AI Search Doesn't Need a Secret Handshake

Every time search changes, a new acronym wanders into the room wearing a lanyard.

This time it is GEO and AEO: Generative Engine Optimisation and Answer Engine Optimisation. Enough jargon to make a perfectly sensible business owner wonder whether their website now needs rebuilding for the robot overlords.

Google's latest guidance on AI Search offers a pleasantly unexciting answer.

There is no secret handshake.

AI Search still depends on the familiar stuff: a site that can be found, pages that work properly, clear structure and content people genuinely want to read. No special AI file. No magic schema. No need to chop every paragraph into robot-sized snacks.

The interesting bit is Google's emphasis on non-commodity content. In normal language: publish something with actual experience, opinion or useful detail behind it.

Not another “seven reasons your business needs a website” article assembled from the same internet leftovers as everyone else's.

So, before commissioning a 48-page GEO strategy, try three less glamorous questions:

• Can people find and use the important parts of your site without a map and emergency rations?
• Does your content answer questions customers genuinely ask?
• Is there anything on the page that a competitor could not nick by swapping in their logo?

That might be a project lesson, a view on an industry's silly habit, a useful comparison or the honest answer to a question clients keep raising. Specific beats polished-but-empty every time.

AI is changing how people discover websites. It has not changed why they trust one when they arrive.