I listened to Google’s Search Off the Record podcast recently. The episode on January 8, 2026 asks Dan Sullivan of Google to talk about AI and its impact on SEO. Here’s a quick summary of what he suggests people, businesses and organizations do with their SEO in the times of AI.

First off he says, “We want to reward content that is great for people. We don’t want to reward content that is written for Algo’s or LLM’s.”

He also says, “SEO is the craft of improving content for search engines. People who do SEO understand how people seek information and how that information appears.” Essentially meaning that understanding your audience, their questions, interests, etcetera and creating content that matter to them into a structure like HTML and structured data so it can be easily referenced is important for good SEO.

As well, he says, “AEO, GEO, LMNOPEO whatever you want to call it is a subset of SEO. Just because the formats are changing doesn’t mean everything you do needs to change. The more you change things around the more unnecessarily complex it becomes and not necessarily successful.”

The key takeaways are:

Be Authentic

Don’t Chase Trends

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