Google says “SEO for AI is the same as SEO for Search” – Agree or cope?

[V8TTGoFast]

We are not doing anything different and most of our clients LLM traffic has significantly increased MoM. In fact, I don’t think one is down MoM since the start of 2025 – they’ve all been upward, gradual trends.

So, agree.

[WebLinkr]

100% agree on this – the answer is because LLMs are not search engines, dont have search indices.

But there are 3 observation points that have becme “attack vectors”

1) People dropping their search query from Google into ChatGPT or Perplexity and getting different results

2) GEO Disinformation (this was picked up by Lily Ray and Edward Sturm from here)

3) Marketers who think LLMs are inherently search engines because they dont understand training data, LLM variables or SEO

But LLMs need Bing, Google and Claude

1) ChatGPT uses Bing and Google. but -it uses cached data

2) Grok uses Google but is a week behind. Grok also uses X posts (fyI)

3) Claude uses Bravesearch – a Google clone/repica

4) Perplexity uses Google in Real time, as does Gemini

# Red Flags in the GEO LLM search conversation

These conversations are happening across Reddit in the other “AEO” or “GEO” or “AI SEO” subs – they dont happen here because we have stricter controls

Some examples of red flags

1. The same conversation, different poster

2. Low Karma (why we unfortunately have a karma check) – these posts are AI generated and then posted by new accounts spun up

3. Subs that are just platforming this content

4. People replying to posts where the account is already suspended by Reddit

# Please check the account you’re replying to

People often reply to interesting conversation ideas because we all love discussing SEO topics. but 9/10 those accounts are suspended.

FYUI – Reddit suspends accounts,. not Mods. We just block them from posting here

[PrimaryPositionSEO]

GEO is BS

[TheLongTailGuy]

Yessir. Agreed 1000%

[cinemafunk]

Agree.

If you have an understanding of ho the internet/web works, how Search Engines crawl, index, and parse content, you’ll understand that that AI platforms generally do the same things.

This “Brand Mentions” aspect for AI is not new and Googlers have been talking about how unlinked URLs and Brand Mentions (including their context) contribute to authority since early 2010s.

Optimizing for LLMs is the same as SEO.

[VillageHomeF]

most everyone on this sub agrees with that

to the point where the marketers of scammy GEO tools have created new AI SEO subs to market their junk

[KermieKona]

I Created specific webpages for clients, to address topics they needed to rank for, but wasn’t represented well on their website.

A week or so later, Google AI was referencing (verbatim) the new pages I created, when I used the search terms I was targeting.

So yes… totally agree… just do good, fundamental, legitimate SEO optimization and targeting 👍.

[dergal2000]

Unfortunately it’s a little different, the sad part is that classic SEO is more mature & “GEO” optimisation has opportunities for abuse, examples are listicles and other lists being abused. Spam working in different ways.

Core SEO basics are absolutely critical, and a lot of LLM optimisation over laps with classic SEO.

Also for Gemini in particular, the sources if input are the same that power conventional search like merchant centre and gbp

[cronixi4]

GEO is just the new hot thing, scoring good for GEO is 95% SEO and I don’t think that will change soon.

What I do see changing soon is the massive amount of AI content that is getting thrown online. I see people posting 5 blog posts a day. This will be the next keyword stuffing.

[royfrigerator]

All of the different things the LinkedIn influencer wannabes are saying are purely so they can profit off of people/companies that don’t know what they’re doing.

I always comment that I prefer ranking signals that are measurable and they always push back on me. I think it’s a funny troll comment at least…

[Marvel_plant]

Yeah. It is exactly the same. The only people saying anything different are from agencies that are trying to sell you more services.

[Arkadiann]

Huge amount of copium in this thread. Yeah ofc it’s 95% SEO because without that you aren’t even going to be found when the search tools retrieve web data for the LLMs. But to blindly ignore the fact that there is some kind of algorithm (that can therefore be optimized for) determining what 10 lines of writing to return out of the 10 possible top pages it’s pulling from is wild.

You guys have obviously been doing this for your entire careers, but things are changing and being closed off to it is very ‘old man yells at cloud’ energy.

Drown me in downvotes.

[klaaz0r]

tell me how you are showing up in ai overviews