Is Your Answer Engine Optimization Hurting Your Google Rankings?

Whether you’re a marketing professional, business owner, or organizational leader, you know that Answer Engine Optimization (aka AEO, GEO, AIO, LLMO) is constantly being talked about right now. As a result, there are tons of self proclaimed “experts” giving advice on X, Instagram and YouTube on how to optimize your brand for better visibility on ChatGPT, Google Gemini and other LLMs. And while of course we believe in the importance of improving visibility on major answer engines, that shouldn’t come at a trade off of harming your visibility on Google or your overall brand reputation. Smart marketers understand that specific tactics that help your visibility on answer engines may in fact cause you to lose visibility, traffic from Google and overall trust in your brand. With that in mind, be very careful about who you listen to when it comes to AEO/GEO. Some bad advice we’ve seen of late:

• “Remove long-form content from your site! Just focus on creating short answers for answer engines.”
• “Forget about Google rankings! Answers engines are all that matter now.”
• “Answer engines don’t care about link quality, so create lots of listicle articles even on low quality sites!“

The next time you see a post telling you to use a specific tactic to improve answer engine visibility, think twice before you take any action. What are the credentials of the person making these recommendations? Does this person have a very deep understanding of SEO? How will doing this make my brand look to prospective clients? Think carefully before you take action. Something that is ok today may be against answer engine guidelines tomorrow.

Answer Engines Won’t Ignore Manipulation Tactics Forever

As an long-time agency owner, I’ve been helping business get dominant visibility on Google through SEO for more than 20 years. Over that time, I’ve seen the way that Google has evolved in the way they combat spam and over aggressive optimization tactics. Spam on any platform is damaging to the user base. Whether it’s ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AIO or Gemini, these systems have a very strong incentive to protect trust. If users start getting low-quality, biased, or spammy answers, they will stop using that answer engine and start using a different one. That’s not a risk any of these platforms are willing to take.

So what happens next is predictable, based on how we’ve seen Google evolve over the past two decades. Signals evolve. Sources get scrutinized. Patterns of abuse get dampened or penalized. Rules will change. The tactics that rely on thin “summary-only” pages, mass-produced “best of” lists, or using AI generated content at scale is likely living on borrowed time. And when those tactics stop working, the sites that leaned too hard into them won’t just lose answer engine visibility. They may find themselves losing their Google traffic as well.

Smart Marketers Optimizing for Answer Engines in 2026 are Keeping Google Top of Mind

The smartest approach in 2026 is to optimize for answer engines while keeping Google search front and center. At this point in time, if your brand ranks high on Google SERPS, it gives you a much greater likelihood to be cited by an answer engine. While this will likely change at some point in the future, Google is very much a part of how answer engines validate their answers.

ChatGPT, for example, uses Google Search as a core grounding mechanism to improve the accuracy and timeliness of its responses. Grounding is the process of anchoring an AI’s response to real-world, verifiable data rather than just information that exist in the training data of an LLM. It forces the AI to “show its work” by referencing specific, up-to-date sources like custom documents, specialized databases, or live web search results. Guess where those live web search results come from for ChatGPT? Google! While OpenAI originally relied primarily on Microsoft Bing, it officially integrated Google Search results via SERP API in August 2025.

So, keep Google top of mind when it comes to your answer engine optimization efforts. If you don’t, it may end up costing you significant traffic and revenue. And that’s not what smart marketers do in 2026.