And Someone Is Probably Trying to Sell You Otherwise
If you’ve been hearing about “Answer Engine Optimization” and wondering whether your small business needs a whole new strategy, I have good news. You mostly don’t.
Google said it themselves in May 2026: “Optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.” That’s not my interpretation. That’s a direct quote from their official guidance.
So why is everyone acting like the sky is falling?
Because there’s money in it. An entire industry has sprung up around the idea that AI search is a totally separate game requiring totally separate tools, totally separate strategies, and (conveniently) totally separate subscriptions. Some of this is well-meaning. A lot of it isn’t.
Here’s what I’ve seen being sold to small business owners that doesn’t hold up:
“You need an llms.txt file.” Google says they don’t use it. A 90-day study of 62,100 AI bot requests found that exactly 84 of them, about 0.1%, even looked at the file. An analysis of 300,000 websites found zero correlation between having one and getting cited by AI. Save your time.
“Add schema markup and AI will cite you.” Schema is fine to have. It’s basic site hygiene. But a controlled study of nearly 2,000 pages found that adding schema made no statistically significant difference in AI citations. The popular stat that “AI-cited pages are 3x more likely to have schema” is just correlation. Good sites tend to have both good schema and good content. The content is doing the work.
“Post on Reddit and forums to get mentioned by AI.” Google explicitly calls manufactured mentions spam. Reddit is now blocking 23 million spam views a day. This is the 2026 version of buying backlinks, and it’s going to end the same way.
“Our tool shows you gained 10x AI traffic.” A June 2026 study with an actual control group found that untreated pages on the same website grew 3.5x from the overall growth of AI search. The “optimized” pages grew 5.7x. So the real lift from optimization was closer to 1.8x, not 10x. Most of those big numbers people are quoting? That’s just the tide coming in.
What actually works is less exciting but more durable. Answer the questions your customers are actually asking, clearly and directly. Put the answer near the top of the page, not buried in paragraph six. Include real numbers, real project details, real outcomes. Keep your business information consistent everywhere it appears. Make sure AI crawlers can actually read your site (a lot of modern website builders serve pages that AI can’t process). Keep your content fresh.
That’s it. That’s AEO. It’s writing clearly, being specific, staying current, and not breaking the technical basics. If someone is telling you it’s more complicated than that, check whether they’re selling the solution to the complexity they just invented.
The businesses that will do best in AI search are the same ones that did best in regular search: the ones that actually know something and say it plainly. No special file, no magic markup, no secret trick. Just be the clearest, most credible answer in the room.
