Mike King is right about Google. And right about Bing.

Mike King's piece on Google's updated generative AI guidance landed yesterday, and the central argument is correct. Google's public guidance has a long track record of nudging the industry in directions that benefit Google first. The Content Warehouse leak made that explicit two years ago. You don't have to assume bad faith to assume self-interest, and Google's interest right now is keeping the SEO industry calm, deferential, and pointed at the same surface it's always optimised for.

Bing, by contrast, is publishing posts that openly name what's happening. Agents are doing the browsing. Grounding requires structure. GEO is a discipline. They're shipping citation tooling inside Webmaster Tools. King reads this as Microsoft being honest where Google is being protective, and I think he's right about that too.

But here's where I part company with the read. The fact that Bing is being more candid than Google does not mean Bing's framing is the one to optimise around. It means Bing has different incentives. The trap, for anyone reading King's piece this morning and feeling vindicated, is mistaking "more honest" for "more correct about what you should do."

Two companies, two incentives, neither neutral

Google's incentive is to keep the index it dominates looking continuous with the index it dominated last year. Telling 5 million SEOs that everything has changed would invite them to look elsewhere. Telling them it's "still SEO" keeps the flywheel turning.

Bing's incentive is the opposite. Bing has been the also-ran of search for two decades. The AI shift is the first genuine opening Microsoft has had since 2009. Of course Bing is publishing aggressive GEO documentation. Of course they're shipping citation tooling. Of course Jordi Ribas is naming Generative Engine Optimization without air quotes. Microsoft has everything to gain from convincing the industry that this is a new discipline requiring new tools, new vendors, and new platform attention — and Microsoft owns one of those platforms.

This is not a criticism of Bing. It's just noting that "Microsoft is being more transparent than Google" and "Microsoft is more neutral than Google" are different sentences. Neither company is your friend. Neither company's documentation is the spec. They're both marketing to you.

The leaked documents argument cuts both ways

King's strongest move is the Content Warehouse reference. The leak showed Google's public guidance and internal reality diverging. Fair. That's a real piece of evidence that Google's documentation should be read with scepticism rather than as scripture.

Treating either company's public posture as a map of the territory is the mistake. The territory is what the systems actually do.

But the same scepticism has to apply to Bing's documentation. There is no Microsoft Content Warehouse leak. We don't know the gap between what Bing says about grounding and what their systems actually weight. We don't know whether the AI Performance tab in Webmaster Tools is showing the real citation graph or a sanitised summary of it. We don't know whether "GEO" as Microsoft describes it is what Microsoft's models actually reward, or what Microsoft would *like* publishers to think they reward, for strategic reasons that benefit Microsoft.

Treating either company's public posture as a map of the territory is the mistake. The territory is what the systems actually do.

What the King piece gets exactly right

Where I fully agree with King: the "it's just SEO" camp is performing a victory lap they haven't earned. Google's guide gave them a paragraph they liked, and they treated it as confirmation that nothing structural has changed. That's intellectually lazy and commercially convenient. The discovery surface has fragmented across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, Reddit, TikTok, and YouTube, and pretending Google's word on that fragmentation is the final word is the kind of mistake that ends consulting careers.

I've written before that Google's GEO playbook is the SEO playbook, and I stand by that — the *fundamentals* haven't changed, and most "GEO tactics" are SEO tactics with a new label. But "the fundamentals haven't changed" is not the same as "nothing has changed." The fundamentals are necessary. They are not sufficient. The surface on which they're rendered, the systems that interpret them, and the channels through which they reach buyers — all of that has changed, and Google has a vested interest in your not noticing how much.

The actual position to hold

Read Google's guidance. Read Bing's guidance. Read King's piece. Read Lily Ray's analysis of what happens to sites that took the AI content vendors at their word. Then form your own view from the work, not from the documentation.

The honest stance, after 18 years of watching this industry be played by both Mountain View and Redmond, is that platform documentation is always a lagging, motivated indicator of reality. Google tells you what they want you to do. Bing tells you what they want you to do. Both serve the publisher's interests precisely as much as those interests align with the platform's, and not one inch further.

The thing King's piece risks doing — and I don't think he intends this — is replacing one source of scripture with another. Don't treat Google as scripture. Don't treat Bing as scripture either. Treat both as marketing collateral from platforms with skin in the game, then triangulate from the things you can actually measure: log files, citation appearances, branded search trends, referral patterns where you can still see them.

The leverage Google had to define "good content" is fragmenting. The leverage Bing wants is the same kind, on a different platform.

What this means for the next twelve months

If you're advising clients in 2026, the practical implication is that no platform's guidance is enough to build a strategy on. The smart move is to read everything Microsoft publishes about GEO — because Microsoft is being unusually open, and that openness contains real signal — while treating their framing of the problem as one company's view, not the industry's settled position.

Bing's openness is useful. Their citation tooling is genuinely a step forward, and it's roughly two years ahead of where Google Search Console is on the same problem. Use it. But don't mistake "the only platform shipping the tool" for "the platform with the right model of the world." Microsoft is shipping the tool because Microsoft needs to recruit publishers to a fight Google is currently winning. That's a real, useful, mutually-beneficial alignment of interests. It's not neutrality.

King is right that Google is being naive and self-serving in its guidance. He's right that Bing is being more candid. Where he leaves a gap — and where the consulting class is going to walk straight into it — is the implication that more candid means more correct. It doesn't. It means more usefully aligned with publishers right now. Those are not the same thing. And in a year, when Microsoft has the publishers it needs and the strategic calculus shifts, we'll find out which one it was.