I’m not gonna pretend for even one second that I’m not enjoying this. I know, it’s not cool to gloat, but what’s a woman to do when everything she’s been saying for MONTHS is backed up by two of the big bods at Google? My “SEO, innit?” series of posts on LinkedIn sparked a fair bit of debate last year, but nothing was said that convinced me of anything other than “GEO IS SEO”.
And it seems that Google agrees with me.
The fabulous Danny Sullivan was on the Search Off the Record podcast this week and said (out loud, on the record) that you shouldn’t be formatting your content into “bite-sized chunks” for AI search. His exact words: “We don’t want you to do that.”
He and John Mueller also confirmed that hiring a “GEO expert” or buying “AI optimisation tools” is no different from hiring an SEO or buying SEO tools. The advice is the same. The work is the same. The made-up terminology is just marketing.
I’ve been saying this for months. Now Google’s saying it too.
If you’ve been paying someone to “optimise for AI search” or “chunk your content for LLMs”, you might want to have a word with them.
Google says stop chunking your content for AI
Danny was pretty clear about this. He’d been seeing advice floating around telling people to break their content into bite-sized chunks because “LLMs like things that are really bite size.”
His response: “We don’t want you to do that. I was talking to some engineers about that. We don’t want you to do that.”
He went further. Even if chunking seems to work right now, even if you think you’ve found some trick that gives you an advantage, the systems will change. And when they do, all that effort you put into pleasing an algorithm instead of writing for humans will be wasted.
I wrote about “chunking” in my SEO, innit? series – in fact it was the very first post. “Chunking” isn’t even what GEO people think it is. It’s a technical term borrowed from AI engineering that’s been repurposed to sell courses. What they’re describing is just good content structure – clear headings, focused paragraphs, sections that cover one point at a time. SEOs have been recommending this for over a decade. I know, because I was one of them. But over the last couple of years some people have tried to distil it down even more, into almost FAQ style “chunks” that will apparently do you more good in AI search.
GEO and AEO are just SEO with a new name
Danny also addressed whether you should hire a “GEO expert” or an “AEO specialist” or buy tools specifically for AI optimisation.
His answer: it’s the same as hiring an SEO. The guidance is the same. The questions you should ask are the same. The work is the same. He pointed people to Google’s existing documentation on hiring an SEO and said it applies equally to anyone calling themselves a GEO or AEO specialist.
He also warned that some tools focus too much on ranking factors and made-up metrics rather than what’s useful to humans. John Mueller jumped in to specifically call out “spam grades” and “domain grades” – metrics that sound important but mean nothing to Google.
Danny’s response to people obsessing over domain scores was also perfect: “”I don’t understand. I have domain score 89. How am I not doing better?” And it’s like, well, it’s not our domain score. We don’t have that.”
If you’ve been paying for tools that promise to optimise your “AI visibility score” or improve your “GEO ranking factors”, you’ve been paying for metrics Google doesn’t use.
I wrote about this in April last year – What the fuck is GEO? (And why the SEO industry needs to stop making up terms). The entire concept of GEO is marketing bollocks. You’re always optimising for the search engine that feeds the AI, not the AI itself. That was true then. Google just confirmed it’s still true now.
I followed that up in June with Generative engine optimisation expert – bollocks dressed up as expertise, calling out the flood of people claiming expertise in something that doesn’t exist yet. I said at the time that nobody is a GEO expert. Nobody has cracked the code. Anyone claiming otherwise is using your website as their testing ground while charging you for the privilege. And that’s still true now – everyone is still testing and learning.
Write for humans, not for algorithms
Danny Sullivan’s core message hasn’t changed in years: write for humans, not for search engines. Not for LLMs. Not for AI overviews. For the real, actual, human people you’re trying to help.
He acknowledged that some gimmicks might work in the short term. Some tricks might give you a temporary advantage. But when the systems improve – and they always improve – content written for humans will win. Content written to game algorithms will fail.
This isn’t new advice. It’s the same thing Google has been saying for over a decade.
Focus on SEO fundamentals instead of GEO tricks
Stop paying for GEO courses. Stop buying AI optimisation tools with made-up metrics. Stop chunking your content because someone on LinkedIn told you LLMs prefer it.
Instead, do what’s always worked – create genuinely useful content that answers what your audience is searching for. Structure it clearly. Make it easy to read. Focus on being helpful rather than gaming systems you don’t control.
That was good SEO advice in 2009. It’s good SEO advice now. And it’ll still be good advice when the next made-up acronym comes along.
If you’ve been paying someone to optimise your content for AI search and you’re starting to wonder what you’ve been paying for, we should probably talk. Book a discovery call.
