Google Says GEO and AEO Are Still SEO: What Small Businesses Must Do Now

The Short Answer: Keep Doing Good SEO

On June 29, 2026, Google published an updated official documentation page titled "Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search." The core message was clear. From Google's perspective, optimizing for AI Overviews and AI Mode is still SEO. It is not a new discipline with a new rulebook. The same fundamentals that help you rank also help you get cited in AI-generated answers.

That is good news for small business owners. You do not need to throw out your existing strategy. You do need to understand what changed, what the data shows, and where to focus your time.

What Google's June 2026 Guide Actually Says

Google's new guide addresses terms you may have heard from marketers and agencies: Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). Google's position is direct. Both terms describe work focused on AI search visibility, and both fall under the SEO umbrella when it comes to Google Search.

The guide also calls out several tactics as unnecessary for Google's AI features:

• Creating an llms.txt file (Google says it is not needed for its systems)
• "Chunking" content into small pieces for AI readability (Google's systems understand full pages)
• Adding special schema.org markup just for AI (standard structured data is enough)
• Chasing inauthentic brand mentions to game AI citations

What Google does emphasize is the same list it has stressed for years: unique and genuinely helpful content, clean technical foundations, good page experience across devices, and accurate local and product information through tools like Google Business Profile and Merchant Center.

Why This Still Matters Even Though It Sounds Familiar

The stakes are higher now. Google AI Overviews have grown from a limited rollout to a feature used by more than 2 billion monthly users. At the same time, the relationship between ranking and being cited in an AI Overview has weakened significantly.

Research published in early 2026 found that the overlap between pages cited in AI Overviews and pages ranking in the organic top 10 has dropped to somewhere between 17 and 54 percent depending on the study. Ranking first no longer guarantees you appear in the AI-generated summary above the results.

That means two things for small businesses:

• Your content needs to be genuinely authoritative, not just keyword-optimized.
• You need to track AI citation presence as a visibility metric, not just your Google ranking position.

The Click-Through Rate Picture in 2026

One of the most-studied questions this year is how AI Overviews affect the number of users who actually click through to your website. The data points in one direction: click-through rates are lower on searches where an AI Overview appears.

A large-scale Seer Interactive study published in April 2026, covering more than 2 billion impressions across 53 brands and over 5 million queries, found that organic CTR on queries with an AI Overview present ran about 37 percent lower than on queries without one.

Informational queries, the "what is" and "how to" type searches, are the most affected. Google AI Overviews appear on informational queries roughly 39 percent of the time, compared to just 12 percent for navigational queries. E-commerce and transactional queries see AI Overviews far less often, which is useful context for product-focused businesses.

The silver lining is conversion quality. Visitors who arrive at your site after an AI-assisted research phase tend to be further along in their decision process and more likely to take action.

What Small Businesses Should Do Right Now

Based on Google's official guidance and the current data, here are the actions that will produce real results for a small business website:

• Check your Google Business Profile. Google's own guide recommends keeping your profile accurate and complete for local and product visibility inside AI responses. Verify your hours, phone number, categories, and recent reviews.
• Audit crawlability. Your pages must be indexed to appear in any AI feature. Check your robots.txt file, confirm important content is not hidden behind JavaScript, and make sure your site is not accidentally blocking AI crawlers through a CDN like Cloudflare.
• Write direct answers at the top of each page section. Structure your content so that the first sentence of any major section gives a clear, specific answer before adding context. This is what AI systems extract.
• Build depth, not volume. Generic content that restates common knowledge gets absorbed and summarized by AI without sending traffic to you. Content built on your direct experience, original data, and specific expertise is what earns citations.
• Track impressions alongside clicks in Google Search Console. If your impressions are rising while clicks fall, that gap is often caused by AI Overviews absorbing the traffic. Knowing which queries trigger this lets you decide where to deepen your content.
• Add FAQ sections to key service pages. Question-and-answer formatted content is frequently pulled into AI-generated summaries across Google, Perplexity, and ChatGPT.

The Multi-Platform Reality

Google is the dominant search engine, but your customers are also asking questions in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Each platform sources and cites content differently. Perplexity cites sources in the vast majority of its responses, while ChatGPT cites far less often but tends to weight those citations more heavily.

The platforms differ, but the content qualities they reward are consistent: clear structure, genuine expertise, specific details, and external authority signals like mentions in credible third-party sources. Content that earns citation in Google AI Overviews tends to perform well across other AI platforms too, because the underlying quality signals overlap.

Nearly a third of US internet users are expected to use generative AI search in 2026. That number will grow. Your content strategy needs to serve both traditional search results and AI-generated answers, and the good news is that the same well-structured, authoritative, experience-backed content serves both.

The Bottom Line for Michigan Small Businesses

Google has confirmed what experienced SEO practitioners already knew: there is no shortcut built specifically for AI Overviews. The businesses that show up in AI-generated answers are the ones that built real credibility over time through helpful content, clean sites, and consistent local signals.

If your site was well-optimized before AI Overviews arrived, you are starting from a strong position. If it was not, the same improvements that would have helped you rank in 2023 will help you get cited in 2026.

If you want a clear picture of where your site stands today and what specific steps will move the needle, contact us or schedule a call with the AppWT team. We have been building and optimizing websites since 1997, and we can help you cut through the noise and focus on what actually works.