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Google Updates Content Guidance as AI Agents Reshape Search · Found in AI: AI Search Visibility, SEO, & GEO

• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, welcome back to Found in AI.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: I am Cassie Clark and today is October 8th.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: We have four stories to cover, and I think they are all interesting, but I am an AI search nerd, so they're all interesting.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Google has updated its guidance around what makes good main content.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: It also has explicitly told publishers to stop creating fake author profiles.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: We have new data showing that AI usage for local search has exploded over the last year, and Profound published some really interesting research into personal agents like views and instinct and how they're actually navigating the web.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna start with Google because apparently Google has decided that this is the week to spill some things out.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna start there.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Let's get into it.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: So Google recently updated its documentation around creating helpful, reliable, people first content, and there is now a whole section devoted to what Google calls quote main content.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Main content is basically anything on the page that directly helps that page accomplish its purpose.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: That can obviously include things like text and images, but Google has also specifically called out things like interactive tools, user-generated content, information behind tabs, and more importantly, page titles and headings.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: Google says its quality raters are trained to evaluate main content based on four things, which are effort, originality, talent, or skill, and accuracy.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I have to be honest, when I read this, I was a little bit annoyed about it.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Not because Google did anything wrong here, it's actually really useful guidance, but I am annoyed because Google is now spelling out something that a lot of us working in AI Search have been testing for quite a while.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: And that's just how you organize and structure the page, like the useful information on your page actually really matters.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: And when I was reading this, I immediately thought of one of my own experiments.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: A while ago, I updated an article as part of an experiment with perplexity.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now I did not completely rewrite this whole thing, I just restructured it.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now, before the update, that page appeared in about 25% of the perplexity responses, like the AI share of voice, was roughly 25% when I was testing.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: Within two hours of updating, that moved to 42%, and then the next day it was roughly 63% AI share of voice.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you go check that page now, probably not in the answer because it has sat dormant for a while.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: I need to redo that test actually and see what happens.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: But I also really want to be really careful here because this experiment does not prove that just adding a TLDR makes perplexity sight you more.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: So please do not go add 400 TLDRs to your blog post and then tell everyone that I said it was a secret to GEO.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's not how any of this works.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: What this experiment showed me though is that making information easier to identify, understand, and extract appeared alongside a very fast change and how often that page was being surfaced in that particular test.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: And now we're seeing Google put more explicit language around the quality and organization of the main content itself.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: So to me, this is another place where SEO and GEO absolutely overlap.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Not because they're the same thing, they are not, but clear structure helps humans understand information.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: It also helps search engines understand information.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: And based on what we're seeing in AI search experiments, it can help AI engines work with that information too.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: So this really isn't about stuffing more headings into an article.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Please, please don't do that either.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: But it's about making the purpose of the page obvious and making the information somebody came for easier to find.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: And frankly, I think that should have been good content strategy all along.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Google also made another change to that same helpful content documentation.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: This one's a little less nuanced.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: They just said stop making up authors.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: Google specifically warns against what it calls deceptive authorship information.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: Its examples include AI-generated headshots, fake names, and false credentials that make content look as though it was written by a human expert, even if it wasn't.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: Google says deception like this makes a page untrustworthy to users and it's automated quality systems.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now, my reaction to this one is pretty simple.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: You cannot manufacture authority.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: We have spent a long time watching people try to reverse engineer what signals they think Google wants.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now we're watching the same thing happen with AI search and these new AI engines, and everyone really just wants the shortcut.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: They're asking, can I add an expert reviewer box and does that count?
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: Can I put an author bio on every article?
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Can I manufacture mention somewhere?
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: Can I publish enough content that eventually the AI has to notice me?
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: But an author box doesn't really make someone an expert.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: A fake headshot certainly does not make somebody an expert.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: And putting reviewed by Dr.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody on a page doesn't magically give the underlying information any more credibility.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Authority is something that you build, it's something that you work on.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's the expertise attached to the people behind your company.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's your original research, it's earned media, it's what credible third parties say about you.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's whether the things that you're saying on your website are corroborated elsewhere.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that becomes even more relevant in AI Search because these engines aren't necessarily evaluating your brand based on one paint on your website.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: They're pulling information from across the web.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: Which actually brings us pretty nicely to the next story.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I am probably going to mispronounce this brand.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not actually sure how you say it.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: But SOCI released its 2026 Local Discovery Index based on a survey of more than 1,000 US consumers, and one number just immediately jumped out of this research.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: The percentage of consumers who said they had used an AI tool to find a local business in the previous 30 days went from 9% in 2025 to 52% in 2026.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's close to a six-fold increase in just one year.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Here's another part of the story that I found particularly interesting or the study.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I should say study and not sorry.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Either way, people are using AI more, but they're not necessarily trusting it more.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: 67% of AI users surveyed said they received incorrect information about a local business at least once.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now I think I have talked about this on the podcast.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: I have also had this happen.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: It was an incorrect phone number when I was trying to call a doctor out doctor's office.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: I got some random lady's cell phone number.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: And according to this survey, when an AI tool recommends a business, 81% of those respondents said they take some kind of additional step to verify it before contacting the business.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: They might check reviews or look at social media, maybe run another search, or just check multiple sources.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: SOCI calls this a verification loop.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: And that is the part the marketers need to pay attention to.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because we are still talking about AI visibility as though the goal is to get mentioned in an answer.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: But imagine somebody asks Chat GPT for a restaurant recommendation.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Chat GPT then recommends you, which is great, but then the person goes to Google and sees that your hours don't match what ChatGPT had just said.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Or they check Instagram and they see that you haven't posted since 2024.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: Or they look at reviews and discover three people saying something completely different than what the AI just told them.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: Did you actually win because you got the recommendation?
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: No, not really.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: You entered the consideration set, which is great, but that's different.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: This is why I keep saying that AI search visibility is bigger than SEO and bigger than citations.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: The buyer doesn't experience your marketing channels in the neat little organized boxes that companies use internally.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it seems neither does AI.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: Your website reviews, your social presence, your PR, your third-party coverage, your local listing, all of those things are contributing to the information environment around a brand.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: And they all need to be as accurate as possible.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: Which brings me to the last story because we're now moving away from AI helping somebody research a business to AI actually doing some of that research for them.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: So Profound published research this week, it was October 2nd, looking at two personal AI agents.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: That is Muse, and then the other one is Instinct.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: Shout out to not Brown at Profound if you're listening.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for sending this straight to me.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: This one actually just caught my attention because I've been playing with Muse myself.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: If you've been listening to the podcast or you're on the visibility report, I've been talking about this a little bit.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: Personal agents are different from answer engines that we've spent the last couple of years talking about.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: With something like ChatGBT search, you go ask a question, you get an answer, and you're done.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: A personal agent, though, like Muse, or where Gemini is kind of headed, is designed to actually carry out parts of that task for you.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: It can research products, it can compare options, it remembers your preferences, it's very personalized, visits websites for you, and then it can potentially take action on your behalf.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: Profound found that Muse maintains a shopping profile containing preferences by product category.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: So when someone makes a shopping request, Muse checks the profile, it can search its memory for additional context, it browses merchant websites and also searches meta product catalogs before filtering those candidates into recommendations.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now, here's where it gets interesting for marketers.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Muse and Instinct can visit websites live using a browser.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: So they're not simply relying on previously indexed content.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Profound says they navigate using the accessibility tree, so essentially the structured description the browser creates from your HTML and accessibility labels.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: Semantic HTML and clear labels can therefore help these agents understand how to navigate a website.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: In Profound's small exploratory muse test, and I want to emphasize small here because it was 50 prompts in one retail category, the browser typically visited three domains and returned four products from two merchant sites.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: Meta's product catalog separately returned roughly 60 products from about 30 merchant sites.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: Those candidates were then filtered down into recommendations.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: This is where I think we need to start expanding the AI visibility conversation.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: We have spent the last little bit asking: can AI find my brand?
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: Does it understand it?
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Does it cite my content?
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: Does it recommend me?
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: And they've said this before, and I will say it until I am blue in the face.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: The next question is: can the agent actually interact with my brand?
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: If I had to dust off my crystal ball, I would say we are headed to agentic commerce maybe much faster than we realize.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: It might still take a couple of months, but I think that's where we're headed.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: And this is important because being visible to an AI system and being usable by an AI agent are not necessarily the same problem.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: I had a really interesting experience with Muse recently that I'm still digging into and I want to kind of mention it here.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: I had a conversation with it about how it was navigating websites, because sometimes if you just interrogate these AI chatbots enough, they will tell you how they work.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: Muse sung like a canary.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: But but I had this conversation with it about how it was navigating websites and some of the friction it was encountering.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: Several days later, like after I had stopped talking about the subject, it was almost actually two weeks later, Muse proactively sent me a notification with a newly published article related to that earlier conversation.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: I kind of stared at my phone for a minute, I'm not even gonna lie to you, because that was a very different discovery experience.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't search again, I didn't ask another question, I actually really haven't touched Muse since that first experiment.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: But the agent remembered something that I cared about, it encountered new information, and then it brought it back to me.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: Now, again, I want to do more digging before I make any sweeping claims about how exactly that process works, but think about what that behavior could mean.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: Like today I searched for information when I need it.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: Tomorrow I may tell an agent what I care about once, and then it just keeps looking for me.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: That changes discovery, it changes shopping, and it really changes research.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'm over here thinking about how I can use it for my own my own research with the podcast and the news updates and all of the things.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: But for marketers, it changes what it means to be findable.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: We are moving from optimizing for a moment of search toward creating an information environment that both people and their agents can continuously discover, understand, verify, and potentially act on.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I still think that we are very ugly in figuring out what that actually requires or what it means, which absolutely means I'm gonna keep poking at these personal assistants until I understand them better.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, I will report back what I learned.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: So, quick recap before we wrap up.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: Google is putting more emphasis on the quality and structure of actual information on the page.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's also making it very clear that you cannot manufacture authority by inventing experts or creating the appearance of expertise that isn't really there.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time, we're seeing consumer behavior shift.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: More people are using AI for local discovery, but they're still verifying what those systems tell them across reviews, search, social media, and all these other sources out there.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then personal agents take this one step further.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: They're not just answering questions, they can browse websites, remember your preferences, research on your behalf, and potentially bring back information to us without us initiating another search.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes that can be as much as two weeks later, probably longer, time will tell.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: When we put all that together, I think the bigger story this week is that AI visibility is becoming less about optimizing for a single answer and more about the entire information environment around your brand.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: Your content needs to be understandable, the authority needs to be real, the information about you across the web needs to hold up when someone or their AI agent goes looking, and your website may need to work for agents as well as humans.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: There is still quite a bit that we do not know about how all of this develops or how it's gonna take shape, but I think we are seeing a very clear direction here.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: And with that, that's it for today's news update.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: If you want more of this kind of analysis, you can subscribe to the visibility report.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: I send it every Friday with what I'm seeing in AI surge, discovery, and really the buyer journey, including the experiments in the rabbit holes that don't always make it into the podcast or anywhere else that I'm talking about it.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: I will be back on Tuesday with another guest episode.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: Until then, stay visible.