Originally published on rikuq.com. Republished here for Dev.to's readers.
Google's May 2026 AI search guidance settled one debate: for Google's surfaces, AEO and GEO are "still SEO." Same crawl, same ranking, same E-E-A-T factors. Optimizing for AI Overviews is optimizing for Google search, period.
That sentence is accurate, and it ended a year of speculation about whether Google would build a separate AI crawl or weight different signals on its AI surfaces. They didn't. They reaffirmed that strong fundamentals win everywhere they own.
But the guidance ended one debate while leaving another wide open: what about the engines Google doesn't own?
ChatGPT runs on Bing. Claude runs on Brave. Perplexity runs on its own index. Each of those engines has its own crawl behavior, ranking signals, and citation patterns. None of them issued matching guidance saying "we're also just classical SEO." Optimizing for them genuinely is a separate discipline — what I cover in the four-index reality post.
