AI search hasn’t really changed too much when it comes to SEO best practices - but don’t just take our word for it. Last month Google shared their best practices when it comes to SEO and AI search.
This week on the S.O.B. (small owned business) Marketing podcast, Vivian and I are dissecting and discussing all of Google’s tips and suggestions for businesses who want to show up in their AI search.
NEXT WEEK we are discussing everything Google said NOT to take seriously when it comes to SEO and AI search, so make sure you are subscribed, following, etc so you don’t miss out on the rest of this conversation!
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00:00 Introduction to SOB Marketing
03:45 Google’s Best Practices for Generative AI Search
17:29 Creating Quality Content for SEO
31:24 Technical Requirements for AI SEO
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Chelsea: I don't want you to think about the fact that there's AI. I want you to write your content or create content like you're talking to your target audience. That's it.
*Intro*
Chelsea: Hey everyone and welcome to the S.O.B. Marketing podcast. Where we celebrate to S.O.B. you are, and if you haven't figured it out yet - we mean Small Owned Business, we don't mean S.O.B...
Vivian: Listen, we know that as a small business owner you are working hard on the daily to keep your business fully operational while trying to promote it. And while some days it may feel like the business is owning you, if we're being honest with each other I bet you would admit that you wouldn't give up the insanity for anything.
Chelsea: Our commitment here at the S.O.B. Marketing podcast is to give you the real talk, what works when it comes to advertising, marketing, and promoting your business. And then what doesn't really work.
Vivian: And Chelsea and I promise to always keep the conversation real.
*Beginning of Episode*
Chelsea: Vivian, we are once again talking about the machines.
Vivian: This has been the year of the machines. You know how in the Chinese calendar you have the year of the-
Chelsea: Year of the dog, year of the dragon. Okay, so it's the year of the machines. Y'all, welcome back to another episode of the SOB Marketing Podcast. Before we start talking about these said machines, we would really appreciate it if you subscribed.
Vivian: I like how she lowered her tone, you guys. She said it very, that was very nice, Chelsea. I like it.
Chelsea: I'm trying to be a little more persuasive instead of just saying "go leave us a review". I feel like that comes off a little aggressive sometimes. I feel like sometimes I'm a little...
Vivian: Too much. Stern.
Chelsea: Yeah, let's go with too much. I was going to say hostile, but that's so much better.
Vivian: Let me toss out this idea because y'all know my little baby sister over here is a metal loving queen. So I want to challenge you. Let's make up a Leave Us Review metal song that we can insert in our episodes.
Chelsea: I mean Vivian, I don't think I can scream or can you scream either? I feel like that's part of the metal. That's important.
Vivian: I feel like everybody that has vocal cords can scream.
Chelsea: Yeah, but can you scream words?
Vivian: I mean...
Chelsea: Okay, this is going to be the worst metal song you've ever heard, but pretty, pretty please leave us a review. Vivian, what are we talking about today? What aspect of the machines are we talking about today?
Vivian: So we wanted to bring you guys this topic because for one, it's super relevant. There has been a lot of information and a lot of advice out there about what to do to get your content, your website, your business on that generative AI feature. We're going to be talking about optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google search. But the kicker here is that this is actually coming straight from the horse's mouth. This is coming straight from Google. It's the first time they are legit telling us what their search engine is needing and the best way that we can provide it content to be able to show up in these searches. So anything else that you have read or heard in terms of this has been, I don't want to say speculation, but it's it's been the best that people can put together based on what they're seeing, but it hasn't been from Google like today's episode is going to be.
Chelsea: Yes, so all of this information is straight from Google. We are actually going to do a two-parter for this. So part one is going to be all of Google's best practices for generative AI search. Next week's episode is specifically going to focus on all of the misconceptions and Google saying, hey, these are pieces of advice that we've seen online that you don't have to do.
Vivian: Yeah, so you're going to want to subscribe so that you could get a notification when the two part releases so that way you guys can hear from Google the advice they do not want you listening to.
Chelsea: So basically today is what to do and next week is what not to do.
Vivian: As far as timeline, just know that we are bringing you this because it is the latest and greatest. You're going to listen to this sometime in July. This actually was just, Google just published this stuff in June of 2026. So it's very timely and we're doing our best to stay on top of this stuff because we know that as small business owners, this information impacts you and it impacts potentially your sales, whether you are showing up on these generative AI searches.
Chelsea: I do have a little hot take.
Vivian: Ooh. Spicy. How many chili peppers is this? One to five.
Chelsea: It depends on your opinion.
Vivian: Caliente.
Chelsea: My marketing hot take is, and this kind of goes back to a recent episode of ours where we talked about how to decide whether specific marketing advice is worth your time. I feel like with SEO specifically, it can be so difficult to decide whether marketing advice is worth your time because there's a lot of things out there that sounds like maybe it could help, but in practice, it's not doing what you think it's doing. I just feel like there are a lot of marketing gurus out there that are talking about how to hack the AI system and that's not how this works. A main, not component, but a main thread in today's conversation is going to be: your content needs to be people first. That's what it is. There's no hacking AI. There's no if I use this phrase then it's definitely going to show up in the AI search. That's not how this works. You just need to create good quality content.
Vivian: Yeah, I think that's very good advice and I will agree with that hot take today. I think it's interesting because I think I was mentioning to you earlier, as much as we're joking that we're talking about machines again today, it is a learning- what is it? A learning model machine?
Chelsea: A learning language.
Vivian: Yeah, a learning language machine. Technically it is a supercomputer that's doing all this, but everything that we're reading points to exactly what you said, which is it's not pleasing the computer. It's pleasing the people that you're trying to reach, giving them the stuff they want so that then the computer in return can show them the best stuff, right?
ChelseaL Absolutely. This is a conversation we've had multiple times where Google's a matchmaker.
Vivian: If you haven't heard, we do have an episode, go back. Just listen to all our episodes since I mean, since you're here and we got over a hundred of them. Just binge. But one of them, Chelsea, goes further into that explanation. We talk about Google's matchmaking skills and so that is the top priority for them.
Chelsea: Yes, exactly. They don't care who you are or anything like that. You can't hack the system. They just want to share quality content with their consumers. With their users. That's it.
Vivian: Absolutely. All right. Where shall we start this conversation, Chelsea? How do you want to share this?
Chelsea: I want to start this conversation with a quote from Google's article because I want you guys to really understand why we're bringing this today. They said, and I quote, this guide is for website owners looking for official best practices from Google search. So that's why we're talking about this today, because like you said earlier, straight from the horse's mouth, this is their official best practices.
Vivian: I kind of feel like that was their cheeky way. It is kind of funny that they included that sentence at the beginning paragraph of all of this information because I feel like it's them saying whatever you read out there, these people are making up. We did not tell them to say that. This is what we're saying.
Chelsea: This is what we want. Yes.
Vivian (08:54.03) Chelsea, will you do us a favor and link to this specific post from Google in case any of you want to read it for yourself. It's a little, not super lengthy. They formatted the information really well and it could be a quick read if you wanted it to. We always want to be sure that you know that we're not making this stuff up, we're getting it from somewhere. If you want to read it for yourself, Chelsea will put the link in the description.
Chelsea: I'll put it in the show notes. Best place to start this conversation, Vivian, is to recognize, and what Google does at the very beginning is recognize that the SEO best practices that we already have are still relevant for AI search engine optimization.
Vivian: Can I take a step backwards? I know you guys are going to get tired of me reiterating this, but-
Chelsea: I'm already tired of Vivian.
Vivian: Yeah, I mean you've had it twenty-eight years. I would be tired too. Just to remind you guys, the generative AI feature that we're talking about is when you go into Google and you ask it something, right? Give me an example, Chelsea.
Chelsea: How to metal scream.
Vivian: How to metal scream. What it does is now, if you haven't done a Google search in a while, whereas before it would show you pages and you would have to go in and click the stuff on your own. Now it takes, through AI, all that information and it's going to present you a paragraph at the top and then it's going to link to the most relevant stuff. That's where you want to show up. Most people aren't going to continue down. I have found myself doing this. I literally will read the paragraph and I'm like, it links me to the TikTok video that's the most relevant. It links me to the YouTube video or whatever. So in Chelsea's case, for this query, it would probably say, Chelsea, it probably would give her the practical stuff. This is how you actually metal scream. Here is a video teaching you a step by step process and it would link to the YouTube video that teaches her how to metal scream.
Chelsea: The key here is Google has stated that your best practices for regular SEO are still going to work in this specific scenario. They specifically state in the article that the reason that it's going to continue to be relevant is because their generative AI features on Google search are rooted in their core search ranking and quality systems.
Vivian: Yeah, so they introduced two interesting things. They said that this generative AI is based on two things. It's based on, this was the first time I heard this phrase, retrieval augmented generation. So it explains it just as a technique used to improve the quality, accuracy, and freshness of the AI responses. So it's doing all of that data mining per se to bring you the most relevant thing. They want to be sure that it's not outdated and all of that stuff. Essentially what it says though is at its core, when it's doing this RAG, retrieval augmented generation, what do you think it's using as its basis?
Chelsea: It's using the original search engine optimization information. It's using that original algorithm.
Vivian: The idea being, just like in your 2000's Google searches back in the day before AI, you would put your question in there and it would show you the ten links or ten pages. You would have to click on each one. Remember the pages listed at the top, the websites are going to be the ones that are using this SEO. That's how it was ranking them. It was like, this is the most relevant website for her query. Now what they're doing is this augmented, this retrieval augmented generation is saying, okay, we're going to take those top websites that would have been listed and we're going to further data mine it. So if you would have been listed on 10 pages in on a Google search results, obviously you have no chance of being even pulled from that.
So that's the thing, at its core that's why the old school SEO is still going to work.
Chelsea: The other feature that the AI is taking into account is query fan out. When you ask Google a question now and they're trying to pull all of the relevant information to put in that top paragraph, they're not just searching how to metal scream. They're not just searching that key phrase. They're also looking at all the relevant queries. So maybe-
Vivian: Perhaps metal screaming classes.
Chelsea: Metal screaming classes. Coach for, a vocal coach, metal coach. It's going to, instead of just focusing on my original question, it's going to search all of those queries so that it can find all of the relevant information to give me in that paragraph.
Vivian: Remember, it's funny, we said this at the beginning, Chelsea said it with her hot take. As much as we are talking about machines, the machines understand that their purpose is to actually try to find the best information and content for what that person's looking for. Basically what the machine is saying is AI is going to say, Well, if Chelsea's asking this, these are other logical questions that she's probably asking. I think that just remembering that is always a good idea. Now we're going to get into the actual foundational practices. This is a review of the typical SEO practices that we say for any website. Google is now saying, okay, we're going to point out the ones that are going to still apply for the AI generative search.
Chelsea: Before we get into that, Vivian, though, I do want to point out, I don't remember how recently we had this conversation, but we have had an episode on AEO and GEO, which are relevant SEO terms specifically relating to AI. Go listen to that episode if you haven't listened to it. But Google specifically in this article does bring up AEO and GEO just to let you know they are relevant. The way that both of these terms work and the best practices for AEO and GEO is just good quality SEO practices that you should be doing.
Vivian: Remind us, AEO. These two newer terms came about because of the way technology has shifted in the last couple of years. AEO being...
Chelsea: Answer engine optimization.
Vivian: And GEO being?
Chelsea: Generative engine optimization.
Vivian: Yes. They all have a place and the way I would think of this is kind of like you have a hub which is your just the way people are looking for information and these kind of stem out of it. They're all sort of related, but some of them are talking very specifically about a certain type of search that people are doing. This is because we have now been exposed to this newer technology that's giving us information a lot quicker and all that. What we're looking for could be a little different than...
Chelsea: To say it simpler, AEO and GEO are in the umbrella of SEO. Google is saying if you focus on AEO and GEO, that's fine because it's still in the umbrella of SEO.
Vivian: Yeah, but I'm guessing they're probably saying, but if you focus on SEO...
Chelsea: Yes. If you focus on just SEO-
Vivian: Then you're covering both of them. You're covering basically all of the stuff.
Chelsea: Vivian, let's go ahead and get into best practices.
Vivian: Yeah. So best practices, the first one that they talk about is they say that they want you to create valuable non-commodity content for your audience. If you're wondering what the heck is non-commodity, what's that mean, Chels?
Chelsea: Commodity content is content that's easily found, already out there. It's not really, I mean, maybe you phrased it differently, but it's not your perspective. You're not bringing anything new to the story. You're kind of just rewriting someone else's advice. So this could be-
Vivian: How about, "three tips to metal scream"? Or three tips to perfect your metal scream.
Chelsea: Sure. If you're not adding anything different to the conversation.
Vivian: That's very broad.
Chelsea: That's very broad and that's something that people can find anywhere. So why would they show your content?
Vivian: Sure. So then what would be a non commodity content version of that?
Chelsea: Ooh, if I'm Melissa Cross. Melissa Cross is a very famous metal vocal coach. She has trained a lot of amazing people. Because she has that first hand experience, she's unique, she's the top person in her field. Saying something like, "my top ten tips for Noah Sebastian when I was training him on how to scream correctly". Something like that. That's a very long title.
Vivian: I was going to say you might want to reword that. That would be-
Chelsea: Well I'm not Melissa Cross, so it's fine. I'm not writing this article. The point is-
Vivian: It would be like "three tips I gave Noah Sebastian to perfect his like metal scream" or something like that.
Chelsea: Okay, so that was an equally long title.
Vivian: But it made more sense.
Chelsea: id it though? I think mine also made sense too, okay? But the point is-
Vivian: You guys tell us in the comments, are you team Vivian or Team Chelsea?
Chelsea: The point is that you are focusing on your very unique experience. You're sharing your specific knowledge.
Vivian: Yeah. That's non commodity. So basically what Google is just telling us is, hey, if you're creating valuable non-commodity content for your audience, something that speaks to them, something that they are going to be interested in, that's what you should be doing. Then you know, you have a better chance of landing in that generative AI search results.
Chelsea: Yes, phrases that they mention in this article that are very important. Unique point of view. You're sharing your unique point of view, and you're creating content that's helpful, reliable, and people first. We've said that a lot on this podcast.
Vivian: I hope this kind of is a relief to everybody. If you are feeling that you're struggling with posting on social media because you're basically just kind of taking what you're seeing out there and you're regurgitating it or you're just repackaging it. Google is pretty much telling us that's not going to make you stand out. What they're looking for is a different perspective. What they're looking for is a video that stands out, that is going to give someone, you know, their direct experience. If you're just creating content that's just like everyone else's, then you're less likely to-
Chelsea: To show up. Vivian, this next tip I feel like is super important when we're talking about AI, because of the tips that I've seen floated online. You want to organize your content in a way that helps your readers.
Vivian: Okay, what's that look like?
Chelsea: I don't want you to think about the fact that there's AI. I want you to write your content or create content like you're talking to your target audience. That's it. In my personal opinion, I think they mention organizing content because a lot of tips out there are focusing on lists when it comes to AI. We have brought this up before. You know, AI likes lists. They do. If it doesn't make sense for your content to be in a list. Don't put it in a list.
Vivian: So I think the thought doesn't end there. When you said AI likes list, to finish that thought, it's if your target audience is going to need the list, if it makes sense.
Chelsea: If it makes sense for your target audience to need a list, then AI wants to see a list. But if you don't need a list, don't just create one. It's not going to work. Like that's not how this works.
Vivian: Think of it this way. If you were sharing a recipe online, you had a website that shares recipes, you very well could just write an entire recipe without breaking up the content, right? But if you think to yourself, it would be easier to have bullet points so that it individually lists the steps. So people could digest it as they're following along. That is what they're saying. The if it makes sense and that's-
Chelsea: Organize the content to help the readers. That was a great example, Vivian. Your recipe needs to be in bullet points. If I'm a music blogger and I'm sharing my opinion on this latest album of something, I really don't think it needs to be in a list. I don't think list form is going to help in that scenario.
Another thing that they mentioned in this article, which again, a lot of this is just common SEO. But add high quality images and video. High quality. That's important. I want to say it's also really important that the imagery or the video actually makes sense with the content that you're sharing. So it's not adding an image is going to help this get pushed out. It's adding a relevant image that adds something to the conversation is going to help your SEO.
Vivian: Yeah, the way I would think about this too is let's say you have a blog for your business and I probably would not be adding images like... If for us, if we had a a blog where it was specific to the content that we're sharing, I would not add an image of a sunset. Okay, that doesn't make any sense. Now what I would add an image of is let's say in Canva I create an infographic to show the graphical representation of something that I'm talking about in the blog post, then visually that might help some people. Maybe they're like, yeah, I like seeing it in graph form. Or I like seeing it in a pie chart, right? Then that's what Google's saying is the more stuff you give it like that, it may actually pull even the images into some of these, if it's good enough. But if you're just posting a beach sunset and it's not related. It's not related to anything. Why would they pull it?
Chelsea: A beach sunset and you're a metal coach. I wanted to bring that up. That's an important part when it comes to imagery and videos, you know? It needs to be relevant. You also want to focus on what your users want and to avoid overdoing it. I think this is a very important bullet point, Vivian. This was a big one.
Vivian: This was a big one.
Chelsea: Again, I want you guys to think about your target audience. I don't want you to think about the fact that there's AI now that might pull from your content.
Vivian: Well, and also let's just not try to cheat the system. This is the thing. If you're trying to trick the AI into, let's just not do that. Do the easy thing. The easy thing is how is it best for people to consume this information? The person that I eventually want to buy from me, how would they like to see this information. Remember, it takes seven to eight touch points before someone buys from you, this might be their first introduction into your business. You want to make sure it's a good impression, right. Do right by your target audience and you should be okay.
Chelsea: Focus on content that they actually want and really important the don't overdo it part. I want to know in the comments, let me know if you have ever heard about Google's scaled content abuse spam policy. I feel like this is part of their spam policy that people forget. If you are creating content that you've separated but doesn't really need to be separated because you're just trying to scale your content-
Vivian: Game the system.
Chelsea: You're just trying to game the system, you're just trying to separate it so it looks like you're pumping out a lot of information, but it doesn't need to be separated. That's spam. That's against Google's spam policy.
Vivian: What this would look like is, remember Chelsea talked about- what'd you call it? The fan out, the query fan out.
Chelsea: Query fan out.
Vivian: Okay, so just like if you are looking for a very specific question and then the AI is, but with this question, they would probably have these follow-up questions. So let me just query all this and then package it up nicely, right? So it has all the information there. If you're like, great, what I'm going to do is I'm going to think about what other queries they could be. For each one of those, I'm going to write a blog post. But let's say your blog post, you only have like three sentences in each blog post because that's how direct the response would be. Google's going to be like-
Chelsea: This is spam.
Vivian: Yeah, man. You literally could have done one blog post with all of these questions in it, answering all of it.
Chelsea: Or maybe you're writing more, but you're being very repetitive. You only needed one blog post for it. Yeah, they can tell.
Vivian: In what we are reading through this thing that Google put out there is they remind you several times in this article that the AI is very good at what it does. It doesn't need you to repeat yourself. It doesn't need you to hit home something like three or four times. Because think about it.
If someone is reading something that you've put out there and you're repeating yourself four times, they're going to get tired of it. The AI knows if it's bad for people, it's not good for AI either. They don't want that mess. So be concise. Don't try to game the system. Don't split it up into a million little things when really...
Chelsea: When really it's all just under one umbrella. I really liked, Vivian, this sentence from this article and I want to quote it because it sums everything up perfectly. It says "you can simplify your approach by focusing on one core principle. Focus on what your visitors would enjoy, find helpful, and feel satisfied with after visiting your website". That's it.
Vivian: That's it. That's it.
Chelsea: That's the core of SEO right there.
Vivian: Yeah, so there you go. You guys basically just got a lesson from Google on exactly how to approach stuff. It's simple, right? Keep it simple.
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Chelsea: We just spent all this time talking about the content that you're creating. That, of course, is a big part of SEO. Google does mention technical requirements because I mean if you're not meeting the technical requirements, it really doesn't matter how good your content is because Google can't find you.
Vivian: So that's kind of like the scary part, I think, for small business owners. If we're not people that, I don't know, technical stuff can seem a little intimidating.
Chelsea: Yeah, I will say with most if not all of these website platforms now they're very good at the technical back end. Specifically in the article it mentions that to be eligible, to be shown in generative AI features on Google search a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google search. So again it's you have to meet the basic requirements. So you want to make sure you're meeting crawling best practices, Google can actually crawl your website. Semantic HTML, you know, you want to focus on human readability. You don't need to focus on the code. Do you want me to explain that more?
Vivian: Explain semantic HTML.
Chelsea: So semantic HTML, a good website is going to be organized in a way that makes it easy for the reader to understand. You want it to be clear and concise. So then, for example, let's think about screen readers. If I'm blind, a screen reader will read the screen out loud to me so I can still consume the content even if I can't physically see it, that's code. On your end, on the website's end, if your code isn't clean, if your website is muddled and confusing, then that's going to be difficult for the screen reader. What they're saying specifically is when it comes to the HTML that blocks everything and makes your website easy to read and stuff like that. There's nothing fancy that you need to do on Google's part. Google can read your website. What you need to be doing is making sure that your HTML and the way that your website is structured makes sense for your human user.
Vivian: So do right by the humans and you do right by the machines.
Until they take over. To extend to that, Chelsea, it does go on. It has a very specific bullet point just dedicated to saying provide a good page experience. So ideally, if your website is built to be consumed by people, just be sure it looks fine and that they enjoy it.
Chelsea: Notice that the theme throughout this entire conversation is focus on people.
Vivian: Yeah. It also it also says reduce the duplicate content.
Chelsea: Yes. We kind of already talked about this earlier when we were talking about spam and their spam policy and stuff like that. Will it necessarily hurt or dox your website if you have duplicate content? No, unless you're being really really spammy about it. However, it's just bad for your users' experience. It's a waste of your time and it's a waste of crawling resources for everyone involved.
Vivian: That's right. Keep it simple. All right. So then the next thing that they lead into and they do focus on is just using the tools that they have to optimize for local business information. There are two tools that they specifically mention. The first one, of course, is always going to be what?
Chelsea: Google Business Profile.
Vivian: Heck yeah. Listen, if you have not gone into your Google Business Profile, this is your weekly reminder to do so. Go ahead, check, make sure your hours are updated. That it's got your website attached to it. You can even upload photos now of your storefront or of your products and I don't know, services, all that stuff. The other thing is it does mention that where appropriate, "generative AI responses can include product listings, product information, and information about local businesses". So the other one, we were talking about Google Business Profile. The other tool they have is something called Merchant Center.
Chelsea: Yeah, and we're going to do an entire episode on Merchant Center in the future. So again, make sure you're following so you can get that update.
Vivian: I'm going to be very honest with you guys, as long as I've been doing this marketing thing, I won't tell you how many years I've been doing it. I had never heard of the Merchant Center. So I am very excited that we're going to be covering this in a future thing because I want to get in there and I want to see exactly what they're offering to small businesses for us to take advantage because for them to come out and specifically mention these two things. Obviously they're going to want you to take advantage of them and if it's pulling information, if that's a place where you could put your product listings, I mean, I would take full advantage of that.
Chelsea: I'm glad that they added this bullet point at the end because the key here is this is still part of SEO. So you need to be adding as much information as you can to your Google Business Profile, to Merchant Center, stuff like that.
Vivian: Yep, so this was the official, from the horse's mouth, best practices for-
Chelsea: From Google for AI SEO, which this sounded a lot like your best practices for SEO in general. That's probably because the AI is trained to give us, the end users, the best experience.
Vivian: Yeah. I'm just going to remind you guys, if this all feels a little overwhelming, if this is the part of your small business that you're like, it's like German to me. I don't understand it. We have a SOB community. It's a monthly membership. Okay, fifty dollars a month. You guys can hop on Zoom calls with us once a week, and literally we will talk about your business and any questions you have related to this kind of stuff. We like doing a little research before those calls on behalf of our members. That way when they hop on there we can share with them what we've discovered. But that's a great resource for you. So if you need a little guidance, if you just need someone to hold your hand through all these AI and these bots, we'll do it.
Chelsea: I'm working on being more gentle, guys.
Vivian: Yeah, she's not as, what do you call it? Aggressive. What was the term you used earlier?
Chelsea: Hostile.
Vivian: Hostile. She's not as hostile. We're working on her. Yeah, we're going to take all her screamo music away.
Chelsea: No, we're not. Well, you guys again don't forget to listen to next week's episode because we're going to be talking about what Google said in this article about worst practices, about things not to do when it comes to SEO. So go ahead and make sure you subscribe and go be the best SOB you can be.