For two years now, the marketing industry has been pitching contractors a new acronym every six months.

AEO. GEO. AI Optimization. LLMS files. Special schema. Content chunking. AI-friendly rewrites.

A new shortcut. A new service tier. A new invoice line item.

This week, Google published an official guide called Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search. It went live on May 15, 2026, on the Search Central blog.

I will save you the click. Here it is, in their own words:

“Is SEO still relevant for generative AI search? In short, yes!”

That is not a tease. The rest of the guide spends most of its time telling site owners that the things being sold to them as “AI SEO” do not actually do anything. Same playbook. Same fundamentals. Same work.

What Google says you can ignore

The guide has a section called “Mythbusting generative AI search.” These are the tactics Google is officially telling you to skip:

  • llms.txt files and other “special” markup. You do not need AI text files, machine readable files, or any special markup to appear in AI features. Google may crawl those files. That does not mean it treats them as special.
  • Chunking your content. No need to break pages into tiny pieces for AI to understand them. Google’s systems handle nuance across multiple topics on one page.
  • Rewriting content just for AI. AI understands synonyms. You do not have to capture every long-tail variation or write in some special “AI-friendly” way.
  • Seeking inauthentic mentions. Buying blog mentions, fake reviews, paid forum posts, and any other manufactured “AI citation” play. Google says quality is what gets cited and that spam systems block the rest.
  • Over-doing structured data. There is no special schema just for AI Overviews. Existing structured data is still useful for rich results. That is it.

If your marketing vendor has pitched any of these as the new must-have for AI search, you now have Google’s own public documentation saying it does not matter.

What still works

Same things that worked last year. Same things that worked five years ago.

  • Unique, non-commodity content. Google’s example, almost word for word, is the difference between “7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers” and “Why We Waived the Inspection & Saved Money.” One is recycled common knowledge. The other is real, lived, expert-led experience. For contractors, this is your home turf. The install nobody else would touch. The repair that turned out to be three problems stacked. The truck-roll that saved a homeowner ten grand. That is the content that earns visibility in AI search.
  • Clear technical structure. Pages have to be crawlable, indexable, and eligible to appear in Search. Site has to work on mobile. It has to load. The main content has to be easy to find.
  • Good page experience. Easy to read. Easy to use. Not buried under junk.
  • Real local and business signals. Google Business Profile. Merchant Center. Accurate, consistent business details. The unglamorous infrastructure that has always mattered.

That is the whole list.

Why this matters for contractors

Here is the part I care about most.

Contractors have been getting pitched “AI optimization packages” for over a year now. Some of those pitches come with five-figure monthly fees. Most of them are either repackaging things that were already part of basic SEO, or selling tactics that Google is now publicly saying do not work.

If a vendor is asking you to pay extra for:

  • An llms.txt file on your site
  • “AI-ready content rewrites”
  • A “GEO audit”
  • “AI citation building”
  • Special schema markup just for AI Overviews

Ask hard questions. Google’s official position, in a public document updated this week, is that none of that is required to show up in AI Overviews or AI Mode.

What is required is the work. Useful content from people who actually do the job. A site that loads. A real business with real signals.

The takeaway

Nothing changed.

The interface changed. AI Overviews show up. AI Mode exists. Citations are surfaced differently. The way clicks come in is shifting, and the traffic data is real.

But the work that earns visibility? Same work as always.

Earn it with content real people actually want. Build it on a site that works. Run a business that deserves to be recommended.

That is what we have been telling our contractor clients since AI Overviews launched two years ago. Now it is in Google’s own documentation.

Keep it simple. Make it look beautiful. Have it work.

The shortcuts never worked. They just took longer to fail.