My AI Notes

What People Are Actually Seeing After the GEO Guidelines Came Out

Since Google’s GEO guidance started circulating and the May 2026 core update landed, a few things keep coming up in practitioner conversations and audit data.

The structural gap is bigger than most sites realize. One analysis across 40+ client engagements found that 83% of audited sites were missing the basic citation-friendly structures that AI systems need to surface content: statistics, definitions, schema. And 71% had no real entity signals at all. No named author. No About page. No consistent social profile data. These aren’t advanced problems. They’re hygiene issues that have become visibility problems.

There’s also a content structure piece that keeps coming up. Research from position.digital shows that 44.2% of LLM citations pull from the first 30% of a page. If the answer is buried in paragraph 8, AI systems probably won’t find it. Lead with the answer. Save the context for after.

Danny Sullivan said something at WordCamp US 2025 that I keep coming back to: “Good SEO is good GEO.” The practitioners seeing real results aren’t running AI-specific playbooks. They’re doing the fundamentals well and the fundamentals are what AI systems reward.

That said, Lily Ray and Rand Fishkin have both pushed back on how aggressively Google is pushing AI into search, and the declining traffic question isn’t settled. Worth keeping an eye on how that plays out.