Every time Google ships a new Search Central document, two camps in our industry move at the speed of light. The first camp screenshots their favorite paragraph, posts it to LinkedIn with “SEE? IT’S JUST SEO” in the caption, and goes back to doing exactly what they were already doing. The second camp screenshots a different paragraph and posts it with “see, here’s the proof they’re lying to us.” Both camps treat Google’s guidance like scripture, depending on which verse confirms what they already believed.
Google’s recently updated guide on Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search was a feast for the first camp. The “it’s just SEO” folks ate well that week. AEO and GEO got declared “still SEO.” Chunking got dismissed. llms.txt got dissed. Rewriting for AI got nullified. If you’ve spent the last two years on LinkedIn telling everyone that nothing has changed, Google handed you a gold star and a victory lap.
But I want to remind everyone of something the first camp likes to forget: two years ago, we held thousands of pages of Google’s internal Search ranking documentation in our hands. The leaked Content Warehouse documents showed, in Google’s own words, how the public guidance and the internal reality diverge. The same company that publicly insisted certain signals didn’t exist had them named, weighted, and documented inside their own engineering wiki. That wasn’t a leak from an enemy of search. That was Google’s own engineering documentation, and it showed exactly how much we should trust public guidance about what is and isn’t important.
I’m not saying every line of Google’s new guide is a lie. I am saying that Google has a long, well-documented history of nudging the industry in directions that benefit Google first and the open web maybe. It’s to Google’s benefit for SEOs to remain the janitors of the web cleaning up technical debt, formatting structured data, and politely waiting for the next algorithm update rather than evolving into a discipline that operates across multiple platforms and influences how content is engineered for systems Google does not control.
As I argued in my refutation of the misinformation about chunking, the influence Google has spent two decades accumulating is finally fragmenting. Competitive AI platforms are stealing attention. Referral traffic is shrinking. Investment is moving to channels Google doesn’t own. The leverage Google had to define what “good content” means is weaker than it has been in twenty years — and you can hear it in how protective the language has gotten.
Meanwhile, in Redmond
For a clean contrast, look at what’s been coming out of Bing.
Krishna Madhavan and his team have spent the last several months publishing posts that read like the opposite of Google’s guide. Keep in mind that there is near parity in both platforms’ offerings.
Where Google’s posture is “trust…
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