Uh oh, Google said a thing

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Hey folks, it's your content friend Eric here.

When Google dropped its first “guide to optimizing for generative AI features on Google Search” last week, I thought:

“Great, I will finally have a Superpath newsletter topic ready more than 24 hours in advance.”

But since then, I’ve already seen hundreds of reactions to the guide on LinkedIn.

Meaning: I’m late for the reaction news cycle, but just in time for the reaction to the reactions news cycle.

Here’s how I think content marketers should be thinking about this guide:

1. This is an objective win for content marketers. When someone asks us to “do AEO”, we will forever be able to point to this section of the article and say, “Look, ‘Create valuable, non-commodity content for your audience’!” to defend our practice.

2. Add “non-commodity content” to your lexicon. Many of us have long wanted to move out of the SEO article business and into the true content business. We often use vague words like “quality” to describe our mission to our superiors, but have struggled to make the case for it. Here’s an objective business reason why it’s a good idea.

3. No, AEO is definitely not just SEO. There’s a section that reads:

So many folks immediately took to LinkedIn to dunk on the AEO/GEO crowd. “Look, see! It’s all the same! We don’t need to change a thing!”

But this statement from Google is pretty objectively false. For example, off-site mentions of your brand matter much more for AEO/GEO than they did for SEO. In SEO, the game was to rank a page #1, and then you could say whatever you wanted about yourself. But AEO, it’s consolidating information from many sources.

This article from Mike King goes into way more detail than I ever could, so I suggest you read up on that to understand the differences.

4. Google would prefer that you don’t know how to optimize for AI search. Google has forever been in a constant battle with the website owners and content creators it relies on to evolve its search algorithm so that it can’t be gamed. Some signals are only useful to Google if the rest of us are not intentionally optimizing for them. So Google has historically told us about the positive, helpful things we can do to improve search (“build great content”) and either left out or explicitly instructed against the potentially nefarious things we can do (“build backlinks”)—even when some of those things are proven to work. So no, Google doesn’t want you to try any “hacks”—but that doesn’t mean some of the hacks won’t work (I’m also not saying they will).

5. Google doesn’t have a monopoly on “search” anymore. Important to remember: people are also searching things on Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc. So when Google says something works or doesn’t work for AEO, they’re speaking only about their own search engine or AI answer tools. They don’t control the Claude or ChatGPT search algorithms. Case in point: Krista Doyle did some great off-site AEO research showing that each platform has different preferences for third-party data sources.

6. Search is not the only thing now. Agents can crawl your site now, too. Soon, they’ll be able to “use” your website like a person could, rather than just crawl through content and links. So there are more than just search engines to optimize for.

7. Nobody (including Google) can say with certainty what works or doesn’t work yet. We’re all figuring this all out on the fly. There’s so much research that still needs to be done. Great SEO folks I trust, like Cyrus Shepard, Lily Ray, and Michael King, are actually looking at the data and asking questions rather than making definitive statements. And don’t forget the LLMs change every day. There’s no bible for this yet.

8. Being in a “camp” is not productive for your career. There’s a lot of unproductive “us vs. them” language popping up—where people are painting each other in extremes. Yes, if you look for them, you will find scammy GEO snake oil salesmen. And yes, you will find anti-AI purists who are sticking their heads in the sand about how this all works. But those are the extremes, and you’ll learn a lot more by being at neither end of the spectrum. You don’t need a stance. You just need an open mind and a willingness to experiment.

The lesson certainly isn’t to ignore Google. Stay informed. But take everything they say with a grain of salt, consider multiple sources, and consider who is giving you information and what they stand to benefit from it.

Also: please keep an open mind and willingness to read the rest of this newsletter, full of fantastic links and content!

Cheers,

- Eric

✍ New on the Blog: Checking in on the 1:1 Matching Program by Alex Hilleary

In the spirit of building in public, Alex Hilleary, CEO of Superpath, wrote a blog post that dug through the history of the 1:1 matching program at Superpath.

It’s by far the most beloved part of the Superpath Pro membership, so we’ve been constantly tinkering with it to make the 1:1 peer matches even better.

Since taking over the program, Alex has built a really neat AI-backed system that pairs people up based on their LinkedIn profiles, locations, and other parameters.

Here’s a deep dive into how he built it:

📧 Ad network with beehiiv (update) – Last week's HubSpot ad earned $22.66 from 11 verified clicks. We buried it at the bottom of the newsletter and didn't promote it at all, but a few of you clicked through anyway. Getting that payout email was pretty cool. With a better placement and the right audience fit, I could see this becoming real revenue for not a lot of effort. - Alex

Want to try beehiiv? Use SUPERPATH30 for 30% off

📆 Upcoming Superpath Community Events

To get the invitations to our virtual events, join Superpath Pro. You get 30 days free, so you can attend all these events!

And we have one in-person event left to attend:

🎙 New on Content, Briefly: Your Employees Are Your AI Search Strategy with Kaleigh Moore

For this episode, I chatted with Kaleigh Moore about this great article: Your Employees Are Untapped AI Search Potential.

Kaleigh’s argument is that the company blog sits at the bottom of the LLM trust hierarchy in terms of content influence. Third-party mentions sit at the top. But most B2B teams are still pouring budget into the layer LLMs trust least.

Kaleigh is a former Forbes journalist who now works full-time on AI search strategy. She has a framework called the Source Signal Stack, in which she argues that employee subject-matter experts on LinkedIn are the most overlooked AEO move available.

We talked about:

Listen here.

💬 Great Slack Threads This Week

Here are some great questions members asked in Superpath Pro this week:

📙 The Reading List

Here are some thought-provoking articles shared in the Superpath Slack community this week:

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