Early 1990s to 1998, before Google
I was running my own computer consumables business, and I optimised it myself, out of commercial necessity rather than as a discipline anyone had named yet. Ranking on Lycos, AltaVista and Ask Jeeves, five years before Google launched. At one point, for a laugh, I got the business ranking number one on Lycos for the single term bank. In hindsight I should probably have kept hold of that one.
1998 onwards, the PageRank era
The PageRank era began in 1998, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin introduced the algorithm that gave Google its advantage. By the time it arrived I already had seven or eight years of ranking sites in search behind me, so the shift was a change of mechanism rather than a change of trade: work out what the machine is rewarding, then earn it rather than fake it.
2016 to 2019, answer engines, first time round
At least eight years before ChatGPT I was ranking answers in voice search, on Alexa and the assistants around it. Technically it was good fun. Commercially it went nowhere, because very few people were actually searching for products and services by voice, and low adoption meant low client interest.
What it taught me: when a machine returns one answer instead of ten links, second place is worth nothing. I saw that on a device in people's kitchens years before anyone was discussing AI Overviews. Same problem now, vastly larger scale.
The algorithm decade
A decade in which digital media and social platforms all ran on the same core assumption: that the algorithm would actively curate and deliver an audience straight to your content. I spent a large part of it on video, ranking on YouTube and building video specifically to rank, because video was being pulled into the main Google index faster than anything else you could publish.
2019–2022, saying it out loud
The posts above, written while the industry consensus was still that search would keep sending links and keep sending traffic.
The honest answer is that almost nothing happened. I could not sell it. There was no demand for answer engine optimisation as a service in 2019, so none of that writing was lead generation. It was me showing what I thought was coming. Not one client was won on the back of any of it.
The revenue came from somewhere else entirely. Social media and ordinary SEO, getting clients ranked in Google, because that is what people were buying. I pitched AEO to a few larger brands and it did not land. They did not see the value, and I understand why, because the other half of the problem was attribution. I could not show them what it was worth. That is still the hardest part of this work, and it is why measurement is now the first thing I sell rather than the last thing I mention.
The comments on those posts were mostly fair questions. What did I know. Was this even a thing. Could it really happen. I have gone back to a few of them recently and left a reply saying the comments aged well.
2023–now
ChatGPT arrives, the category forms, and the thing I'd been describing since 2019 becomes the thing everyone needs. Question.marketing is the practice built for it: question research feeding both outreach and answer-first pages, with results published in a public ledger, including the interventions that produced nothing.
