Google publishes guide on optimizing for generative AI features

Google has published a new guide on how to optimize for Google’s generative AI features, like AI Mode, AI Overviews and more. A lot of this content is put together from previous communication from Google but all in a neat new help document named Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search.

What’s in the document. The document covers the following topics:

• SEO is relevant for generative AI search, follow Google’s best practices for SEO.
• Create valuable, non-commodity content for your audience
  • Provide a unique point of view
  • Create non-commodity content that’s helpful, reliable and people-first
  • Organize content in a way that helps your readers
  • Add high-quality images and video
  • Focus on what your users want, and avoid overdoing it
  • Make sure your AI tools you use follow Google’s guidelines and best practices
• Build and maintain a clear technical structure
  • Meet the search technical requirements
  • Follow crawling best practices
  • When it comes to semantic HTML, focus on human readability, not code
  • JavaScript should follow Google’s best practices as well
  • Provide a good page experience
  • Reduce duplicate content
• Optimize your local business and ecommerce details
• Mythbusting – what you don’t need to do
  • You don’t need LLMS.txt files
  • You don’t need other special markup
  • You don’t need to “Chunk” content
  • You don’t need to rewrite content for AI systems
  • You don’t need to seek inauthentic mentions
  • You shouldn’t overfocus on structured data
• Explore agentic experiences
• Next steps

Why we care. This document sums up a lot of the advice Google has posted on its blogs, videos, spoken about at in-person events and more. It is a good document to see how Google thinks site owners should optimize their sites for AI-generative engines.

Check out the document over here.