Google Shares Insight On SEO For AI Overviews

Google’s John Mueller shared his insights on how to approach SEO for AI search in an interview posted on YouTube. The discussion also touched on what SEO should do in 2025 given the reality of what users want.

The video discussion was hosted by Mike Grehan on his new marketing podcast, Inside Marketing with Mike Grehan. Mike is a search marketer who co-founded a search marketing organization and was known for publishing interviews with Google search engineers.

John Mueller confirms the necessity of SEO

Mike got straight to the point of the discussion by asking what the search community should focus on in 2025, jokingly asking if SEO is finally dead. While Mueller apparently didn’t say that search was dead, he and several other panelists acknowledged that SEO is undergoing profound changes.

John Mueller said he thinks many in the general public may wish SEO was dead, but don’t realize that search optimization has a positive effect, implying that it helps Google list the websites the public wants to see.

He answered:

“Seo is dead … I don’t think SEO is dead. I think one of the challenges is a lot of people online, they want SEO to be dead, but they don’t realize that it’s … it’s almost like you’re driving so many things that work on Where they notice when there’s something weird on the Internet and they’re like, oh, this is boring SEO.

Technical SEO is still important

Mueller suggested that technical SEO will continue to be important for search engines and search AI. He also mentioned that SEO will be helpful to access large language models that depend on internet content.

He continued:

“So I think from my side, what people should be doing this year is hard to say exactly. But I think a lot of the technical SEO stuff definitely still makes sense. I think a lot of it still makes sense with all the AI ​​as well things that are happening, and all the different kinds of big language models that are trying to train from the Internet like they need that foundation of technical SEO.”

How SEO should evolve

Mueller next explained what search marketers need to do to evolve with the reality of where we are today because of artificial intelligence.

He offered the following insights:

“I think it’s also important to try to figure out like the value that you want to get out of the internet. And … the simple aspect that SEOs have focused on in the past is like I want clicks, I just want a lot of clicks. And just clicks aren’t really what drives value for many websites.

So it’s almost like a subtle shift in mindset from clicks to trying to figure out what’s the value I want to get out of it. “

What Mueller was talking about is the narrow perspective that SEO has traditionally ignored anything that didn’t measurably drive traffic or include a link. Part of the reason for this is the client’s expectations from SEO, but it is also reinforced on the SEO side where they talk about KPIs, key performance indicators. KPIs for SEO are organic traffic, ranking, clicks from search results.

So what happens is that, at best, SEOs in their silo do half the work that needs to be done to drive traffic to a site, and at worst, they do nothing to promote the site and make it successful. Getting SEO to accept the promotional part and think about what the website actually brings to the users.

Mike Green noted:

“Wouldn’t it be nice if people stopped thinking about SEO as just a traffic driver, just throwing numbers around, and actually thought about it with more of a marketing and scientific mind?”

It’s time to become real traders

Something Mueller has advised in the past for those looking to drive traffic to new websites is to get out there and promote it. Promotion is more than just SEO.

Ryan Jones of Razorfish -and founder of SERPRECON SEO tool (LinkedIn profile) agreed with Mueller that SEO needs to get out of the traffic and click bubble, encouraging listeners to add more marketing to their mix.

Ryan said:

“I think it’s time for us to become real marketers. We’ve been spoiled for a long time where we focus on downstream and attribution. And you know, nobody’s ever asked TV how many clicks or visits they get when they run a Super Bowl ad, you know? And even paid search too, in fact, date it.

In SEO, if we say, hey, if we’re not there, our competitor might be there. Like ok. Great. How many clicks will they get? But on paid media we can say, well, if we’re not there, our competitor will get there and say $1,000,000 here. Go, go there, won’t you?

And so I think it’s time to develop SEO to be full flow. We have to start thinking about user intent, what users want, doing the right marketing. It is not enough to focus on clicks, and we are spoiled. We’ve been focusing so much on tactics, haven’t we?

To go back to ‘is Seo dead’, if all you’ve been thinking about is tactics to get clicks and links and rankings, yes, it’s dead. But if you’ve been thinking about giving users what they want, then no, it’s not dead. It is evolving.

So … those things are important, but I think to bring them home … we have to do the right marketing. It’s not enough to just do last click attribution like we were in the past, we have to be real marketers and that excites me because I think you know at a big agency or with all of our backgrounds, I think we’re all well positioned as real marketers because we’ve done that. “

Face the SEO reality

Ryan Jones went on to say that it’s time to realize the fact that people don’t want to visit a website anymore, they want information. He suggested that the role of websites no longer fits what people want, so SEOs need to be realistic about this. The irony of what he’s suggesting is that SEOs love to talk about user intent, but they’ve failed to track the reality of what users want.

He said:

“When I search ‘when is the Super Bowl,’ I want to know it’s February 9th. That’s it. End of assignment. I’m done. … What I don’t want, and go click the first, second, third, or 4th result for this, I promise that you’re going to get it, what I don’t want is a web page with an overlay ad, a cookie consent notice, and You’re going to click into your alerts, an email signup form, and seven paragraphs of unrelated text before it tells me it’s the 9th. February.

… Today … people just want … an answer, they don’t really want a website. And a lot of seos didn’t keep up with that shift or paradigm. … We’ve lost track of what the user really wants. “

John Mueller discusses SEO for an AI review

Mike Grehan next asked the question everyone wants answered, which is how to optimize for AI review.

John Mueller recommended thinking about it the same way SEO optimizes for featured snippets.

Mueller said:

“I just want to say that all these discussions that we’ve had, I don’t know what was 5 or 10 years ago? Excerpts. It’s basically the same thing, right?

Like this is very visible at the top and it’s like, “I hate him.” And then a year later everyone’s like, oh, how do I go in and how do I optimize for that? How do I appear visibly?

And my feeling is … without kind of a big crystal ball, is that it’s going to evolve in a similar direction and I think user expectations are definitely changing. I think AI type answers make sense for a lot of queries and it will be frustrating for some websites that are focused on those queries, like featured snippets. And that also provides a lot of possibilities.

And I also think it’s something where like the different levels of SEO you’re working on still make sense. Like at the low level, you work on a lot of technical questions that stay the same, and then you move to more strategic approaches where you try to figure out what direction you need to go. “

Watch also: Mastering AI previews for greater search visibility

Inside Marketing with Mike Grehan

There are many more ideas discussed on Mike’s video podcast, it may be helpful to find the time to watch the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_7yhqwmp_k