Google’s guide to AI search says that optimizing for AI Overviews and AI Mode is still SEO, and for every page you own it is right. If it reached you as the reason to cut the off-site work from next quarter’s plan, read it again: it never says that. It barely touches the pages Google’s AI Mode quotes when a buyer asks who to hire.
What follows is that second reading, fair to Google, set beside what its AI Mode cited for 500 buyer questions in our own category, with a way to count yours. It is for the marketing leader whose organic numbers have slid for six months, with penalties, crawl problems, and decayed content ruled out, deciding what the AI line pays for.
Empact Partners runs SEO for B2B software companies as Search Everywhere Optimization, and has since 2020, from inside each partner’s own marketing team. Buyers search on Google, in AI answers, and in communities, so the work follows every page they read. That is why this consultancy counts what AI Mode cites, not only what ranks.
Google’s Guide Is Right About Every Page You Own
Google announced the guide on May 15, 2026, and last updated it on July 10. It is called Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search, and its first paragraph names its reader: “website owners looking for official best practices from Google Search” on AI Overviews and AI Mode.
The central claim rests on how those features work. Google says they are “rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems”: AI Mode pulls pages from the same Search index, which Google calls grounding, and fans a question out into related searches to fetch more of them.
From that mechanism the conclusion follows, and Google states it plainly: “optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.” Taken literally, most of the guide is a to-do list for pages you control, plus a few things to stop paying for:
| What the guide says | What to do with it | What it leaves open |
|---|---|---|
| A page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet | Fix crawling, indexing, and snippets before anything with AI in its name | Whether an eligible page gets quoted |
| Unique, first-hand content beats “commodity” content | Put your own evidence on the pages that answer buyer questions | Which questions your buyers ask |
| Query fan-out pulls in related searches | Answer the adjacent questions on the same page | Where coverage turns into spam (Google’s line: a page per variation) |
| llms.txt files, “chunking,” rewriting for AI, and special schema are myths for Google Search | Stop expecting them to move Google, and keep schema for rich results | Other engines may still read an llms.txt |
| Measure with the Generative AI report in Search Console | Set it up and export it every month | Every page that is not yours |
Two readings of the guide travel in the wrong form. The phrase people pass on, “no additional technical requirements,” is from an older Google page, AI features and your website, last updated in December 2025. And neither page tells anyone to cut off-site work. Whoever forwarded the guide drew that conclusion.
Read down the third column and every row points the same way. Being eligible is not being quoted, and the guide says so: meeting every requirement “doesn’t mean that Google will crawl, index, or serve its content.” It simply stops where your website stops.
Everything Off Your Site Gets One Sentence, and It Is a Warning
The guide does see the rest of the web. In its list of myths, under seeking inauthentic mentions, it says this:
“Just like the rest of Google Search, our generative AI features can show what’s being said about products and services across the web, including in blogs, videos, and forum discussions. However, seeking inauthentic ‘mentions’ across the web isn’t as helpful as it might seem.” — Google Search Central, in the same guide
That passage concedes the off-site half exists and says one thing about it: faking it helps less than it seems. It is the only passage of its kind, apart from a pointer to Merchant Center and Business Profiles for shops and local businesses. For a software company tracing where a buyer’s answer comes from, that is a warning and no method.
The guide’s own brief makes that a fair place to stop. A document for website owners does its job on the website, and Google tracks some off-site presence elsewhere: since July, Search Console’s platform properties cover posts on Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube. Reddit and LinkedIn are not on that list.
In our category those two are the sites Google’s AI Mode quotes most. Practitioners have argued since May over whether the guide proves AI search is just SEO, and the question underneath is cheaper to settle than the argument: ask Google’s own AI Mode, and count what it cites.
In Google’s Own AI Mode, Reddit and LinkedIn Beat Every Company Site Three to One
Empact Partners built the Empact Panel to measure AI visibility for our partners. It runs weekly for more than a dozen of them, putting their buyers’ questions to ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Claude, and we point it at ourselves too.
Between October 4 and 23, 2026, it asked Google AI Mode the 500 questions a buyer types when hiring help with B2B marketing, SEO, Reddit, and AI visibility, four times each, and logged every source the 2,000 answers cited.
Of the 1,972 answers that cited a source, 34.8% cited Reddit and 31.2% cited LinkedIn, and more than half cited one or the other. The most-cited company website appeared in 10.1%, and no other company site reached one answer in ten.
Leave out the 75 questions about Reddit marketing, which would cite Reddit by subject, and Reddit or LinkedIn still appears in 52% of answers. And the LinkedIn half is Google’s own: ChatGPT, asked the same questions in the same weeks, cited LinkedIn in 0.1% of its answers.
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One limit belongs inside these numbers. They are answers about our own category, and every question asks who to hire, so they describe what AI Mode cites for a shortlist question about marketing help, not for yours. Your split is unknown until you count it, and counting takes an afternoon.
The Other Half Is a Short List of Pages, Not Two Platforms
“Reddit and LinkedIn” sounds like two channels to staff, and staffing two channels is how an off-site budget disappears without anyone saying what it bought. The citations underneath are narrower.
87.6% of the LinkedIn citations went to LinkedIn articles, the long-form posts any member can publish, and 98% of those were ranked lists of who to hire. One list took 263 of the 687, 38.3%, and appeared in 12.6% to 14.1% of the answers in each of the four runs.
Reddit works the same way. 95.6% of the Reddit citations went to threads, four in five of them recommendation threads: someone asking who to hire, or someone answering with a list. Ten threads took 45.9% of Reddit’s citations, and one subreddit, r/SaaS, more than a third.
Ranked lists matter wherever they are hosted, in a LinkedIn article, on a marketing company’s own blog, or on a marketer’s personal site. They were 49.6% of every citation AI Mode made, so half the material its answers stood on was somebody’s ranking of who to hire.
And the material is concentrated. AI Mode cited 2,459 different pages over the three weeks, but the 50 that appeared in the most answers reached 64.9% of the answers, and 49 of those 50 turned up in at least three of the four runs.
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First, though, the set has to be yours. Ours describes our category and no other, and the pages your buyers’ answers stand on may look nothing like it.
Run a Source Census on Your Own Category
The census takes an afternoon and a spreadsheet, and it answers the question the guide leaves open: how much of your plan does Google’s advice cover? Give the sheet seven columns: question, date, cited page, site, kind of page, who published it, and whether the answer named you. Then work through it in order:
Then read the kind-of-page column from the top. If most rows are company pages, yours or a competitor’s, the guide covers most of the plan, and the work is Google’s list done well. If most rows are lists and threads, the guide covers the smaller half, and the rest is a short set of named pages, each with someone who can act on it:
| Kind of page | Who can act on it | What Google’s guide says | The move |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your own page | You | Everything in the guide | First-hand evidence, adjacent questions, a clean index |
| A ranked list by an independent writer | The writer | Only the warning on fake mentions | Ask to be considered, with evidence a reviewer can check |
| A competitor’s list ranking itself first | The competitor | Nothing | Leave it, and publish your own honest comparison on your site |
| A recommendation thread | The community | Fake mentions help less than they seem | Answer as a named person from your company, where you can help |
| A LinkedIn article | Its author | Nothing | Your experts publish under their own names, and you pitch the list authors there too |
| A video | Its creator | Image and video advice, for your own site | Brief the creators who already review your category |
Two of those moves are named work at Empact Partners. Getting a partner’s product onto the ranked lists AI engines keep citing is Existing Article Outreach, our own method inside SEO. Turning up in the threads, and in what real users say about the product, is our Generative Engine Optimization work.
Both run under the company’s own name, which keeps them on the right side of the one line Google draws. We sell that half, so weigh this section accordingly: the census costs nothing to run without us, and if your sheet comes back full of your own pages, you do not need us for this.
An Afternoon to Find the Pages, Quarters to Work Them
The census is the cheap half. What it cannot do is the work it finds: winning the attention of list authors who are pitched constantly, answering threads for months under a real name, and holding your own pages to Google’s standard while the same questions are asked every week. That is a standing job, and it is where most teams stop.
With us, a partnership on this starts with exactly that job:
Off-site work takes months before momentum shows, and it compounds. For flair, an HR platform built on Salesforce, our team earned more than 500 links from sites with a domain rating of 40 or more within two years, and monthly organic traffic was up 1600% three years in.
flair’s growth is organic search, not AI Mode, but it came from the same work: pages other people publish, earned one at a time. What our record cannot settle yet is whether working a cited page changes an AI Mode answer. The weekly rerun shows whether an answer moved, not why.
Google’s guide is the standard for every page you own, and it is right that the AI hacks do nothing in Google Search. The rest of your plan is a set of pages you can name by Friday. If your category’s answers come from lists and threads nobody in-house reads, book time with me, and we can judge together whether we are the right people for it.
