A question came up on Bluesky this week that a lot of site owners have probably been wondering about. Someone asked John Mueller, Google’s Search Advocate, whether certain industries, like adult content or gambling, might be exempt from the whole GEO conversation since regular search still seems to drive most of the discovery there.
Mueller’s answer was short and to the point:
“I’m not quite sure what you’re asking; from our POV there’s nothing really special you need to do for generative AI responses in search.”
Why this makes sense once you think about it
Google’s AI-generated search results aren’t built from some separate index or a different set of ranking rules. They pull from the same crawled index as regular search, drawing from the top results for a query along with related “fan-out” searches, the follow-up questions a user might also want answered.
So if your site already shows up well in normal search results, it’s already sitting in the pool that AI Overviews and AI Mode draw from. There isn’t a hidden second system to optimize for.
This isn’t a one-off comment
Mueller has been saying some version of this for months now. Back in January, when someone on Reddit asked whether SEO alone is “still enough” or whether it’s time to invest in GEO, his answer was similarly grounded: the label doesn’t matter much, what matters is understanding how your audience actually behaves and where your traffic and revenue come from. He put it plainly: “What you call it doesn’t matter, but ‘AI’ is not going away.”
He’s made the same point about llms.txt, the file some SEO tools generate to supposedly help AI models understand a site. Mueller has confirmed that Google doesn’t check for it or use it in any way, comparing it to the old keywords meta tag: a claim a site makes about itself, not something worth trusting over just looking at the site directly.
The takeaway
If there’s a thread running through all of this, it’s that Google keeps pointing back to the same fundamentals: helpful content, a good page experience, and a site that’s easy to crawl and understand. Whether you call that SEO, GEO, or something else entirely doesn’t really change the work.
Sources:
- Google: There Is Nothing Special To Do For Generative AI Responses In Search — Search Engine Roundtable
- Google Answers If Some Sites Can Ignore GEO And Just Focus On SEO — Search Engine Journal
- Google’s John Mueller on SEO vs. GEO: Focus on audience behavior — Search Engine Land
- Does llms.txt Help? What John Mueller Says — Webyes