What is AI SEO?

If someone offers you "AI SEO," ask first which of the two things they are selling, because two jobs that do not resemble each other circulate under the same name. One is getting Google's AI Mode, ChatGPT or Perplexity to find your store and cite it when a shopper asks. The other is doing the usual SEO with AI tools: writing descriptions, titles or whole pages with a language model. Both have published rules, and they are not the same rules. Mixing them up is the fastest way to pay for the second believing you are buying the first.

What it includes

SEO so an AI finds you

This is the sense that shares ground with GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), and Google settles it in one sentence: from the point of view of its Search, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and so it is still SEO.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search} Its guide adds what is not needed: creating machine-readable files, text files for AI or special markup, chopping content into pieces, or writing in a particular way just for AI.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search}

What it does ask for is less glamorous work. Content that is not interchangeable, that does not recycle what the internet already says or what any AI model could produce, but brings the opinion of an expert or of someone with experience.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search} And, for a store, one concrete pointer: using Google Merchant Center and its feeds can help your products show up both in AI answers and in the rest of Google's results.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search}

Outside Google, each company has its own crawlers, and the first step is not to shut them out by accident. OpenAI, for example, separates the agent that shows sites in ChatGPT search, OAI-SearchBot, from the one that crawls content to train its models, GPTBot, and a site that blocks OAI-SearchBot does not show up in ChatGPT search answers.⁠^{[2]OpenAI. Overview of OpenAI Crawlers} The GEO entry has the full table of agents.

SEO done with AI

Here the rules are of another kind. Google acknowledges that generative AI can be useful for researching a topic and structuring original content, but warns that using it to generate many pages without adding value for the reader can violate its policy against scaled content abuse.⁠^{[3]Google Search Central. Google Search's guidance on using generative AI content on your website} That policy defines it as generating many pages with the main purpose of manipulating rankings rather than helping people, and specifies that it does not matter how they were created.⁠^{[4]Google Search Central. Spam policies for Google web search}

The second rule is review. Google explains that generative models do not retrieve data but predict the most likely sequence of words based on what they learned, and that what they produce can therefore contain errors, so-called hallucinations. Its conclusion: you have to check all AI-generated content by hand before publishing it, and that includes the <title>, the meta description, the structured data and the images' alt text, which can appear in results.⁠^{[3]Google Search Central. Google Search's guidance on using generative AI content on your website}

In a store

A fictional example: a cookware store with several thousand products decides to rewrite all its descriptions with AI; they were the manufacturer's. It is SEO done with AI, and what makes it legitimate or not is what it adds and how it is reviewed. A description that includes the real capacity, the material and what kind of stove each saucepan works on adds something; three thousand variations of the same template with synonyms does not.

If that store sends its catalog to Merchant Center, there is one more rule, concrete and mandatory: AI-generated text goes in its own attributes, marked as AI-generated.⁠^{[5]Google Merchant Center Help. AI-generated content}

Google points to this same policy from its guide to AI-generated content for stores.⁠^{[3]Google Search Central. Google Search's guidance on using generative AI content on your website} Review also has to be possible before publishing: in Clione, for example, nothing is published to the store until you press Push.

How to check

1. Ask in writing which of the two jobs they are offering you and what deliverables each one has. If it is the first, the list should look like an SEO one; Google points anyone buying AEO or GEO services to its guide for evaluating outside SEO advice.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search}
2. Check that search agents can get in. Open your robots.txt and see, for example, whether OAI-SearchBot is allowed.⁠^{[2]OpenAI. Overview of OpenAI Crawlers}
3. If you already write with AI, take twenty product pages at random and check each fact against the manufacturer's sheet, including the title, the meta description and the JSON-LD.⁠^{[3]Google Search Central. Google Search's guidance on using generative AI content on your website}
4. If you send feeds to Merchant Center, confirm that titles and descriptions written with AI go in structured_title and structured_description.⁠^{[5]Google Merchant Center Help. AI-generated content}
5. Count the new pages in the plan. If they grow by query variants and not by real products or questions, it is the pattern Google flags as spam.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search}

Related concept: GEO

GEO is the name for the first sense, getting found by an AI, and it has an academic origin, with its own metrics, which its entry covers along with what Google says about it. "AI SEO" is broader and more everyday: it is the plain-language label, and it also drags in the second sense, working with AI tools. For Google, the two names end up in the same place: it is SEO.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search}

To see GEO, AEO and SEO side by side, the comparison GEO, AEO and SEO: what changes for an online store, and for the rest of the terms, the AI search reading path.