Written by Josh Bouwman, Head of Digital
In January 1996, Bill Gates published an essay called “Content is King.” At the time, Google didn’t exist and search engine optimisation as a discipline was barely a concept. And yet, what Gates was predicting wasn’t really about search at all. It was about something more fundamental: that the internet would reward the people and businesses willing to share genuine expertise, real information, and actual value.
“If people are to be expected to put up with turning on a computer to read a screen, they must be rewarded with deep and extremely up-to-date information that they can explore at will.” – Bill Gates, 1996
At the time, it was describing the standard that every version of search, from the earliest crawlers to today’s AI assistants, has been trying to apply ever since.
Nearly three decades later, the definition of what “being found online” looks like has changed substantially. The tools, the platforms, the acronyms – all different. But the underlying principle? It hasn’t moved an inch.
The shift you should understand, not fear
Have you caught yourself thinking, “I’ll just ask ChatGPT”?
The narrative for search is changing. The phrase “I’ll just Google it” is morphing, for what feels like the first time. The way we find information on the internet is evolving, led by the rise of AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and even Siri. The path from question to answer has shortened dramatically, and that compression is changing traffic patterns.
Research from PayPal Australia in mid-2025 found that 48% of Australians had already used an AI assistant to help them search for products online. Separately, Google and IPSOS research from early 2025 found that nearly half of Australians (49%) had used a generative AI tool in the past year. These aren’t fringe numbers. This is mainstream behaviour, and 12 months on, it’s accelerating.
But let me be clear: traffic changing is not the same as your audience disappearing. People are still looking for businesses like yours… They’re just finding answers in different places.
Before any business starts debating SEO vs AEO or worrying about which acronym to optimise for, the most valuable question is far simpler: where are my customers actually searching?
Not where you assume they are, but where the data confirms they are. That distinction matters more than you realise. And it’s something I work closely with clients on, to understand where their customers actually are, and how they can meet them there.
Let’s clear up the acronyms
AEO. GEO. AIO. LLMO. If you’ve been trying to keep up, you’re not alone; even agencies and industry experts working in this space don’t fully agree on what to call it. What we can agree on is that this is a meaningful shift, and the businesses that move thoughtfully and early will hold an advantage that’s genuinely hard to close later.
Here’s a plain-language breakdown.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) focuses on ranking well in traditional search results; think of your standard Google or Bing listings.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) focuses on appearing in the AI-generated answer boxes that now sit above those results: position zero. If you’re not there, you’re already falling into second place.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) goes a step further; it’s about being cited inside AI-generated responses on platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity, where users often receive a synthesised answer with a small number of referenced sources rather than a list of links.
Are these completely separate disciplines? Not quite. And here’s where the data becomes genuinely useful. Research from Brainlabs in mid-2025 analysed how AI Overviews decide what to cite and found that 96% of the links appearing in AI-generated answers came from websites already ranking in the top ten organic search results.
That’s an important finding. The sites winning in AI search are, overwhelmingly, the same sites that have been winning in traditional search, all because they built the right foundations.
The most practical way to think about it is roughly 70% of what you need to perform across SEO, AEO and GEO is the same strong foundation: genuine authority, content that clearly answers real questions, solid technical website health, and a website architecture that both humans and search engines can navigate.
The remaining 30% is thinking specifically about how AI systems read and reference your content: structured data, clear entity signals, answers that are concise enough to be cited with confidence.
Most businesses aren’t struggling with the 30%. They’re struggling with the 70%. Getting the foundations genuinely right (not just ticked off a checklist) is still the most important thing any business can do to show up across every version of search that exists and every version that’s still coming.
The AI content problem
There’s a version of this conversation that goes: “Easy, I’ll just use AI to write all my content and solve this overnight.”
The logic is understandable, but the outcome, in most cases, doesn’t hold up.
AI has a genuine role in good content production, and there’s no hiding that it’s widely used (our agency included). When applied thoughtfully, it improves both the speed and quality of the work. But there is a meaningful difference between AI as a tool within a considered strategy and AI as a substitute for one.
Google has made its position increasingly clear. As part of its January 2025 update to the Search Quality Rater Guidelines, Google instructed its human quality raters to explicitly flag pages where the main content appears auto or AI-generated, and to rate them as lowest quality.
That’s a significant escalation. John Mueller, Google’s Search Relations lead, went further late last year, warning directly against using AI language models to create content clusters, describing the practice as building “liability” into your website and giving visitors “reasons not to visit any part of your site.”
Right now, a significant volume of content is being published that was generated without real expertise, a genuine point of view, or any meaningful understanding of the audience it’s meant to reach. It has become obvious. Readers can identify it. Search engines are increasingly able to flag it. And AI systems, when deciding which sources to cite, are not rewarding it. It’s what’s now referred to as “AI slop”.
Content that performs, that gets cited, that builds authority, that actually converts a reader into a customer, demonstrates that you genuinely know something. It shows real familiarity with the topic, the question, and the person asking it. That is a human standard. AI can accelerate how you meet it. But it can’t replace it.
So what content actually works for AI?
Content that performs across search, AI Overviews and generative responses in 2026 tends to share a few consistent qualities. It answers a specific question clearly, ideally in the opening paragraph. It’s structured so that both a human reader and an AI system can extract the point quickly. It demonstrates genuine knowledge; not a surface-level overview, but the depth that signals to any reader, human or machine, that the person writing it actually understands the subject.
And it lives on a website built to support it. This is where conversations about website development have shifted. A good website isn’t just one that looks credible but it’s one that’s technically sound, fast, clearly structured, and designed in a way that reinforces rather than undermines the quality of the content. Those decisions need to be made together, from the start of the project.
Bill Gates wrote that audiences would reward publishers who gave them something genuinely worth their time. That standard hasn’t lowered. The tools for finding and evaluating content have just become considerably more sophisticated.
Final thoughts
The businesses that will show up reliably across search, AEO and GEO aren’t the ones who produce the most content, or the ones who found the fastest AI shortcut. They’re the ones building strategies around genuine expertise with websites designed to carry that expertise effectively.
If you’re a marketing manager or business owner working out where to direct your digital marketing investment, the starting point is the same as it’s always been. Know your customer. Understand where they’re looking. Give them something worth finding.
And if you need help working out what that looks like? Let’s have a chat.
