SEO, AIO, GEO, your site, & third-party support to optimize for LLMs

0:10John Mueller. Hello, and welcome back to a new episode of Search Off the Record, a podcast coming to you from the Google Search team, where we talk all about search and maybe have some fun along the way. My name is John Mueller. I'm a search advocate here at Google Switzerland. And today, Danny is joining us again for more about AEO, AIO, all of these new fancy new terms. Welcome back, Danny. Thank you, John. Gosh, I can't hardly believe it's been a week. it feels like it's been only maybe two minutes

0:49we of course are recording this in one go but we're splitting it up into two so you have it spread out this is great don't give away our secrets no no no this is being recorded a complete week afterwards um yeah no this is exciting i don't get to talk that much so cool i'm always talking at home i'm like oh i get to talk to this fancy little mic here now this is great Fantastic. Yeah, like last time we talked a bit about how all of these fancy new terms basically map back to SEO and a lot of the advice that we've given in the past and talked a little bit about the blog post that we did about how to optimize for this new world of AI in search.

1:32And one of the questions, I guess, that we get from time to time is, how do I find someone who can do all of these fancy new things with the assumption that maybe there are fancy new things that you have to do? So what are your thoughts about how you would choose someone to do SEO in modern times? That's certainly a question that's not fraught with any controversy or possible criticisms. Let's dive right in. Well, you know, we did. It's funny. I say we because I'm at Google, but then when I was outside of Google, I wasn't we, but then I use we now because we're there. So we, but I wasn't we at the time came out with our guide, which was not my guide, but it was our guide.

2:20And we still have it to selecting an SEO. And at the time I can remember getting announced and everybody went, oh, this is it. What are they going to say? And it was, and I think anybody can read fairly straightforward, which was like, yeah, there are people who provide services and some are good, some not so good. And here's something to keep in mind. So it's been interesting revisiting all this as we're getting questions where people are asking us now, well, what do we do in this world of AI? And what should we be doing about all these other new tools that are coming along? And it is going to be very similar to what we've already been saying because these things have happened.

2:57But let me go back to what we said before in case people just came in at part two and they didn't get the, then they clipped the skip recap. Don't clip, skip that part like I do on Netflix or whatever. Now just, I'm going to go right in. I'll remember what this happened on the season a year ago. What? Oh, so SEO, the practice of improving content for search engines, but also is a term that is used to refer to people or companies who provide such services. So technically, and we haven't even said what it is, SEO stands for search engine optimization, SEO. And the people who provide such services are, of course, search engine optimizers, which I never hear anybody say that.

3:40They just have an SEO. And the tools that are out there would be search engine optimization tools, but they're just SEO. It's this universal thing. And, you know, to me, and I think more Google might be thinking this way too, but, you know, this whole AEO, GEO, LMN, PEO, whatever it is that people are thinking about, I need to do for AI format search engines or chat formats or whatever you want to call it. To me, I'm defining those as a subset of SEO. Like, you know, those are things that people still use to search. So if you're thinking about these specific things, then that falls into the broad category.

4:23I'm trying to be found on search, and this is a particular format. So when I start saying this is something that applies to SEO in terms of the guidance for picking somebody or two or whatever, then it equally applies to the AEO type of stuff. And as always, what I'm talking about is specific to how Google operates. So we don't know how everybody else has to sell you or whatever. So anyway, SEOs and SEO tools can be helpful, but they are not required. And we talked about this in part one, which is why people should go back and listen to part one if you didn't. But in short, there are plenty of sites that succeed in search.

4:58They don't even think about SEO. They're just focused on great content for people. And that is the foundation, the bedrock. It is the frame. It's everything that you want to be successful for in search is built on that great content. So if you're ever feeling lost, if you're ever like, but I don't know what Google is. It's like, that's what we want. We want you to focus on people. And for the people out there who have been going, you know what? I am just tired of all this SEO stuff. I don't want to do it anymore. I'm just going to think about what I want to write about for people. And I'm going to do that.

5:31Hallelujah. Great. Just do that. That's what we want you to do. We really want you to do that. If writing a blog post is just giving you joy because you know you're going to bring joy to somebody, then find that joy and stick with it. That is the authentic stuff that if we're doing our job and we keep trying to do better, but that's what we want to reward. So then this goes back to the page. We'll drop a link to the page and whatever. But, you know, we don't review or evaluate or recommend any particular SEO tools or companies except for. No, we don't. We don't. It's not a negative thing. It's not like we're saying we don't say they don't have use.

6:13It's just that there's so many of them and we can't go through and that's just not our thing to be doing. But if you want to know about SEO, then you can read our guide. And we have our general guidance and you can make use of our Search Console tool set. We have all this great stuff. Your team has done all this great stuff out there. John, applause to the Search Central team. People will be sometimes like, well, who's out there? and where we're supposed to be getting advice. It's like, there's an entire team. Sometimes people would get confused when I first started. I'm like, well, he's doing all.

6:51I'm like, no, I'm not the thing, the person who tries to make sure all the sites know what's going on. There was an entire thing built up before me. There was an entire whole system designed to be there and is still out of there. So that's great that you're all doing that. And people should go back to it. And I think also this shout out or whatever you want to go. But like, we're not saying that the advice that we're offering is all you're ever necessarily going to need or want. That you absolutely, if you just read our guide, that's it. You're done. You have to make your own judgments. You have to decide what you want to do.

7:32But we do believe that if you're thinking about being successful with Google search, you should start and be prepared by understanding what we ourselves are already saying. and with the information we're already providing to you directly. That is a kind of important foundation if you decide you want to go on and do more beyond just I'm following my hopes, my dreams, my passions, and my joy. And now is there other stuff I should be doing to this content? So understand the stuff we're already telling you directly. And we think that will prepare you if you decide then you want to go to a third party tool or you want to go to other services and people who might be able to help you do other things.

8:08I really think at some point you really need to understand what the direction is from Google's side with regards to SEO. And then it's a lot easier for you to kind of pick between the different SEO service providers and also to evaluate a little bit. Are they actually doing what goes into the direction that I've learned that Google wants? or are they kind of optimizing things that are not actually on Google's list, but they say that there's like some secret backdoor kind of thing happening here, which generally there isn't. And I think making those choices is really hard for someone who doesn't have any interest at all in understanding what SEO is.

9:02So some amount of foundational knowledge, I think, makes sense. But it's not that you have to basically do all the SEO yourself in order to hire someone to do SEO. You kind of just need to understand what the direction is, what the guardrails are around SEO. Yeah. I mean, and we'll get to this, but there are definitely times when you just say, like with anything in life, I might need some additional help here. I'm going to move my website from one thing to another, and it's going to be dramatic. There are things I should take into account. So it's not that there's no value. It's not that you don't necessarily ever want to use anything additional.

9:45But having that sort of foundational stuff at least may help you as you're making some decisions, especially if you start hearing some things like, well, that sounds really, really different. These doorway pages you're talking about that I need to make. I remember reading something about that in the Google SEO guide. It said, like, don't do them. Oh, yeah, I don't need to worry about that. It's fine. Yeah, you probably want to worry about that.

10:10So some of these tools, the companies that people are thinking about, they do or recommend things that keep with our guidance, right? And they can help you with especially, I think, sometimes technical aspects of SEO. Maybe they're going to give you some thoughts on content. Maybe they're going to give you some other kind of advice along the way. Again, we're not going to evaluate them or whatever. But absolutely, because this always, you know, what we'll get said is, you know, you take the one thing like they said they don't evaluate tools. Therefore, they're not useful at all. It's like, no, we didn't actually say that.

10:46But, you know, we took that one little sentence. But anyway, so we're not saying you can't use these third party tools. You can't take SEO advice, that there's something wrong with it necessarily. necessarily. We're saying that it actually can be helpful. And our page externally says that they can be helpful for some people in some circumstances. But we're saying, think critically about what's being recommended and see how that matches against our own guidance. And if you're being told, oh yeah, Google says this, Google says this is what you should be doing. Then maybe you have to see where we say that directly.

11:20Because I've seen innumerable times where people say, Google says to do this. And I'm like, we don't say to do that. And it's not that we actually said it. It's that someone has interpreted something we've said to be what it is that they want to say. And that's fine. You want to make your interpretations or whatever. Just be clear that this is how I interpret it. And this is why I think it's perfectly fine. But if you're hearing that from someone, you should be able to ask, like, well, show me. It doesn't seem to be controversial at all. And then there's the other thing. This is always my favorite is that you'll get some tools or companies or people who will offer to generate content or provide advice that they claim will perform better.

12:02Right? It's rare that you'll encounter something that says, try our service and it might be all right. We'll see how it goes. And I get that. Right? Probably not a good marketing thing. but claims as with anything, not just in the SEO space and remembering again, SEO contains the subset of AEO or GEO or whatever, but claims are simply claims. Nobody can guarantee something until you actually see it happen. So you'll see these claims, but they can't guarantee it's going to improve. It's going to make you rank for anything. You're going to get any particular a kind of traffic is going to last for any period of time to the end of time.

12:43It will last until the end of time. Typically, when you do see actual guarantees, it's like, well, if we don't do X thing, you'll get X thing back or whatever. So just evaluate and understand those are claims. Now, John, I know this may surprise you, but there are some SEO tools and companies that recommend things that would be against our guidance. And, you know. What? Is it shocking? I don't know what to say. I am flabbergasted. What's the word for flabbergasted in German? Oh, gosh. I have no idea.

13:31Flabbergastern. That would be like flabbergasted yesterday or something. I don't know.

13:38anyway it's um so someone will wreck things against our guidance and and you know you do things against our guidance potentially you could get a spam action so uh you you again kind of want to ask questions and you want to understand you should not be afraid to say so is this going to cause me any spam problems and why and that sort of thing and so understand anything that's being recommended to you is with our guidance, not against our spam policies. I think lastly, I think this really gets into sort of the EIO stuff, whatever we have going on now, all the vowels. But I think sometimes tools and companies can focus too much on changes that they think are primarily for ranking and not necessarily for being useful to humans.

14:26And it gets you away from that bigger picture. And I get it. I wrote this thing, In 1997, it was called the Quest for the Perfect Page or Perfect Page Tools. What was happening is we're getting all these tools that were purported that you'd give them your content and they would go through and they'd say, Ah, okay, you know what? We have looked for what ranks for this particular term. And all the things that are ranking are between, on average, 285 characters long. Whatever, right? and all their headlines are on average 57 words long so we've graded your content and you might want to trim your headline to this and you're the the average isn't actually the average the average is that everything was unique and you can see this repeatedly that you go through search and you click to each result and each result will be different it's one of the joys of the web that everything can be different it's one of the downsides to the web because then people encounter all sorts of things.

15:29And sometimes they might be thinking, oh, I just prefer that nice, straightforward, give me a feed where everything looks the same. But it is, I think, one of the joys of everything's different. So the exception is the rule, but they would produce these averages because people like, I think, to have tools that tell them this is what you should do and that this is the formula and you do the numbers or whatever. So they would kind of go to that thing. And then they were actually not producing anything that was actually matching the perfect thing. It didn't actually exist. So, you know, the tools have continued to evolve and it really is, well, have you done this thing?

16:04Have you done that thing? Have you done this thing? And then you start getting focused on the individual things and it can cause you to get away from that bigger picture. I see that also a lot when it comes to metrics from some of these tools where it's like you get something like a spam grade or a domain grade, and then you kind of get, I get it. I mean, it's almost like this gamification aspect where it's like, oh, my domain grade is 52. I'm going to improve that to 59. And then Google is going to like me a lot better. And you spend a lot of time focusing on this one particular metric. And maybe you can work out which factors are actually involved there.

16:47But you have to keep in mind, this is a metric that was created by this one specific tool, and maybe it was based on some average or its own ideal page or ideal website. But that's not necessarily what Google thinks. And Google doesn't essentially diminish your website into one particular number that you can optimize, but rather it tries to figure out what do people actually want to find in search. So by just focusing on one metric that you see, maybe that metric is useful for some aspects, but blindly focusing on it, you end up going down a path that doesn't really get you closer to what is actually useful for users.

17:31Yeah. One of my favorite things would always be, if it's not really favorite, it's just kind of sad, something like, I don't understand. I have domain score 89. How am I not doing better? And it's like, I have Google domain score 89. Like, well, it's not our domain score. We don't have that. And it doesn't like, yeah, no, it's not even a thing, but okay. To go to one of the things, you know, I talked about the specific things people like, what is the thing I need to prove? One of the things I keep seeing over and over in some of the advice and guidance and people are trying to figure out what do we do with the LLMs or whatever, is that turn your content into bite-sized chunks because LLMs like things that are really bite-sized, right?

18:13So we don't want you to do that. But I've been talking to some engineers about that. Like, we don't want you to do that. We really don't. We don't want people to have to be crafting anything for search specifically. That's never been where we've been at. And we still continue to be that way. We really don't want you to think you need to be doing that or produce two versions of your content. One for the LLM and one for the rep. But let's go ahead. I can already hear you saying, but Danny, it works. And that's why we're going to be doing it. How dare you say we don't want you to do it when it works?

18:47All right. All right. Let's go. Let's go down. Let's assume that in some edge cases, let's even assume maybe in more than some edge cases, you're finding you're getting some advantage here. Tiny, maybe tiny degree measure. No, this is my secret weapon is doing it. Great. That's what's happening now. But tomorrow the systems may change. Like, so you've gone through all this effort. you've made all these things that you did specifically for a ranking system, not for a human being, because you were trying to be more successful in the ranking system, not staying focused on the human being. And then the systems improve probably the way the systems always try to improve to reward content written for humans.

19:31So all that stuff that you did to please this LLM system that may or may not have worked, may not carry through for the long term. So was that the best use of your time and your energy? Was that the best use of putting turmoil into your marketing department, your content department, all your other stuff so that you could say, aha, I've got the new thing that you wanted. I brought it down from the mountain and here it is. Do these sorts of things. Again, you have to make your own decisions. But I think that what you tend to see is over time, the various little specific things are not the things that carry you through.

20:07So, but, you know, you make your own decisions. But I think also that many people who have been in the SEO space for a very long time will see this. We'll recognize that, you know, focusing on these foundational goals, that's what carries you through. What's interesting is we've had a lot of information about our ranking systems come to light over time. Some of it is actually about our ranking system. Some of it is just not, but people make the wrong guesses. But as people have looked at all this data and like, now I can see, it kind of heartens me that a lot of them come back and go, gosh, you know what?

20:48It looks like trying to figure out all this advice, the best thing to do is focus on having really good content. It feels like the whole time I've been involved with regards to SEO, it's always like the small technical things that you can do versus almost like the bigger picture. And I get there are some SEOs who have infinite time and spin up a site to just focus on that one small technical thing. And it goes away after a year or so. But especially for small businesses, normal businesses, that's not something that they can do where they say like, oh, it's like John's Plumber. Well, I guess I'll set up a new domain next week because some technical thing changed.

21:33That's just not something that works for a normal business. It is that measuring up of how much time you're going to want to invent in different sorts of things and what makes sense for you to be doing. And John's Plumber probably doesn't need to break up their site into discrete bite-sized chunks for LLMs. probably need to spend more time on ensuring that their customers are happy to begin with, maybe encouraging them to leave reviews into the various reviews, things where you can review for local stuff. And, you know, I don't know, focusing on things that make sense for the kind of customers they're trying to get and what's valuable to them that's useful.

22:14If you're in an area that has specific plumbing needs of Pacific waters, whatever the things are, then writing about those sorts of things might be helpful as opposed to, I don't know, if you feel like you need to write about anything at all, you know, then here's the history of plumbing as written by John's Plumbers, because someone told me that plumbing is the number, you know, X term on Google. So I'll write a bunch of stuff about plumbing. And then most of those people who come to my site, if I am successful, aren't even possible prospects for me. Gary's got a nephew who said this will do it.

22:51How dare he say that all SEOs are simply the nephews of Gary? I didn't say that. By the way, that Gary refers to nobody in particular. It's just a random name. There's no single Gary's nephew out there. What more should we add? I think that covers a lot of ground already. Yeah, I think to reemphasize, we are not saying that tools or people don't have value and that they can be of assistance to you. We just are saying that you don't feel like you need to go out and necessarily get one to begin with. You should understand that just because you engage in any kind of tool or service or whatever, it's not going to be a guarantee.

23:33People are successful without them. But some people will find them helpful. Just like some people might say, yeah, I could do my own public relations, but I want to hire a public relations firm. And it's not guaranteed that it's going to do anything for me, but it might be useful to me. Or yeah, I could build a network cabinet myself, but I'd rather have somebody else pull the cable because that's just a better use of the time, whatever. I know I need to have that. So it's not saying that they're not there, but we are in a time of change. And in a time of change, people start hearing all sorts of new things, new acronyms, new claims, and can just be very, very confusing.

24:10And it's understandable to feel unsettled and like, what do I reach for? What should I be doing? Oh, the train's going. I didn't get on the train. I'm missing it. And it's like, you are not going to be missing the train if you continue to be focused on where the train is heading to those human beings out there who want the train car full of your great content that was written for them and not for the locomotive pulling it. I'm making the metaphor up on the fly or simile or whatever you want to call it. My head's spinning. Stop. Stop. You don't know where this train's going. I can make it work.

24:53Yeah. It's like you don't want to optimize a train while you're on it. Yeah. Cool. Well, thanks a lot, Danny. It's been really insightful and fun to kind of talk about all of these different things that play a role in the modern world of SEO. I don't know if we'll have another episode, I guess at some point. but you're welcome to join us again at any point. Yeah, that'd be great. I'll have to come out to Switzerland for the next one. I'm running low on chocolate. Oh yeah, we have lots of chocolate. You can optimize for chocolate. I think that's okay. Suitcase is always packed full when I'm going there.

25:27I have optimized my chocolate purchasing. Well, thank you all folks for listening in and goodbye. Goodbye, everybody. Thanks for listening to us. Thanks for John for indulging me going so long in my spiels.

25:43We've been having fun with these podcast episodes. I hope you, the listener, have found them both entertaining and insightful, too. Feel free to drop us a note on LinkedIn or chat with us at one of the next events that we go to if you have any thoughts. And, of course, don't forget to like and subscribe. Thank you and goodbye.