Brendon Kraham, VP of Search and Commerce for Global Ads Solutions at Google, today published a piece on Think with Google titled Good SEO is good GEO, directly addressing CMOs and marketing leaders navigating the expanded use of artificial intelligence inside Google Search. The article, published in June 2026 and estimated as a four-minute read, lays out five concrete positions on what brands should - and explicitly should not - be doing to maintain and grow their visibility as AI-powered search features become the dominant interface for users.

The timing is deliberate. According to the piece, Google recorded an all-time high in Search queries during the first quarter of 2026, a figure sourced directly to the Alphabet Q1 2026 earnings release. That milestone - confirmed separately by Google executives on the quarterly earnings call - arrives as AI Mode and AI Overviews have together pushed search usage to levels not previously seen. The practical consequence for marketers is significant: more people are searching, but the interface through which they search has changed substantially.

What Kraham's piece actually argues

The central claim is technical rather than motivational. According to Kraham, generative AI features including AI Mode are "built directly on top of our core ranking systems," and because these AI experiences retrieve content from the existing search index, the optimization approach required is identical to what it has always been. The piece does not hedge on this point. The framing - "good SEO is good GEO" - positions the emerging vocabulary of generative engine optimization (GEO), answer engine optimization (AEO), and LLM SEO as synonyms for an unchanged discipline, not as independent practices requiring new technical investment.

This is not the first time Google representatives have made this argument. As documented on PPC Land as early as January 2026, Danny Sullivan - then Google's Public Search Liaison - explicitly warned practitioners against fragmenting content into bite-sized chunks for large language models, stating on the Search Off the Record podcast that "we don't want you to do that." The consistency across Google voices is striking: from Sullivan's January 2026 podcast appearance, to Nick Fox's December 2025 interview on AI Inside, to John Mueller's repeated statements about LLMs.txt throughout 2025, the company's position has not shifted. Kraham's Think with Google piece is the most senior-level, CMO-facing articulation of a message Google has been delivering for more than a year.

The five specific positions Google is taking

Kraham organizes the piece around five "don'ts" - areas where, according to Google, marketing teams are currently investing time and resources without material benefit.

GEO, AEO, and LLM SEO terminology is the first target. According to Kraham, the proliferation of acronyms has created a perception that AI search requires a fundamentally different optimization discipline. The piece pushes back directly: "Your existing investment in solid, foundational SEO is your launchpad for AI success." The fan-out technique - the AI process by which Google Search subdivides a query into subtopics and retrieves results for each simultaneously - is specifically mentioned as a mechanism that highlights "a wider and more diverse set of helpful links," not a mechanism that penalizes sites lacking special AI-era optimization.

Bot-optimized content is the second area. According to Kraham, there is no need to write "awkward, keyword-stuffed copy or chunk your content into tiny, artificial snippets." The statement is direct: Google's systems "understand language just like a human." This directly addresses a tactic that, as PPC Land has documented since at least July 2025 and through independent research, circulated widely in the SEO industry following the expansion of AI Overviews.

The piece also addresses inauthentic mentions - the practice of engineering third-party references to a brand or product across blogs, forums, and video platforms in order to influence what Google's generative AI features surface about that brand. According to Kraham, Google's AI features "can show what's being said about products and services across the web, including in blogs, videos, and forum discussions," but the guidance is to "continue to create fresh and helpful content that only your brand can speak to, with your unique voice and authority." The implicit message is that manufactured mentions are detectable and not reliably beneficial.

LLMs.txt is explicitly named and dismissed. According to Kraham, "at least for Google Search, they're not needed." This aligns with a longer paper trail on the subject. Google's own John Mueller had stated in 2025 that none of the major AI services were even checking for LLMs.txt files, citing server log evidence. Mueller asked pointedly why LLMs would need a special format when they had successfully processed HTML since their inception. The Think with Google piece brings that position into the CMO layer of Google's communications for the first time.

Generic content is the third named problem. According to Kraham, "in a world of infinite content, your true competitive advantage is authenticity and expertise." The piece describes what Google means by this with a concrete example: a local running store producing a deep-dive video analyzing why a specific customer's shoe collapsed, rather than a generic "Top 10 Things to Consider" article. The specific, experience-driven format is what Kraham refers to as "noncommodity content" - content that represents a genuine competitive advantage because it cannot be replicated by any brand that has not had the same direct experience.

Merchant Center feeds and Google Business Profile are specifically named as mechanisms that can help products and services appear in both AI responses and conventional search results. That detail connects Kraham's piece to a broader shift in Google's product strategy: AI performance insights in Merchant Center, announced on May 27, 2026, now allow retailers to see how their product listings appear across AI Mode, AI Overviews, and the Gemini app - covering share of voice, shopping funnel metrics, and product attribute completeness.

Website user experience is the fourth pillar. According to Kraham, this means ensuring sites display correctly across all devices, reducing latency, and making it easy for users to identify the main content. High-quality videos and images are noted as assets that "Google Search may opt to highlight" in results, potentially expanding visibility. The piece closes the website section with a point that carries implications for how brands think about AI traffic: visitors arriving from AI surfaces "may be more informed, looking to engage, or ready to convert." Losing that opportunity through a poor landing experience is framed as a risk.

Measurement is the fifth area. Kraham addresses it by setting clear limits on what Google is and is not providing. According to the piece, Google "does not evaluate third-party SEO tools or vendors directly, and they have no access to our internal metrics." The recommended focus is on "concrete business goals, including leads, sales, or sign ups" rather than proxy metrics that may move independently of actual commercial outcomes.

What is actually new in reporting tools

Two specific product developments are mentioned in support of the measurement guidance. First, Search Console has "begun rolling out new performance reports that show the number of impressions you're receiving from AI features on Google Search." The Search Console AI visibility reports, covering impressions inside AI Overviews and AI Mode across both Search and Discover, expose five data dimensions: impressions, pages, countries, devices, and dates. Prior to this update, publishers had no way to distinguish AI feature impressions from traditional organic impressions within Search Console, a gap that had frustrated the industry since AI Overviews launched in the United States in May 2024.

Second, Merchant Center has "made available reporting that shows how your product listings are showing up across our generative AI features on Search." That is a reference to the AI performance insights feature announced on May 27, 2026. The rollout is planned for five initial markets - the United States, Canada, Australia, India, and New Zealand - with no specific per-market dates confirmed. The feature includes competitive share of voice benchmarked against similar brands, shopping funnel data segmented across discovery, evaluation, and purchase stages, and a product attribute completeness score. The last element is new infrastructure that has no direct equivalent in existing Merchant Center analytics.

The commercial backdrop

The query volume milestone Kraham cites is not a standalone data point. As PPC Land reported in detail following Alphabet's Q1 2026 earnings call, Google's Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler stated on April 29, 2026 that "queries are at an all-time high" and that "AI Overviews and AI Mode continue to drive greater search usage and growth in overall queries." That earnings call also showed Google Network revenues falling 4% year-over-year as AI features absorbed more user activity inside Google's own interfaces rather than routing traffic to publisher sites.

AI Mode has now surpassed one billion monthly active users globally, with queries more than doubling every quarter since launch and average query length running three times that of traditional searches. AI Overviews reaches more than 2.5 billion monthly active users. Those two scale figures - combined with Kraham's own reference to an all-time high in queries - describe a search environment where the interface has changed dramatically even as the underlying optimization approach, according to Google, has not.

Why this matters to the marketing community

The Think with Google piece is addressed to CMOs, not practitioners. That choice of audience is significant. For months, Google's most explicit guidance on AI search optimization had come through practitioner-facing channels - Search Relations podcasts, John Mueller's social posts, Search Central Blog entries. The May 15, 2026 technical guide from Google Search Central, covering mythbusting of AEO and GEO misconceptions, reached developers and SEO specialists. Kraham's piece uses a different register: it names Lufthansa Group, Etsy, and Royal Canin as brands already extracting value from AI search features, and frames the guidance as what "CMOs need to lead in the new era of Search."

The practical tension this creates for marketing teams is real. If foundational SEO is the only strategy needed, then the significant industry investment in specialist GEO and AEO practices - what PPC Land has tracked across multiple reports and analyses through mid-2026 - is either redundant or, in some cases, counterproductive. Research from Cyrus Shepard published May 7, 2026, covering 54 experiments and patents, found that the top predictors of AI citation probability were URL accessibility (9.5 out of 10), search rank (9.4), and fan-out rank (9.3) - all of which are functions of traditional SEO performance. LLMs.txt scored 2.0, the lowest factor in the analysis.

The counter-argument has also been documented. Mike King of iPullRank argued on May 18, 2026 that Google's guidance reflects the company's platform interests rather than the multi-platform reality of AI search, pointing to technical contradictions between the guide and Google's own research, and contrasting Google's posture with more technically transparent publications from Microsoft's Bing team. That critique has not been directly addressed by Google.

What Kraham's piece adds to this ongoing debate is a clear statement of intent from within the VP level of Google's advertising organization - not the Search Relations team, and not the engineering side. The VP of Search and Commerce writing for CMOs on Think with Google represents Google's advertiser-facing business communicating an SEO message. That combination carries a specific implication: the approach that keeps brands visible in generative AI features is the same approach that drives paid search performance, which is also the approach that supports Google's own advertising revenue.

The fan-out technique and what it means structurally

One of the more technically specific details in Kraham's piece is the mention of fan-out by name. According to the piece, "AI techniques, like fan-out, allow for Google Search to highlight a wider and more diverse set of helpful links." Fan-out is the mechanism by which AI Mode processes a single complex query by subdividing it into multiple component subtopics and running searches for each in parallel, synthesizing the results into a single response. Google published data in March 2026 indicating that AI Mode queries average three times the length of traditional searches, and the fan-out technique is what makes those longer, multi-part queries computationally tractable.

The relevance to SEO is specific: fan-out expands the set of URLs that can surface for any given query, because each sub-query runs against the full search index. A site that ranks for a narrow informational topic may appear as a source within a fan-out response to a much broader question - but only if it meets the same quality standards that govern conventional organic ranking. Content that does not appear in traditional search results for relevant queries is unlikely to appear in fan-out responses either. This is the technical grounding for Kraham's claim that existing foundational SEO investment "is your launchpad for AI success."

A persistent message, now aimed higher

What Kraham's piece does not resolve is the click and traffic question. Research tracked by PPC Land has documented AI Overviews correlating with a 58% reduction in click-through rates for top-ranking pages according to Ahrefs February 2026 data. Position-one click-through rates collapse from approximately 27% to 11% when AI Overviews are present in results. The piece acknowledges that people coming from AI surfaces "may be more informed, looking to engage, or ready to convert," which implies lower volume but potentially higher quality - but it does not directly address the net effect on traffic for publishers and brands that are not retail-focused.

The measurement tools announced - Search Console AI impressions reporting and Merchant Center AI performance insights - give marketers a clearer view of how they are performing inside AI features. But the piece does not frame these as traffic recovery mechanisms. They are baseline tools for verifying whether content and technical SEO work is translating into AI feature visibility, not instruments for reversing the structural shift in how users move from search to destination.

For the marketing community, the most actionable guidance in the piece is the most unglamorous: make the site work well on every device, reduce page load times, publish content that reflects genuine expertise and direct experience, keep Merchant Center feeds current and complete, maintain an active Google Business Profile, and measure against business outcomes rather than AI-specific proxy metrics. None of that is new. Kraham's contribution is the explicit instruction - at the CMO level, from the VP of Search and Commerce - to stop diverting budget and attention toward tactics that Google's own systems do not use.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Brendon Kraham, VP of Search and Commerce for Global Ads Solutions at Google, published the piece. The guidance is addressed to CMOs and senior marketing leaders at brands advertising on Google Search. Brands named as examples of successful AI search adoption include Lufthansa Group, Etsy, and Royal Canin.

What: A guidance piece on Think with Google titled "Good SEO is good GEO," arguing that foundational search engine optimization is the only strategy needed to perform in Google's generative AI search features - including AI Mode and AI Overviews. The piece explicitly discourages investment in GEO and AEO as separate disciplines, warns against bot-optimized content and content chunking, dismisses LLMs.txt as unnecessary for Google Search, and emphasizes unique perspective and direct experience as the primary competitive differentiators. Two specific measurement tools are referenced: Search Console AI impressions reports and Merchant Center AI performance insights.

When: Published in June 2026. The Q1 2026 Alphabet earnings release, cited as the source for the all-time high in Search queries, was published on April 29, 2026.

Where: Published on Think with Google, Google's marketing insights platform directed at advertisers, CMOs, and brand marketing professionals. The guidance applies globally to all brands optimizing for Google Search, AI Mode, and AI Overviews.

Why: The piece addresses what Kraham describes as "myths floating around in the market" about AI search optimization, and the questions that brands have raised about how to reach customers through the new AI Search interfaces. With AI Mode surpassing one billion monthly active users and Google recording an all-time high in Search queries during Q1 2026, the question of what optimization approach is required has become material for marketing budgets at scale. Google's answer - that foundational SEO is unchanged and sufficient - directly contradicts a significant portion of the specialist GEO and AEO industry that has emerged since the expansion of AI-powered search features.