MBD114: Google's AEO/GEO Guidelines: What They Mean for Your Marketing Strategy

26 October 2025 | Issue #114

In this issue:

Here's How to Get Listed in AEO/GEO
Claude Gets Some New Skills
Prompt Injection Poses Real Security Risk for AI Browser Agents
Marketing Adoption of AI Tools Hits 60% Daily Usage Among Professionals
Generative AI in Healthcare Projected to Reach $14.2B by 2034
Google Just Killed 90% of the Internet (and Nobody is Talking About it)
Curious About AI Browsers? Read This Before You Try Them
New Book by Lee Densmer
Design Quote of the Week

**Midjourney Prompt:** a kid is using a magnifying glass to find something. A vibrant, high-contrast illustration using flat vector-style shading with neon and duotone color blocking. The characters are stylized with exaggerated lighting in yellow and cyan tones, set against a magenta background. There’s a strong use of shadow and highlight to create depth without using gradients. It uses clean lines and a minimal background to keep focus on the figures and objects. --ar 16:9

Google’s New AEO/GEO Guidelines: What They Mean for Your Marketing Strategy

Google just told us exactly how to optimize for AI-powered search. And most marketers will ignore it. That’s a mistake.

Here’s the thing: Google didn’t whisper these guidelines in a press release buried on a forgotten blog. They published them directly, made them official, and then… crickets. The marketing world moved on. But what Google laid out in their AEO (AI Engine Optimization) and GEO (Google Engine Optimization) guidelines are actually the most practical instructions we’ve gotten about thriving in an AI-altered search landscape.

The fundamentals didn’t change, they evolved

Remember when everyone panicked about Google’s “AI Overviews” cannibalizing search results? The worry was that AI summaries would replace clicks entirely. But Google’s guidelines suggest something more nuanced. Yes, AI is mediating search results now. But that doesn’t mean traditional SEO principles died. It means they got more demanding.

Google is essentially saying: if you want to show up in AI-generated answers, your content needs to be more authoritative, more specific, and more useful than ever before. You can’t rely on keyword stuffing. You can’t hide behind thin content. AI models are actually reading and evaluating comprehensively. Mediocre content gets filtered out faster.

What should catch your attention is that Google’s guidance emphasizes expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, the E-E-A-T framework they’ve been pushing for years. But now these aren’t just ranking factors. They’re the difference between being considered for AI-generated summaries and being invisible.

Your brand’s voice in an AI-mediated world

Here’s where it gets interesting for marketers and designers: Google’s guidelines highlight how important it is to have distinctive brand voice and perspective. AI models need to understand what makes your content different, why it matters, and who it’s for. Generic content that could come from anywhere? AI will bury it or blend it into something else.

This means the old game of “write for the algorithm” has evolved into something more like “write authentically, with clarity and specificity.” It’s actually good news for brands that have a real point of view. If you can articulate why your perspective matters, AI models can surface that more reliably than algorithmic ranking ever could.

The flip side? If you’ve been coasting on mediocre content and vague positioning, AI search is going to expose that faster and more ruthlessly than Google ever did. Sorry.

The practical takeaway

So what do you actually do with this? Start here: audit your content through the lens of what an AI model would need to understand it. Is your expertise clear? Can an AI model figure out who you’re writing for and why they should care? Does your content answer the specific question someone is actually asking, or is it general enough to apply to anyone?

It sounds simple, but most content fails this test. Most brands haven’t even started thinking about it.

Google handed us a roadmap. The fact that most people aren’t following it means there’s still time to get ahead. The AI future of search isn’t as mysterious as people want to believe. It’s just more honest about what actually matters.

One of the things I'm doing is adding FAQs to my site. It helps structure your information in a way that AI systems prefer to ingest.

NEWS AT THE INTERSECTION OF MARKETING, DESIGN, & AI

Claude Gets Some New Skills

According to Anthropic, “Think of Skills as custom onboarding materials that let you package expertise, making Claude a specialist on what matters most to you.”

Use a pre-built Skill, or upload your own

Prompt Injection Poses Real Security Risk for AI Browser Agents

With AI browsers gaining traction, cybersecurity researchers are flagging serious vulnerability: prompt injection attacks that could compromise user privacy and security. Both OpenAI and Perplexity have acknowledged the risks. As these tools request access to email, calendars, and contact lists, the surface area for attack expands significantly. It’s early days, but it’s a real problem worth understanding.

Marketing Adoption of AI Tools Hits 60% Daily Usage Among Professionals

New research from Social Media Examiner shows 60% of marketers now use AI tools daily (up from 37% in 2024), with ChatGPT dominating at 90% adoption, followed by Google Gemini at 51% and Claude at 33%. The data suggests AI isn’t a trend anymore—it’s infrastructure. Interestingly, only 36% of marketers worry about job displacement, suggesting most view AI as complementary.

Generative AI in Healthcare Projected to Reach $14.2B by 2034

Market projections show generative AI in healthcare expanding from $1.1 billion in 2024 to $14.2 billion by 2034, driven by adoption in drug discovery, medical imaging, and documentation. While the numbers are impressive, challenges around model bias, data privacy, and computational costs remain. For marketers in healthcare and adjacent sectors, understanding these dynamics is essential context.

Google Just Killed 90% of the Internet (and Nobody is Talking About it)

Google killed something called the &num=100 parameter. Adding this to your Google search gave you 100 results, as opposed to the regular ten. SEO tools used this extensively. These tools now have to work harder to get the same results. So you'll either see worse results or higher prices.

Curious About AI Browsers? Read This Before You Try Them

This week we saw ChatGPT enter the browser game with Atlas. Combined with Anthropic's Comet browser, Edge's integration with CoPilot, and Gemini now a part of Chrome, everyone is fighting for dominance in the new world order. For now, I'm sticking with Chrome until we know how AI and and browsing are combining.

RECENT AND UPCOMING ENGAGEMENTS

Lee Densmer is now a Tilt author. Her book, Content, Simplified, was released a little over a week ago. It's a simple, no-nonsense guide will help you build a content strategy that works without overwhelming your team.

She lays out the top 40 problems she’s seen across dozens of customers and shows you exactly how to fix them. It’s for content managers, CMOs and marketing leaders, and even writers wanting to learn more about strategy and can even be a great way to train teams. It’s available at leedensmer.com/book/

DESIGN QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“Simplicity, carried to an extreme, becomes elegance.” – John Franklin

My AI disclaimer: I'm trying out Claude Skills, so it helped me write the main article and a few of the news summaries. If AI generates the images, I include the prompt so you can see how I got to that image.