search Central blog, states plainly that the best practices for regular search continue to apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode, and that there are no additional requirements or special tricks needed to appear in them. That's a direct answer to a year of marketing noise claiming otherwise. As Search Engine Journal summarized it, Google's position is that AEO and GEO are, in practice, still SEO — the AI features are built on top of Google's existing ranking and quality systems, and a page has to be found, crawled, and judged trustworthy the normal way before an AI summary can ever cite it.
That doesn't mean nothing has changed. It means the changes are about what "good content" looks like now, not about a new set of hoops to jump through.
The Practical Checklist
Strip away the AEO branding and Google's own AI features documentation boils down to things a small business can actually do without hiring a specialist:
- Make sure Google can find and read your site. A slow site, a broken sitemap, or pages blocked by robots.txt can't be summarized if they can't be crawled in the first place.
- Write for the question, not the keyword. Pages that clearly answer a specific question — "how much does a typical septic pump-out cost in the Comox Valley," "what's the difference between a service call and a diagnostic fee" — are exactly the kind of content an AI summary pulls from and links back to.
- One topic per page. A page trying to cover everything your business does is harder for both Google and an AI system to summarize cleanly than five focused pages.
- Keep your Google Business Profile current. Hours, services, and service areas feed directly into local results and any AI summary that touches a local query.
- Show real expertise, not filler. Google's guidance specifically calls out avoiding "commodity content" — generic, could-be-anyone's-business copy — in favor of specifics only your business would actually know: your process, your pricing structure (in general terms), how you handle edge cases.
Where the Real Shift Is
The one thing genuinely new is that AI Overviews change what happens after a page ranks well. A summary can answer a user's question directly on the results page, which means fewer clicks even for pages that rank at the top. The pages that still earn a click tend to be the ones cited by name and link inside the summary — which loops back to the same advice: clear, specific, directly-answers-the-question content is what gets quoted, because it's the easiest for the AI system to lift a clean sentence from.
If you're publishing content on a schedule with generative tools, Google also has a separate page on its guidance for AI-generated content: it's allowed, but content produced primarily to game rankings rather than help a reader is treated the same as any other low-quality spam, AI-written or not.
What To Actually Do This Week
Skip the AEO retainer pitch for now. Instead, pull up your site and check three things: does every service page answer a specific question a real customer would type into Google, is your Google Business Profile fully filled out, and does your homepage clearly say what your business does and where. Those three things are unglamorous, they're free to fix yourself, and according to Google's own team, they're still the whole game.