TL;DR
- Google has published a dedicated guide to optimising for AI Overviews, confirming that AI search is distinct enough from traditional SEO to warrant its own playbook.
- The guide validates key tactics: optimise for questions your content answers, not just keywords it contains.
- It is important to note that Google's guide covers Google's systems only. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini are not addressed.
- 73% of B2B buyers now use AI tools during their purchasing process. Visibility across all AI platforms matters now, not later.
- The most common issue for businesses is not being absent from AI results. It is being present but described vaguely.
Google published something significant last week: an official guide to optimising for AI Overviews. Not a blog post or a help document buried in Search Console, but a proper guide with technical explanations and specific recommendations.
The fact it exists at all tells you something important, even before you read a word of it.
What Google's AI Search Guide Confirms
The guide validates several mechanisms covered in this series, particularly around retrieval-augmented generation and query fan-out.
When someone asks Google's AI a question, the system generates multiple search queries behind the scenes, retrieves relevant content, then synthesises an answer. Google is now saying this explicitly. That confirms the right optimisation approach: structure your content around the questions it answers, not just the keywords it contains.
The guide also clears up some noise that has been circulating:
- llms.txt files that were supposed to help AI systems understand your content? From Google's point of view, they confirm they are unnecessary.
- Over-engineered structured data designed to anticipate every possible AI query? It misses the point entirely.
- Generic, thin content created specifically for AI? It still fails, just as it always has for traditional search.
What the AI Search Guide Actually Reveals
Google keeps insisting that AI search optimisation is "still SEO." At the same time, the company has published a dedicated guide that would not need to exist if that were entirely true.
The SEO Starter Guide has existed for years. Publishing something new, sitting alongside it in the fundamentals section, implicitly acknowledges that something has shifted enough to warrant separate treatment.
The foundations overlap. That is accurate. But the act of creating a new guide is more honest than the framing around it. You do not write a new playbook for a game that has not changed.
The Strategic Gap Google Does Not Address
The more revealing detail is what the guide leaves out.
There is no mention of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, or any of the other AI platforms where your potential customers are searching. This is not an oversight. Google's guide tells you how to optimise for Google's AI. That is valuable but incomplete if you are building a visibility strategy that works across the platforms people actually use.
Search is fragmenting. People are finding information through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and other AI platforms that have nothing to do with Google Search. AI optimisation is already a recognised discipline. Google publishing this guide confirms it. But the conversation has expanded well beyond Google's ecosystem.
This is not a future trend to prepare for. It is a current shift to act on.
What to Do Now: Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude. Search for your business the way a prospect would. Not your brand name. Your category query. "Best commercial equipment suppliers in Auckland" or the relevant version for your business. See what comes back.
The 1% Referral Traffic Figure Does Not Tell the Full Story
Do not be misled by the 1% referral traffic figure you will see quoted for AI platforms. That number masks where the real activity is happening.
- 73% of B2B buyers now use AI tools during their purchasing process.
- Clients are increasingly hearing prospects mention having "looked them up on ChatGPT" before making contact.
- Tech industry professionals are using these platforms daily.
- Younger audiences are adopting them faster than any other demographic.
The pattern is familiar: new technology gets adopted first at the edges, then it spreads. The businesses building their AI visibility now are the ones who will be hardest to displace when adoption reaches the mainstream.
What ADMATIC Consistently Observes in Businesses
The pattern that appears most consistently is around entity clarity.
Businesses that have invested in making sure their name, category, and description are accurate and consistent across the web tend to show up more reliably in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude than in Google's AI Overviews, where traditional domain authority still carries more weight.
Google's systems have years of ranking signal data to draw on. The newer platforms are leaning harder on what is clearly and consistently stated about a business across multiple sources.
When businesses run those searches, the most common finding is not that they are missing entirely. It is that they are present but vague.
The AI knows they exist but cannot say anything specific or confident about them. The result is:
- A generic description that could apply to any business in their category
- No clear sense of what makes them different
- Often a stronger mention of a competitor who has more independent content written about them across the web
The second most common issue is category confusion. A business gets described primarily by the thing it is least known for, simply because that is what the loudest signal across the web happens to say.
Both are description problems, not findability problems.
What This Means for Your Business
The business is findable. What AI says when it finds them is not doing any selling. That is the more urgent issue for most businesses.
Not "are we showing up" but "what is AI saying about us when we do."
Three immediate actions to take:
- Make sure your content is crawlable and genuinely useful rather than generic.
- Make sure your Google Business Profile is accurate and complete.
- Run the category query test across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude to see what those platforms currently say about you.
What the Full Picture Actually Looks Like
Google's guide is a good checklist for your Google presence. The category query test is how you find out what the full picture looks like across every platform your customers are using.
Are you in the answer? Are you described accurately? Are your competitors named while you are not?
Google's guide tells you how to be visible in Google's AI systems, and that is valuable. But it tells you nothing about what those other platforms currently say about you. For most businesses, that is where the most surprising gaps are.
Need help auditing your AI visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google? Talk to the ADMATIC team.