AI Search Optimisation: What Google's New Guide Means for Your Business
Google has finally said the quiet part out loud. For years, most businesses believed that more content, more schema markup and more SEO tinkering would eventually win. Google's first official guide to AI search optimisation says the opposite. It tells website owners to stop.
I have spent 18 years running Optimise Your Marketing from our office at Cromford Mills, working with SMBs across Derbyshire and the East Midlands. In that time I have watched the same pattern play out again and again. A business owner reads that "content is king", so they commission twenty blog posts on near-identical topics. They read that schema markup helps AI Overviews find them, so they spend a fortnight adding structured data to every page. Then they wait. And nothing changes.
Google's new guide, published on Search Central in 2026, explains why. If your content reads the same as everyone else's, there is no reason for AI search to cite you. There is no reason for Google to rank you either. This post breaks down exactly what the guide says, what it means for a Derbyshire SMB with a normal marketing budget, and what to actually do about it.
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Check your AI visibilityWhat Google's new AI search guide actually says
The guide is called "Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search" and it is Google's first attempt at giving website owners official, straight-from-the-source advice on AI search optimisation, rather than leaving the whole topic to third-party blog posts and guesswork.
The headline message is simple. Optimising for AI Overviews and AI Mode is still SEO. Google is blunt about this. Terms like "AEO" (answer engine optimisation) and "GEO" (generative engine optimisation) get treated as marketing labels rather than separate disciplines. Google's AI features work by retrieving pages from the same search index and the same ranking systems that have always existed, then generating a response grounded in what they find there.
That matters because it means the businesses I work with across Derbyshire do not need a brand new strategy for AI search. They need to get properly good at the fundamentals they have been half-doing for years, because AI systems are now far less forgiving of content that only exists to tick a keyword box.
The commodity content trap
The phrase Google keeps returning to is "non-commodity content". It is worth sitting with, because it explains why so many SMB websites rank nowhere in AI Overviews despite years of blogging.
Google's own example is a good one. A post titled "7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers" is commodity content. It is based on common knowledge that could have been written by anyone, or generated by an AI model in ten seconds, because nothing about it is specific to the person or business that wrote it. A post titled "Why We Waived the Inspection and Saved Money: A Look Inside the Sewer Line" is non-commodity content. It comes from a real, specific, lived experience that nobody else could have written.
What this looks like on a typical Derbyshire business website
I review websites for joiners, accountants, dentists and manufacturers across Derbyshire and the wider East Midlands most weeks, and the pattern is remarkably consistent. Most blog content answers a question anyone could Google. Almost none of it says something only that business could say.
Take a kitchen fitter I worked with near Ripley. Their site had 40 blog posts, most written years apart by three different freelancers, each one a variation of "kitchen trends for 2024" or "how to choose a kitchen worktop". Every one of those posts already exists, in a dozen near-identical forms, on a dozen other sites. Google's AI systems have no reason to pull that business into an AI Overview when a hundred other pages say exactly the same thing.
What actually moved the needle was replacing that content with pieces built from the business's own data. A breakdown of the real cost difference between quartz and granite worktops based on 60 quotes they had issued that year. A description of a specific fitting problem in a 1930s Derbyshire semi and how they solved it. That is content nobody else can copy, because nobody else has that job history.
From invisible to cited
After we rebuilt their content strategy around first-hand data and named results instead of generic advice, a Derbyshire manufacturing client saw their organic enquiries rise by 34% within four months, and their site began appearing as a cited source in AI Overviews for the first time.
See how we approach SEOThree things Google says you can stop doing
The most useful part of the guide is not the advice. It is the mythbusting section, where Google directly tells businesses to stop wasting time on tactics that "AEO" and "GEO" consultants have been selling for two years.
Stop publishing dozens of similar articles
Google is explicit that producing separate content for every possible variation of a search query, purely to try to catch more traffic, is a form of scaled content abuse. It does not improve visibility. Google's systems are now good enough to understand relevance without an exact keyword match, so quantity has stopped being a substitute for quality. If anything, dozens of thin, similar posts now work against you.
Stop over-focusing on structured data
Structured data is not required for AI search visibility, and there is no special schema you need to bolt on. It still has a place in a wider SEO strategy because it helps with rich results, but treating it as the key to AI Overviews is a waste of a developer's time. I have seen businesses spend thousands on structured data projects that Google's own guide says will not move the needle on their own.
Stop chasing inauthentic mentions
Buying or manufacturing mentions of your brand across blogs, forums and directories is another tactic Google specifically warns against. Its systems are built to reward genuinely high-quality content and to filter out spam. Inauthentic mentions do not fool either system, so the time spent chasing them is time not spent on content that would actually work.
So what does non-commodity content actually look like
Once you strip out the tactics Google says do not work, what is left is fairly simple, even if it takes more effort than a keyword-stuffed blog post.
Every client I have worked with over 18 years has something a competitor cannot copy: real numbers, real jobs, real opinions formed from doing the work. That is the entire raw material for non-commodity content. Most businesses just never write it down. Stuart Baddiley, Optimise Your Marketing
In practice, that means building content around a first-hand point of view rather than a summary of what everyone else already says. It means using your own data, whether that is job costs, response times, before-and-after results or client outcomes, instead of generic industry statistics. It means writing content that is organised clearly for a human reader first, with proper headings and short sections, rather than written to satisfy a search algorithm.
It also means accepting that some content simply will not work any more. If a page could have been written by a generative AI model in ten seconds, it probably will not survive in a world where AI systems are actively looking for content that goes beyond what a generative AI model could produce.
Where this fits into the bigger picture
AI search optimisation is not a separate project sitting outside your marketing. It sits inside the SEO pillar of our BIG12 framework, the twelve marketing disciplines every Derbyshire SMB needs working together to grow properly, alongside things like your website, your local marketing and your use of data and measurement to know what is actually working.
Businesses that treat AI visibility as an isolated tactic tend to bolt it onto a content strategy that was already commodity content to begin with. Businesses that treat it as part of a properly built marketing foundation, one that includes strong brand positioning and a clear point of view, tend to be the ones Google's AI systems have something to cite.
See where AI search optimisation fits in your marketing
Our BIG12 Scorecard benchmarks your marketing against all twelve pillars in ten minutes, so you can see exactly where the gaps are.
Take the BIG12 ScorecardYou can read more about the full framework on our BIG12 marketing training page, which walks through how each pillar, including SEO and AI visibility, connects to the others.
The challenge is never learning. It is doing.
None of what Google's guide says is complicated. Write content only you could write. Stop chasing hacks that never worked. Focus on what your customers actually find useful. Most business owners I speak to already understand this the moment I explain it.
The gap is not understanding. It is time. Running a joinery business, an accountancy practice or a manufacturing firm across Derbyshire does not leave much room for auditing forty blog posts, rewriting the commodity ones and building a content plan around first-hand data. That is genuinely difficult work, and it is the work most websites are missing.
This is exactly where we come in. Eighteen years of doing this for businesses across the East Midlands means we already know what non-commodity content looks like in your industry, and we can build it with you rather than leaving you to work it out alone.
Book a free 90-minute audit with Stuart
We will look at your current marketing, benchmark it against the BIG12, and give you a practical set of actions to take. No sales pitch. No fluff. Just 18 years of honest advice applied to your business.
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