Search Changed
A homeowner asks their phone “who fixes water heaters near me.”
Are you in the answer?
More of those answers are written by AI now, and the businesses named in them get the call. Google’s own guidance on how to be one of them is less exciting than the people selling “AI optimization” would like: it is still SEO.1 The same fundamentals, done properly.
In Google’s own words
“Optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.”
Google’s position is that its AI features run on the same core ranking and quality systems as the rest of Search. There is no second search engine to game, and no parallel discipline to buy. A site that deserves to be found is a site that gets cited.
What Google says it needs
Four things, taken from Google’s guidance rather than from anyone’s theory about it.1
Be indexable
This is the only hard gate Google states. To be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page has to be indexed and eligible to appear in Search with a snippet. A site that blocks crawlers, or that never gets indexed, isn't in the running.
Be worth citing
Google's lead item is content with genuine value and a perspective of its own, not commodity copy assembled from what everyone else already published. An AI answer quotes passages, so what you say has to be worth quoting.
Be decent to use
Page experience is a real signal, and latency is named in Google's guidance. It's one input among many rather than a lever, and it's measured on real visitors, not on a score from a testing tool.
Keep the Business Profile current
For local and commerce, Google says a maintained Business Profile can help your services be visible in its AI features. That's a hedge, and worth reading as one: it helps, alongside a real site. It isn't a substitute for one.
And what it doesn’t
This half gets left out, because there is nothing to sell in it.
- Special markup for AI. Google states that structured data isn’t required for generative AI search and that there is no special schema.org markup to add, nor any AI text file to publish.1 Structured data is still worth shipping, since it earns rich results, but selling it as an AI-visibility lever misrepresents what Google says it does.
- A composite performance score. There isn’t one. Google’s wording is “there is no single signal”; Core Web Vitals stay three separate metrics with three separate thresholds, and a page passes only by passing all three.23
- Your Lighthouse number. Lighthouse is a lab tool. Google’s systems read field data from real Chrome visitors, so the score in your browser tab is a diagnostic, not the thing being measured.3
- Extra requirements of any kind. Google’s guidance says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimizations necessary.1If someone quotes you a price to fix that, ask which sentence of Google’s documentation they mean.
What did change
The bar moves. Between February and June 2026 Google shipped five ranking and spam updates: a Discover update in February, a spam update and a core update in March, another core update in May, and another spam update in June.4Those updates target content quality; Google doesn’t tie them to site speed, whatever the SEO press says in the first week of a rollout.
That cadence is the real argument, and it is a boring one. A site left alone doesn’t hold its position while the standard moves underneath it. Nothing breaks in a way you would notice; it just quietly stops being the answer.
So the work is the work. Which is the good news.
Indexable, quick on real visitors’ phones, and written by someone with something to say. That is what Google asks for, and it is what a good site was before any of this. Every FDS build starts there, including a Foundry lease. There is no AI package, because there is nothing to put in it.
Straight answers
- Can I show up in AI answers without ranking #1?
- Ranking #1 isn't the gate; being indexed is. Google's stated requirement is that a page be indexed and eligible to be shown in Search with a snippet. Beyond that, Google's AI features are rooted in the same core ranking and quality systems as the rest of Search, so the work that earns ordinary search visibility is the work that earns a citation. There is no separate ladder to climb.
- Does my Google Business Profile still matter in 2026?
- Yes, for local businesses. Google says a maintained Business Profile can help your products and services be visible in its AI features, a real endorsement though a hedged one, and aimed at local and commerce rather than every business. It works best alongside a real website: in Yext's study of 17.2 million AI citations, a website generated about 1.75 times as many citations per URL as a listing (4.31 versus 2.46). Listings still made up the majority of cited URLs, so this isn't listing versus website. It's both.
- Is 'AI optimization' different from SEO?
- No, and Google says so plainly. Its May 2026 guidance states that optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO, because the AI features are rooted in Google's core ranking and quality systems. Google also states there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special schema.org markup you need to add. Anyone selling AI optimization as a separate service is selling packaging.
- Does site speed decide whether I'm found?
- It's a factor, not the factor. Core Web Vitals are three separate metrics: loading (LCP), interactivity (INP), and visual stability (CLS). They carry separate thresholds of 2.5 seconds, 200 milliseconds, and 0.1, assessed at the 75th percentile of real visits. A page passes only if it passes all three. Google is explicit that there is no single composite page-experience score, and that its systems use field data from real Chrome users rather than a Lighthouse lab score. Speed matters because slow sites lose people, and because page experience is one signal among many. Not because a number went red.
Sources
- 1. Google Search Central, “Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search.” Published May 15, 2026; updated July 10, 2026. (developers.google.com)
- 2. Google Search Central, “Understanding page experience in Google Search results.” (developers.google.com)
- 3. Google (web.dev), “Web Vitals,” the LCP / INP / CLS thresholds and the 75th-percentile assessment rule. (web.dev)
- 4. Google Search Status Dashboard, ranking and spam update history, February to June 2026. (status.search.google.com)
- 5. Yext, “AI Citation Behavior Across Models: Evidence from 17.2 Million Citations.” Citations collected Q4 2025 across Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and SearchGPT. (yext.com)
- 6. Whitespark, “New Research: AI Overviews for Local Business Searches.” 540 queries, 6 verticals, 3 cities; data collected Q1 2025. (whitespark.ca)
Every source above is linked so you can check it. Where a study is cited, the year given is when its data was collected, not when someone blogged about it. Google’s documentation is a living document and is quoted as of July 2026.