Most 'AI SEO' Is Ordinary SEO in a More Expensive Jacket

A new acronym is not a new discipline.

I have now read a lot of AI SEO proposals. Most of them describe crawlability, useful content, clear business information, and credibility, then charge a premium for the rebrand. The work is mostly correct. The framing is mostly marketing.

This matters because the premium is real money, and because the rebrand distracts from the small number of things that genuinely are different.

Start with what the platform actually says

Google's own documentation on its AI features is unusually direct about this. It states that there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimizations necessary.

The eligibility gate is the one you already know. To be shown as a supporting link, a page must be indexed and eligible to appear in Google Search with a snippet. That is it. If the page cannot earn a snippet, the AI surfaces are not a separate door it can walk through.

The recommendations Google lists are the same ones that have been on the table for a decade:

• Ensure crawling is allowed in robots.txt
• Make content easily findable through internal links
• Provide a good page experience
• Make sure important content is available in textual form
• Support text with high-quality images and video
• Make sure structured data matches the visible text

It also says explicitly that you do not need to create new machine-readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features. You can read the whole thing in Google's guidance on AI features in Search.

So when a vendor tells you they have a proprietary AI optimization framework, the first question is whether any part of it survives contact with that page.

What genuinely does change

I am not arguing nothing is different. Four things are, and none of them require a new acronym.

Retrieval happens at passage level, and one prompt becomes many queries. A single question fans out into several underlying searches, and the system assembles an answer from passages rather than ranking ten blue links. Practically, that rewards clear topical coverage and paragraphs that make sense pulled out of context. A section that only means something if you read the three sections above it is a worse retrieval candidate than one that stands on its own.

Entity consistency across the web starts to matter more than it used to. These systems assemble a picture of who you are from many sources. If your site says one founding year, your LinkedIn says another, and a directory listing has your old address and a defunct phone number, you have handed the model three versions of you. Reconciling those is unglamorous data hygiene work, and it is one of the few genuinely higher-leverage tasks in this category.

Platform differences are real, and they are mostly about indexes and crawlers. Surfaces built on Bing's index behave differently from Google's, which makes Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow worth actual attention rather than a checkbox. Different assistants use different crawlers, and a robots.txt written in 2021 may be blocking some of them by accident. That is a five-minute check that some sites have still not run.

Measurement changed completely. This is the largest genuine difference and it deserves its own treatment, which I have given it in a separate post on why citation counts make a poor headline metric.

That is the honest list. It is shorter than most decks, and every item on it is checkable.

The question to ask a vendor

Ask what they would do differently for one assistant versus another, and why.

A good answer names the mechanism. Different index, different crawler, different retrieval behavior, different citation format, different measurement surface. A bad answer restates that AI is changing everything and pivots to a case study with no numbers in it.

Follow up with: which of these tasks would you still recommend if AI search disappeared tomorrow? If the honest answer is most of them, then you are buying SEO, and you should pay SEO prices for it. That is not an insult. Well-executed technical SEO is worth a great deal. It just is not a new product.

The boring things that actually gate AI visibility

In practice, the sites I see missing from AI answers are usually not missing because of anything exotic. They are missing for reasons that would have been familiar in 2016.

Content that only exists after JavaScript executes, on a site where rendering is unreliable. Important text baked into images with no textual equivalent. A robots.txt that blocks more than the team realizes. Templates so thin and so duplicated that no individual page has a distinct passage worth retrieving. Business information, pricing, and contact details scattered across pages that contradict each other.

Fix those and you will usually see movement, because they were also hurting you in ordinary search. That is the point. The overlap between doing this well and doing ordinary SEO well is enormous, and pretending otherwise mostly benefits whoever is selling the jacket.

Where that leaves you

Do the fundamentals properly. Get the entity data consistent. Check which crawlers you are blocking. Build your measurement so it can tell a citation from a customer.

Then be suspicious of anyone who wants to charge you extra to explain that crawlability matters.