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A quick note before we begin.

If you’re wondering why this landed in your inbox, we’ve likely crossed paths through Growfusely, a project, a conversation, or somewhere along the way. This is Pratik Dholakiya. I’ve spent 15+ years in SEO, building agencies and running organic growth strategies for B2B brands through every major shift search has thrown at us.

This newsletter is about the shift happening right now. Each issue explores one topic in depth, backed by real observations, primary sources, and practitioner experience. No recycled takes. No hype. Just things worth learning.

If this is relevant to you, I’m glad you’re here. If it’s not, the unsubscribe link is at the bottom. No friction, no follow-up.

Google Just Settled the AEO vs SEO Debate. Here’s What Most Marketers Missed.

I’ve been getting more client questions about AEO and GEO lately than almost any other topic.

And in most of those conversations, the question is the same: should we be focusing on AEO, GEO, or SEO?

It’s the wrong question. And the fact that it’s being asked this way, as a choice, as an either/or, is causing brands to make decisions that will cost them visibility on all fronts.

The question that actually matters is this: how do I make them all work together?

Not as a trend or something to chase. Not as another excuse to declare SEO dead for the hundredth time. But as a practical shift in how search works now, and what that means for anyone trying to stay visible in 2026.

And here’s the thing most marketers missed: Google has already answered this question officially. At a recent Google Search Central Live Canada session, one of the most direct slides in the whole presentation said this:

That one sentence does a lot of work. It's Google's way of resetting a conversation that the industry has been overcomplicating. Before we get into the AEO versus GEO versus SEO debate, this is the right foundation to build from.

Why This Conversation Matters Right Now

Marketers are talking about AEO and GEO because search is no longer limited to Google.

Yes, people still search the traditional way. They type queries, click links, and compare results. But they also ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini direct questions and expect a usable answer immediately, without necessarily clicking through to any website.

That changes what visibility looks like. Before, success mostly meant ranking on search engines, getting clicks, and driving traffic. Now, success can also mean being cited, mentioned, and serving as the source of an answer, even when the user never visits your page.

That does not make SEO irrelevant. It means the playing field got bigger.

A slide from the same Google session showed exactly how AI search experiences are generated:

AI search is not operating in some separate universe. It is still deeply tied to the web, to search results, and to the content publishers create.

Google has since formalized this in its official AI optimization guide on Search Central. The guide defines RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) as the core technique AI Overviews uses to retrieve relevant, up-to-date pages from the Search index before generating a response.

The fan-out process expands a single query into multiple related ones simultaneously. A search for “how to fix a lawn full of weeds” becomes concurrent queries for herbicides, chemical-free removal, and weed prevention, all pulling from indexed content.

The implication is clear: if your content is not indexed and ranking in the underlying search engine, it cannot enter the AI model’s retrieval step at all. SEO is not an alternative to AI visibility. It is the entry requirement.

One important caveat worth stating clearly: Google’s documentation describes Google’s ecosystem. For brands asking how they appear in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Microsoft Copilot, Google’s guidance is a useful starting point, not the complete picture.

Bing has been publishing its own AI search thinking in considerably more technical detail, including tooling to track how content gets cited across Copilot.

The practitioners pushing hardest on this are increasingly treating Google and non-Google AI surfaces as distinct optimization problems with different requirements.

That is a conversation this newsletter will go deeper into in future issues.

What SEO, AEO, and GEO Each Mean

Before going further, it’s worth briefly clarifying these terms, including how Google itself uses them.

SEO helps your website appear in search engines when people look for topics related to your business. That visibility turns into clicks, visits, pipeline, and revenue. That part has not changed.

AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization, is about making your content easier for AI tools to understand, trust, and reference when generating responses. It earns you mentions, citations, and brand visibility inside AI-generated answers rather than on a traditional search results page.

GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization, refers specifically to optimizing for generative AI search experiences like Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode. Closely related to AEO but tied specifically to search-based AI generation.

Here is the important distinction: Google does not officially use or endorse AEO as a term. Their documentation acknowledges it as something the industry uses, but their own framing leans toward GEO, and even then, only loosely.

One of the most pointed slides from the Search Central Live session captured this:

The LLMNOPEO joke is deliberate. Google is signaling that the proliferation of new acronyms is obscuring what is fundamentally a familiar idea.

Their official documentation puts it plainly: from Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and is thus still SEO.

The industry debate over AEO versus GEO versus SEO is one Google itself has already settled.

For the purposes of this newsletter, I’ll use AEO and GEO interchangeably where the distinction doesn’t materially change the point.

Where SEO and AEO/GEO Overlap

In practice, SEO and AEO/GEO share a great deal of common ground. Neither is a replacement for SEO. Strong SEO creates the foundation that both depend on.

Clear website structure, useful content, topical depth, internal linking, trustworthy information, strong author and brand signals: all of these help you rank, and all of them help AI systems understand and trust your content.

Google reinforced this directly in its Tips for AI Search Success slide:

That closing line, "these align with traditional SEO success, too," is the heart of the whole session. Google is not describing a new discipline. It describes a higher standard than the one most search marketers already practice.

Where AEO and GEO Need a Different Approach

AEO and GEO reward a specific kind of content presentation that most brands haven’t yet built toward.

In my experience, the content cited in AI responses has a different structure than the content that ranks well in traditional search. Answer engines favor content that is easier to extract, summarize, and trust. That means answering the question early, defining terms clearly, using clean headings, and keeping the content factually precise.

It does not mean writing for machines. It means stopping the practice of burying the answer under three paragraphs of preamble. That habit was already questionable from a reader experience standpoint. For AI retrieval, it is actively counterproductive.

Why SEO Alone Is No Longer Enough, And Why AEO/GEO Alone Is a Mistake

If your strategy is built only around rankings and clicks, you are missing a growing layer of visibility happening inside AI tools. A brand that is visible in search but absent from AI responses is losing influence at the top of the funnel, a pattern that does not show up in their traffic data. Not yet.

But the opposite is equally true. AEO or GEO without SEO underneath is a strategy without a foundation. You still need discoverable, credible, well-structured content on your own site. You still need pages that rank, convert, and build a pipeline. AEO and GEO expand the role of content. They do not replace the fundamentals.

Google illustrated this clearly. One slide showed an AI Overview experience built directly on top of traditional search results:

AI search experiences still depend entirely on the quality of the web content underneath them. There is no shortcut around that.

How I'd Approach SEO and AEO/GEO Together

Start with search intent. Create content around real questions your audience is already asking. Not keyword stuffing or trend chasing. Start with actual search demand and actual audience questions. That anchor never changes, regardless of how the retrieval layer evolves.

Build for rankings and readability. Do traditional SEO well: keyword research, content depth, internal linking, and technical hygiene. Make the page strong enough to rank, useful enough to compete, and clear enough to hold attention.

Make the content answer-friendly. Add a direct answer near the top, concise definitions, FAQ sections where relevant, and clean structure throughout. Most teams think this requires a separate content strategy. It doesn’t. It means making your existing content sharper and easier to use.

Strengthen trust signals. Expert authorship, original insights, updated examples, citations where needed, brand consistency. Good content is not just informative. It signals credibility, too.

Create non-commodity content. This is the part I’d emphasize most, and it’s where Google spent the most time in this session.

Look at what Google is actually showing in that table. The non-commodity examples are not just better-written versions of the commodity examples. They are fundamentally different pieces of content, rooted in specific first-hand experience that cannot be replicated by someone who was not there.

The running shoe analysis is not a better version of “top 10 tips.” It is a specific case study of one customer’s midsole foam breakdown after 400 miles.

The real estate example is a first-person account of a specific bidding decision: the exact reasoning, the dollar amount saved, and the detail that the agent personally crawled the sewer line.

The interior designer piece is about a specific family, specific stain tests with grape juice and turmeric, and a specific refusal with documented evidence.

Unique means bringing a viewpoint or information that others lack or cannot easily replicate. Specific means talking about a specific instance or situation, not general rules. Authentic means demonstrating first-hand knowledge or experience.

Google’s official guide adds one more dimension worth sitting with: the content least likely to perform in AI search is content that could easily have been produced by a generative AI model.

That is not a minor caveat. If your content operation is built on AI-assisted drafts lightly edited for publication, you are producing exactly the kind of content Google’s AI systems are least likely to surface. The guide is explicit: don’t recycle what others have already said, and don’t produce what AI could easily generate on its own.

Measure more than traffic. Look at rankings, clicks, and leads, but also track branded searches, mentions in AI tools, and assisted visibility. If your content is shaping decisions before the click happens, that matters even when it does not show up in your session data.

The Framework I'd Use Going Forward

If I had to reduce the whole thing to one framework, it would be this:

SEO gets you found. AEO and GEO get you quoted. Good content helps you do all three.

Or in three words: Rankable. Readable. Referenceable.

Rankable: technically sound, well-structured, competitive in search. Readable: written for a real person, with genuine ideas and clear language. Referenceable: specific, credible, and direct enough that an AI system can extract a clear answer and trust the source enough to cite it.

Most content fails all three because it optimizes for one while ignoring the other two.

Google has settled the debate. AEO, GEO, and SEO are not competing priorities. They are the same priority expressed across different surfaces. The brands that win in 2026 will not be the ones who choose between them. They will be the ones who built content strong enough to perform across all three, and started that work while most of their competitors were still arguing about acronyms.

Until next time,

Pratik Dholakiya

Founder, Growfusely | SearchExperience.AI