"Google Search as you know it is over."
That was the headline after Google's announcement at Google I/O on May 19.
That was the headline after Google’s announcement at Google I/O on May 19.
The first question I got from a few friends: does this affect SEO?
The quick answer: no.
A few days ago Google released a developer doc on optimizing for AI, and they insisted on still using the term SEO over GEO or AEO.
The long answer: GEO and AEO are still 90% SEO.
I have run SEO for over a decade, and I shared concrete proof of this just last week. Someone found my nanogent.ai AI Web Agent through ChatGPT, not because I optimised for ChatGPT, but because I did the SEO basics: clear copy, structured content, pages that get indexed. AI engines pull from the same crawlable content Google does.
Read last week’s post:
So what is the 10% that actually changed?
—
- Timeless content that an LLM can answer on its own is no longer effective for SEO.
If the answer already lives in the model’s training data, there is no reason to send a click to your page. This is what caused HubSpot’s traffic to drop drastically in the early days after GenAI took off.
—
- Conversational long-tail queries are gaining weight over short keywords.
Short popular keywords are still powerful. Search still holds the bigger market share at the moment, so short head terms are not going away. But LLMs prefer conversational long-tail queries, and as people rely more on AI to search on their behalf, those longer natural-language questions get more weight. AI also fans out a single question into dozens of additional queries.
—
- Non-link mentions from authority sites now matter as much as a followed link.
LLMs infer the credibility and authority of a source beyond the followed link. Getting named by a trusted site now carries weight even without the hyperlink.
—
That is the 10%. The other 90% is still the SEO you already know: satisfy intent, structure your content well, earn authority.
If you want to learn to build an SEO and GEO optimized website in 4 hours, I am running my next Foundations of Claude Code workshop on June 4, 1.30pm to 5.30pm at Hashmeta.
#SEO #GEO #AEO #AI #DigitalMarketing
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