Google has published a new guide on how to optimize for Google’s generative AI features, like AI Mode, AI Overviews and more. A lot of this content is put together from previous communication from Google but all in a neat new help document named Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search.
What’s in the document. The document covers the following topics:
- SEO is relevant for generative AI search, follow Google’s best practices for SEO.
- Create valuable, non-commodity content for your audience
- Provide a unique point of view
- Create non-commodity content that’s helpful, reliable and people-first
- Organize content in a way that helps your readers
- Add high-quality images and video
- Focus on what your users want, and avoid overdoing it
- Make sure your AI tools you use follow Google’s guidelines and best practices
- Build and maintain a clear technical structure
- Meet the search technical requirements
- Follow crawling best practices
- When it comes to semantic HTML, focus on human readability, not code
- JavaScript should follow Google’s best practices as well
- Provide a good page experience
- Reduce duplicate content
- Optoimize your local business and ecommerce details
- Mythbusting – what you don’t need to do
- You don’t need LLMS.txt files
- You don’t need other special markup
- You don’t need to “Chunk” content
- You don’t need to rewrite content for AI systems
- You don’t need to seek inauthentic mentions
- You shouldn’t overfocus on structured data
- Explore agentic experiences
- Next steps
Why we care. This document sums up a lot of the advice Google has posted on its blogs, videos, spoken about at in-person events and more. It is a good document to see how Google thinks site owners should optimize their sites for AI-generative engines.
Check out the document over here.