Arron Young

Search Central states plainly that AI Overviews need no special markup, no AI text files, no schema. The one independent study of what users actually do is 18 months old and says a citation is worth a 1% click. Everything fresher is measured by the people selling the service.

It's Q4 planning season, which means a lot of small teams are about to write GEO on a budget line. Before you do, I'd spend twenty minutes on two documents, because they disagree with the pitch in a specific way.

The first is Google's own page on AI features and your website, in Search Central. It says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimisations necessary. Further down it's blunter: you don't need to create new machine-readable files, AI text files, or markup, and there's no special schema.org structured data to add. The whole page is a restatement of ordinary SEO fundamentals - be crawlable, be indexable, be useful, have your important content in text.

That's the platform saying, in its own documentation, that the product being sold to you does not exist as a distinct technical practice. You can decide Google is being coy. I'd just note that this is the one party in the conversation with nothing to sell you, and that it's the version I'd have to defend if I were wrong.

I have heard/read that people started making mistakes in their text to sound more like a human and less like an AI.

+ There was a discussion that LinkedIn identified AI-generated text + Claude released text watermarks.

The Digital Omnibus pushed high-risk obligations out to December 2027. Article 50 transparency was not pushed anywhere - it applies now. And if your generative feature shipped before 2 August, your marking deadline is 2 December, twelve weeks out.

Every summary I read of the Digital Omnibus said some version of "Brussels blinks, AI Act delayed." That's accurate about the part of the Act most small teams will never touch, and misleading about the part most of us are already inside. I went and read the Commission's own pages this week rather than the coverage, and the gap between the two is wide enough to be worth twenty minutes of your time.