GEO/AEO is criticized by SEOs who claim that it’s just SEO at best and unsupported lies at worst. Are SEOs right, or are they just defending their turf? Bing recently published a guide to AI search visibility that provides a perfect opportunity to test whether optimization for AI answers recommendations is distinct from traditional SEO practices.
Chunking Content
Some AEO/GEO optimizers are saying that it’s important to write content in chunks because that’s how AI and LLMs break up a pages of content, into chunks of content. Bing’s guide to answer engine optimization, written by Krishna Madhavan, Principal Product Manager at Bing, echoes the concept of chunking.
Bing’s Madhavan writes:
“AI assistants don’t read a page top to bottom like a person would. They break content into smaller, usable pieces — a process called parsing. These modular pieces are what get ranked and assembled into answers.”
The thing that some SEOs tend to forget is that chunking content is not new. It’s been around for at least five years. Google introduced their passage ranking algorithm back in 2020. The passages algorithm breaks up a web page into sections to understand how the page and a section of it is relevant to a search query.
Google says:
“Passage ranking is an AI system we use to identify individual sections or “passages” of a web page to better understand how relevant a page is to a search.”
Google’s 2020 announcement described passage ranking in these terms:
“Very specific searches can be the hardest to get right, since sometimes the single sentence that answers your question might be buried deep in a web page. We’ve recently made a breakthrough in ranking and are now able to better understand the relevancy of specific passages. By understanding passages in addition to the relevancy of the overall page, we can find that needle-in-a-haystack information you’re looking for. This technology will improve 7 percent of search queries across all languages as we roll it out globally.”
As far as chunking is concerned, any SEO who has optimized content for Google’s Featured Snippets can attest to the importance of creating passages that directly answer questions. It’s been a fundamental part of SEO since at least 2014, when Google introduced Featured Snippets.
Titles, Descriptions, and H1s
The Bing guide to ranking in AI also states that descriptions, headings, and titles are important signals to AI systems. It’s not necessary to belabor the point that descriptions, headings, and titles are fundamental elements of SEO. So again, there is nothing about optimizing these HTML elements that is unique to AEO/GEO.
Lists and Tables
Bing recommends bulleted lists and tables as a way to easily communicate complex information to users and search engines. This approach to organizing data is similar to an advanced SEO method called disambiguation. Disambiguation is about making the meaning and purpose of a web page as clear as possible, to make it less ambiguous.
Making a page less ambiguous can incorporate semantic HTML to clearly delineate which part of a web page is the main content (MC in the parlance of Google’s third-party quality rater guidelines) and which part of the web page is just advertisements, navigation, a sidebar, or the footer.
Another form of disambiguation is through the proper use of HTML elements like ordered lists (OL) and the use of tables to communicate tabular data such as product comparisons or a schedule of dates and times for an event.
The use of HTML elements (like H, OL, and UL) give structure to on-page information, which is why it’s called structured information. Structured information and structured data are two different things. Structured information is on the page and is seen in the browser and by crawlers. Structured data is meta data that only a bot will see.
There are studies that structured information helps AI Agents make sense of a web page, so I have to concede that structured information is something that is particularly helpful to AI Agents in a unique way.
Question And Answer Pairs
Bing recommends Q&A’s, which are question and answer pairs that an AI can use directly. Bing’s Madhavan writes:
“Direct questions with clear answers mirror the way people search. Assistants can often lift these pairs word for word into AI-generated responses.”
This is a mix of passage ranking and the SEO practice of writing for featured snippets, where you pose a question and give the answer. It’s a risky approach to create an entire page of questions and answers but if it feels useful and helpful then it may be worth doing.
Something to keep in mind is that Google’s systems consider content lacking in unique insight on the same level of spam. Google also considers content created specifically for search engines as low quality as well.
Anyone considering writing questions and answers on a web page for the purpose of AI SEO should first consider the whether it’s useful for people and think deeply about the quality of the question and answer pairs. Otherwise it’s just a page of rote made for search engine content.
Be Precise With Semantic Clarity
Bing also recommends semantic clarity. This is also important for SEO. Madhavan writes:
- “Write for intent, not just keywords. Use phrasing that directly answers the questions users ask.
- Avoid vague language. Terms like innovative or eco mean little without specifics. Instead, anchor claims in measurable facts.
- Add context. A product page should say “42 dB dishwasher designed for open-concept kitchens” instead of just “quiet dishwasher.”
- Use synonyms and related terms. This reinforces meaning and helps AI connect concepts (quiet, noise level, sound rating).”
They also advise to not use abstract words like “next-gen” or “cutting edge” because it doesn’t really say anything. This is a big, big issue with AI-generated content because it tends to use abstract words that can completely be removed and not change the meaning of the sentence or paragraph.
Lastly, they advise to not use decorative symbols, which is good a tip. Decorative symbols like the arrow → symbol don’t really communicate anything semantically.
All of this advice is good. It’s good for SEO, good for AI, and like all the other AI SEO practices, there is nothing about it that is specific to AI.
Bing Acknowledges Traditional SEO
The funny thing about Bing’s guide to ranking better for AI is that it explicitly acknowledges that traditional SEO is what matters.
Bing’s Madhavan writes:
“Whether you call it GEO, AIO, or SEO, one thing hasn’t changed: visibility is everything. In today’s world of AI search, it’s not just about being found, it’s about being selected. And that starts with content.
…traditional SEO fundamentals still matter.”
AI Search Optimization = SEO
Google and Bing have incorporated AI into traditional search for about a decade. AI Search ranking is not new. So it should not be surprising that SEO best practices align with ranking for AI answers. The same considerations also parallel with considerations about users and how they interact with content.
Many SEOs are still stuck in the decades-old keyword optimization paradigm and maybe for them these methods of disambiguation and precision are new to them. So perhaps it’s a good thing that the broader SEO industry catches up with many of these concepts for optimizing content and to recognize that there is no AEO/GEO, it’s still just SEO.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Roman Samborskyi
