Agentic engine optimization: Google AI director outlines new content playbook
A Google Cloud AI director is urging teams to rethink SEO for the age of AI agents, introducing a framework for how machines consume content.
Addy Osmani, Google Cloud AI’s director of engineering, published an article April 11 on Agentic Engine Optimization (AEO). In it, Osmani said sites should restructure content for AI agents that fetch, parse, and act on pages differently than humans do.
He compared this AEO, not to be confused with Answer Engine Optimization, to SEO, but for a different consumer.
What is AEO. He defined it as the practice of structuring and serving technical content so AI agents can use it, not just render it. That includes discoverability, parsability, token efficiency, capability signaling, and access control.
The token problem. Osmani said long, bloated pages can be truncated, skipped, or chunked poorly by agents working within limited context windows, raising the odds of incomplete answers or hallucinated implementations.
How content needs to change. Token count is now a core optimization factor, Osmani said, adding his advice:
- Keep quick starts under roughly 15,000 tokens, conceptual guides under 20,000, and individual API references under 25,000 when possible.
- Pages should front-load the answer within the first 500 tokens because agents have “limited patience for preamble.”
Markdown over HTML. Osmani also pushed for serving clean markdown, exposing token counts, creating llms.txt as a discovery layer, and using skill.md or AGENTS.md files to help agents understand capabilities, constraints, and key docs before spending context budget on full pages.
- He released an open-source audit tool, agentic-seo, to check for some of those signals.
Why we care. Osmani’s recommendations align with what many SEOs are already testing for AI retrieval: shorter, cleaner pages, clearer semantic signals, machine-readable formats, and content that gets to the point fast. These all affect whether your content appears in AI-driven responses.
Between the lines. To be clear, the type of AEO Osmani discussed in his article is unrelated to Google Search or organic search rankings. What his article highlights is that content may now need to work for two audiences at once: humans reading pages and agents extracting them.
- Of note, Google’s John Mueller recommended against markdown pages, calingl it “a stupid idea.”
- Also, Google doesn’t use the llms.txt file.
The article. Agentic Engine Optimization (AEO)
Dig deeper:
Search Engine Land is owned by Semrush. We remain committed to providing high-quality coverage of marketing topics. Unless otherwise noted, this page’s content was written by either an employee or a paid contractor of Semrush Inc.
About the Author
