Google published an actual guide on how to show up in AI search. Not a blog post from an agency guessing. Not a "GEO expert" selling a course. Google, on their own developer documentation, on the record. The question every broker's been half-asking for a year - does SEO still matter for AI search - gets a straight answer in it: yes.
The guide is called "Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search". Here's what it actually says, without the padding.
Why the answer is yes
Google's AI features - AI Overviews, AI Mode - aren't a separate system with separate rules. They're built on the same ranking and quality systems that already power regular Search.
The mechanism is called grounding, or retrieval-augmented generation if you want the technical term. Before the AI writes an answer, it retrieves relevant pages from the same Search index that ranks your site normally, then summarises what's already there. There's no second, secret database of "AI-approved" content sitting behind it.
If your site isn't set up to rank in regular Google search, it won't show up in AI answers either. There's no separate scoreboard.
What Google says to actually focus on
Three things, according to the guide.
Content with an actual point of view. Google draws a line between commodity content - generic material like "7 tips for first-time homebuyers" that could come from anyone - and content built on genuine expertise or first-hand experience. We've made this point before without needing Google to confirm it, in what to actually look for in a website designer: if a generative AI model could have written it, so can every other broker's website, and Google already has thousands of versions of it indexed.
A technically sound website. Indexed, crawlable, reasonably fast, mobile-friendly, without duplicate content wasting Google's crawl budget. None of this is new - it's the same groundwork that's mattered for years.
Local business details, done properly. For local businesses specifically, Google points to Google Business Profile as the way to stay visible in both AI answers and regular results.
What Google says you can ignore
This is the more useful part, because it directly contradicts most of what's being sold right now as "AI SEO."
A special llms.txt file won't help you - Google Search doesn't use it. Chunking content into AI-friendly fragments isn't required either; there's no ideal page length. Rewriting content specifically for AI is unnecessary too, since Google's systems already understand synonyms and general meaning without you guessing every phrasing a borrower might type. Chasing brand mentions across the web to influence AI citations "isn't as helpful as it might seem," in Google's own words, because the same spam-detection systems apply to AI features as everywhere else. And structured data isn't the shortcut some are selling it as - still worth having for regular rich results, just not required for AI visibility specifically.
The actual takeaway
"There's nothing you can do about Google" is one of the things we hear most during outreach conversations. It's usually not laziness - it's what happens after enough agencies have overpromised and underdelivered that "it's out of my control" starts to feel like the safe conclusion.
This guide is proof it isn't. Google just published the actual mechanism - grounding, retrieval, the criteria it checks - in plain language, for free. Rankings aren't luck. Neither is AI visibility. A fast, technically sound site with genuinely specific content beats a site that bought an "AI optimisation" add-on, every time, because the add-on usually isn't optimising for anything Google's systems actually check.
If your site already leads with your own take - real client situations, an honest view of your local market, nothing recycled from a listicle - none of this changes anything for you. Keep doing what you're doing.
If it doesn't, that's the work worth doing before anyone sells you an AEO package for it. We build broker websites on exactly this foundation.
Your website should be working while you're in a client meeting. Right now it probably isn't.
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