How Google's AI Search Rewards Communities — A Practical GEO/AEO/SEO Playbook

Google just published its most direct guidance yet on how content surfaces inside AI-powered search — AI Overviews, AI Mode, and the broader generative experience. This is the playbook we wrote for ourselves while rebuilding Led by Community, mapped to the actual components and files that ship it. Lift any pattern you like.

Translate the jargon — one line each, then we use the terms freely.

• SEO — Search Engine Optimization. Making your pages easy for Google to understand and rank.

• GEO — Generative Engine Optimization. Same fundamentals, but the goal is being cited inside an AI answer.

• AEO — Answer Engine Optimization. Sister term to GEO, focused on direct-answer surfaces.

• LLM — Large Language Model. The thing behind ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, AI Overviews.

• Crawler — A bot that reads your pages so a search or AI engine can index them.

• Schema / JSON-LD — A hidden block of structured data on your page that tells machines "this is an Article", "this is an Event", with typed fields (author, date, location).