Google Downplays GEO – But Let’s Talk About Garbage AI SERPs

Google’s Danny Sullivan and John Mueller’s Search Off The Record podcast offered guidance to SEOs and publishers who have questions about ranking in LLM-based search and chat, debunking the commonly repeated advice to “chunk your content.” But that’s really not the conversation Googlers should be having right now.

SEO And The Next Generation Of Search

Google used to rank content based on keyword matching and PageRank was a way to extend that paradigm using the anchor text of links. The introduction of the Knowledge Graph in 2012 was described as a step toward ranking answers based on things (entities) in the real world. Google called this a shift from strings to things.

What’s happening today is what Google in 2012 called “the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.”

So, when people say that nothing has changed with SEO, it’s true to the extent that the underlying…