Answer engines vs search engines: what I actually believe in 2026

Cold open: AEO, GEO, and whether search shrinks

Good morning on this fine Monday morning on the 14th of September, 2026. I thought I'd talk to you today about what's happening in AEO and where it came from. So I used to talk a lot about AEO, answer engine optimisation, back in 2019, 2020.

The debate continues to this day. Um, obviously Google are talking about whether AEO, GEO are part of SEO, and that would be Google's, um, you know, Google's mode is they want everyone to feel like AEO and GEO are part of SEO. Google does not own the web.

Let's remember that. So Google does not own search. Um, it may well be the number one search engine and has been for as long as anybody can remember.

But the problem is that search is an index, and that index is the web. And I was around when the web started, and I remember building sites on Lycos, Ask Jeeves, FTP, and that, you know, was even- eventually taken over by Google. Google acts like it owns the internet, and to an extent it does.

But we are entering a whole new world, and this is the argument that the SEO guys don't like. Search engine optimisation for search engines. And there is a possibility, maybe people are gonna say I'm on crack or on mushrooms, but, and that has been said to me in comments and sent to me in private messages, 'cause I said maybe we're entering a world where search engines don't exist.

[Personal observation, not a cited study. Simon (via CoS) approved this softening for the published transcript page. Video remains as filmed.]

We're already at the point, um, in 2026 now that, and this is my observation from what I see, not a study I'm citing, a lot of people, if you give them AI, so you give somebody ChatGPT, and that's typically where they all start out. It's where I started out. You give somebody ChatGPT, and six months later, their web searches have dropped sharply, often by what looks like over half.

Now, you've got things like Muse coming. You've got, uh, Claude. I'm a massive Claude user.

You've got Grok. You've got Perplexity. You've got others, right?

Copilot, et cetera. And as we move forward, the e- the problem has always been adoption. Adoption of this tech is what moves the needle.

So if you go back to when video started and VHS and Betamax, VHS won. May- maybe there's people listening to this don't even know what VHS tapes are, right? But when VHS won, it won because it was the most adopted tech.

We cannot argue that AI is not getting adopted. It is getting adopted at scale and at pace, and everybody is using it, and it's getting forced on people. You know, you're getting every single device.

I wrote a book back in 2021.

Alexa barrier, the 2021 book, and voice search setup

I wrote a book back in 2021. It was my lockdown project. I wrote a book about how your toaster might be listening to you and, um, I wrote, you know, here are those receipts.

If you wanna, if you wanna check out the question.marketing website, you can see all of the things I wrote, what I was talking about, and that's not me bragging. That's just me saying that I was talking about, at the time, in the main, voice search. So I was talking a lot about Alexa, um, you know, the Alexa voice search in home could well have been huge, right?

And maybe should have been, but the, the barrier to entry was most people didn't have an Alexa, for one, and two, there was a cost attached to owning one, and then you had to change people's behaviour. So you had to get somebody to, you know, have an Alexa in their kitchen, go in there and say, "Oh, can you tell me about the weather today?" Or can you... We didn't get to the stage or, or 99.9% of people didn't get to the stage of saying, "I'm actually looking for a new pair of trainers.

I wanna go for a run. Can you suggest something, Alexa, and tell me, you know, a few of the particular brands that would work for me," et cetera, right? That's just a barrier to entry.

And I was, you know, I was convinced we're moving or were moving into a voice search universe, and I am still convinced we will move into voice search AI.

Voice / spoken layer and the snake-oil question

And I was, you know, I was convinced we're moving or were moving into a voice search universe, and I am still convinced we will move into voice search AI. So AI voice optimisation or AIVO will become a thing. At the moment, the argument is, are we at, uh, a point where search engines are becoming redundant to a, to a level where people will not use them as much?

Yes, local business, amazing. Reviews need to be there. The, the web is becoming more of an index or becoming what it should have been in the first place without a monopoly being held by, for example, Google, right?

So are we talking about, are we talking about AEO or answer engine optimisation? People say it could be the new snake oil. Is it, you know, or generative engine optimisation?

It's, it's technical and you need to do all sorts of different things. Well, fundamentally, you do need search engine optimisation, or actually you need the skills that were the foundational, um, skills that you need to put into rank a page or to get it read by, um, an AI or by Google.

SEO history and Black Hat World aside

Well, fundamentally, you do need search engine optimisation, or actually you need the skills that were the foundational, um, skills that you need to put into rank a page or to get it read by, um, an AI or by Google. Now, looking back, you know, and I've done SEO for 25 plus years. I've done all the naughty stuff.

I've tried all the tricks, right? And I'm one of the founding members of something called Black Hat World. I was in there very early on And I still go in there to read really interesting tactics because everybody is trying to work their way around how do I get my website ranked in answer engines.

Citations in answer engines vs Google-only SEO

Now, we have to say that search is fundamentally disappearing, and the SEO guys will say, "Well, Google says, uh, you know, it's, it's business as usual. SEO is SEO, um, and AEO and GEO equal SEO, so therefore SEO is SEO and SEO is everything." Well, that's talking about a search engine, and the search engine that they are talking about is Google. They are not talking about Claude, Perplexity, CoWork, any of the other, um, you know, ChatGPT.

They're not talking about how you get cited in there. And those are not search engines, they are answer engines, and the job of getting ranked in those is generative engine optimisation to produce content which ranks and is cited, and more importantly, pay attention to the word cited. Back in the olden days, and I'm saying in the olden days, that's, you know, a f- a couple of years ago, um, in search, you wanna get links.

Link building, hot-tub tangent, and brand trust

Back in the olden days, and I'm saying in the olden days, that's, you know, a f- a couple of years ago, um, in search, you wanna get links. You know, if we talk about link building, there were days when, you know, you would go out and build a link-building package for a client, uh, and that link building would be, would, would involve sending hundreds and hundreds of articles out to, to websites with spintax in them and getting them cited, i.e.

building links on external sites. Lots of the Google updates tried to put that out of business and in reality, good SEO was going out and finding partners that would talk about your site. I sat in a meeting, I sat in a board meeting, uh, this is pre-COVID, with a huge national brand whose SEO company were building links for them.

And we sat and we looked at some of those links, and many of those links were completely irrelevant to the business that they were in. They were a fishing tackle manufacturer, and there were links on sites such as hot tub sites, right? The, the SEO company tried to explain that away saying, "Well, you know, it's relevant because, uh, hot tubs are often on, uh, fishing lake sites and that, you know, it's about an out- outdoor pursuit," et cetera, et cetera.

I'm like, come on guys. In reality, what you need are people talking about your brand and talking about it in a good way to prove that you are who you say you are and that you are the trusted resource for, um, you know, for that niche.

Brand, AI slop, and unique knowledge

Now, we're entering a world where brand matters more than anything, right? Your brand is everything, right? And I could throw up a website, I threw a website up, um, I threw a website up for a client a couple of weeks ago, and it has 120 pages in it, and I built that in roughly two hours, and it was SEO'd.

It has all the metadata in it, it has the tags, it has the schema, all the page titles are w- are well-written, the content is very, very well-optimised. It doesn't copy other sites, although we gave it reference sites to pull content from. And ta-da, there you go.

In two or three hours, a brand-new website with 120 pages in which is optimised for SEO. Should that site come to the top of search? Absolutely not, because, you know, I could build a website in a couple of hours and say, "There you go.

There's the number one site in the whole world," because it's gone out, done all the research, pulled it all together and, you know, the term we would call, call that maybe would be AI slop, um, because a great deal of the content on the site will be pulled from other sites, rewritten, and will have a synth ID in it, i.e. Google will know that that site is written using AI. So that's fine.

Does it, does it include any new knowledge? No. So when we're talking about getting ranked in the AIs and in the LLMs or large language models as we should be referring them to, the work of generative engine optimisation is to go out and then prove that that s- that website has, uh, the weight and the knowledge and unique perspective and is true, right?

Because there's nothing to say that you couldn't just put up a t- ton of pages which are, are made up. Um, and talking to that, there are a lot of the, an awful lot of the, uh, LLMs at the moment are looking for unique knowledge, right? They want to eat for breakfast brand-new statistics and knowledge that doesn't exist in their index at the moment.

It's one of the great signals that if you can produce a new piece of knowledge, and I talk to people about get stuffing out, get stuff out of your head. Get it... The old school way of saying that would be get stuff out of your head onto paper, right?

Now we're talking about digitising knowledge, um, and getting it onto, um, a digital format which is unique to you, and you've got, um, a perspective on it.

People Also Ask and question.marketing origin

Now, if we look at a lot of the way Google was working, they have people also ask within their, uh, within their knowledge base, right? So they, in Google Search, and search is starting to become less relevant, there are many, many, many questions. So as people asked questions of the web, they created a, a bank of questions, and they then went and found the r- the right answers for them.

And this is part of why I- Produced question.marketing was I believe a lot of what you need to do to, uh, convert a customer or convert a prospect into a customer is to have a conversation and answer their questions. Now, in a scenario where let's say I'm 54, I'm 54, and let's say I'm looking for a new set of golf clubs. Traditionally, and when I say traditionally, I mean in old school Google search, I would, uh, go onto Google.

I might type in, "What are the best golf clubs?" Um, you know, find me some golf clubs that will match my style of play, et cetera. Now, it, it, it didn't use to then go on to ask you other questions. I would have to go and search on many websites.

I'd go through ... It's, it'd take me ages, right? This is why search is becoming redundant because why would I do the work?

Golf clubs: classic search vs a conversational answer

This is why search is becoming redundant because why would I do the work? Why would I have to go and search through all those websites, try and remember, um, as I go what's good, what's not? Um, maybe I'd make a, a choice.

You know, maybe I'm, I'm just, I'm, I'm ... But Google would say, "You're in market." So you are in market for golf clubs, Simon. Um, it's not really doing an awful lot more than saying somebody searching for golf clubs.

If somebody like me is sat here in, uh, Doncaster searching for golf clubs and a similar person is sat in London, they're probably getting very similar results or, you know, a mix of search results. Google would obviously put different pages in front of people, say, how long did Simon spend on this page? Was it interesting to him?

Was the information on the page useful? Et cetera, et cetera. Now, that would be a ranking factor.

Also, did I visit other sites? Was, was that page linked from golf forums, news, um, you know, other industry sites, forums, et cetera, right? This would all build into that page is worth serving to people.

Now, moreover, did it give people the answer they wanted? The answer. Because if I started by asking a question and that question was, um, what's the best club ...

Just what's the best golf clubs for me? And if, if I have to go and do the work as opposed to an AI then says, "Well, okay, Simon, let's ask you a few questions," and it interviews me, and then it's drilling down into the knowledge base to look at reviews and look at other sites and look what other people have said and looking on YouTube, et cetera, et cetera, and the AI can do all of that work for me, we're suddenly in a world where the recommendation coming to me is, um, off of trusted sources.

It is researched. It saves me tons and tons of time. So this is why we would be working with an answer engine, because it answers my question, right?

For me. Um, and let's not kid ourselves.

WhatsApp / Meta aside and Pocket / voice future

Um, and let's not kid ourselves. Let's not kid ourselves that Google, et cetera, do not know more about us already than we think we know about ourselves. And by that I mean I'm sat here, my phone is on my desk.

WhatsApp, for example, is listening to me at the moment and listening to my conversation and probably recording it, um, again, referenced in my 2021 book. But while all of these, um, traditional search engines were recording our, uh, activity, they weren't necessarily able to attribute that to the exact person. As we go forwards, so WhatsApp, for example, Meta did not pay $19 billion for WhatsApp, uh, to just have it as a free messaging platform for us all.

That definitely was not their reason for doing that. My personal belief is they, uh, they bought WhatsApp so that they can record everybody's conversations and then serve us ads based on what we're talking about, and I know that's the case because we proved it by sitting talking about, uh, cat food, dog food, different types of cars, et cetera, and then saw adverts for those products in our Meta feeds the following day, even if they were products that we'd never even expressed any interest in before.

So we are moving very quickly into a world where answer engines become the norm. I do still believe we will move into a world where voice search or AIVO, voice optimisation, becomes the norm. We're already well- working in, um, a world where I use a device called a Pocket, and that records my meetings and conversations and summarizes them back to me and takes action points and books people into my diary and send task lists and sets up, um, projects on my Notion board, sends messages into Slack.

Can also hook through my Grok bot to, um, you know, to send emails and, uh, talk ... You know, answer messages that are coming into me, right? All sorts of stuff.

It's amazing. But are we gonna get to a point where there's a device on your desk maybe the size of a two pence coin and it's recording everything and doing things for us? Of course we are.

Absolutely we are. Will we ever then be, "Oh, sorry, actually, I'm gonna open up my computer and I'll type the, uh, questions," or, "I'll start searching for myself"? Um, no.

So, you know, somebody called me out and said I must be on crack, um, if I think that search engines are gonna disappear. Do you? Like, maybe.

Um, and Google I feel like it really is panicking trying to- Pitch, um, AEO and GEO underneath SEO and saying that search engine optimisation is still a thing. Yes, obviously, if your site is indexed and s- and referenced and cited and comes up in the top results on Google, well, in search, let's not just say Google, because there are obviously tons of different search engines. But I- we are at a point where Meta, um, you know, l- you've got Brave, you've got all sorts of others that are building their own indexes and have built them and have scraped the entirety of the content that is on the web.

So yes, look, if you're gonna build content, by all means use AI, but you must, you must put your own perspective into, um, into that building of that content.

Unique perspective on content

So yes, look, if you're gonna build content, by all means use AI, but you must, you must put your own perspective into, um, into that building of that content. Because if you're just gonna use AI, if you're gonna AI slop it, um, and you're gonna just use AI to build content, it will have fingerprints all over it, and that will mean it won't rank. Um, it's not unique.

Why would somebody share or reference that piece of content that you've just produced using an AI, um, when it's already out there? It's plagiarism. You're, you know, you- you've just cheated, so to speak.

Um, all the images that are produced in AI have ID fingerprints in them and are therefore effectively demoted. Um, I've built a system which I think goes around that, and I didn't do it to, uh, to cheat. I did it because I wanted to use very specific brand asse- assets for all of my clients that I've put onto that system, and it means that when I post, I'm not just posting AI slop.

I've, uh, curated their brand and s- set up a series of assets that match their brand and the content that is going out, and it's consistent, and it looks better. So talking to your brand, becoming the authority.

Client outreach example (stitch-ai)

And if I could give anybody, um, the best piece of advice that you can get right now for your business is put your unique perspective onto content. So I have literally just before this video messaged a client and said to him, "Look, we need a news article, uh, about what you do." The client is stitch-ai, uh, .com. So Paul Gander, who runs that business, I've emailed him this morning and asked him, "Can you please, um, find me some news articles around what you do?" And they are a WhatsApp messaging tool.

Um, "Find me some, some news." So yes, you can use AI to do that. Don't use AI to then produce a press release because it won't be r- unique. What you then need is ...

So I need Paul's unique perspective on what that news is telling him in his industry and then therefore that will be unique user-generated content and be able to be, uh, shared and referenced and hopefully then picked up by AI. Um, so if I talk to you about UGC and wanting you to produce content that is unique to you, and that's where we're going. You know, that's where it needs to be.

Getting cited: outreach and AI-assisted PR research

You then need to do the outreach, so you then need people to cite that content. And to, to, to achieve that, um, I'm not gonna hide the fact, I use, for example, GrokBots. So I use another AI to reach out to real people with a unique story to talk to them and say, "Look, I've got a unique perspective on something in your industry," and use the a- Like, wow, a PR agency would probably charge you thousands to do what I'm talking about here.

So if you set a GrokBot up that'll cost you $20, it will go out, research your industry, find all the people in that industry, find out what they're talking about. So it'll go and read what they're publishing. Have they talked about your competitors?

Are they willing to publish something that's unique? So the bot then can go out, speak to them, do the hard part. So the hard graft that a PR agency would do in the past would, would be research, finding the right people, building the relationship, and sending them the content, right?

Well, if you do that at scale, and you get published and referenced, and then moreover that content is engaged with ...

YouTube ranking and fresh citable content

Well, if you do that at scale, and you get published and referenced, and then moreover that content is engaged with ... So one of the things that I do for a lot of clients on YouTube is rank videos quickly at the top of YouTube search. The reason for doing that is YouTube will reference that video.

They will put it at the top. Providing people then watch it and engage with it, it will rank and it will stay at the top. That's not hard.

YouTube wants new content. So think of all of these LLMs as, uh, wanting fresh content, wanting good content, wanting content that ranks, wanting content that is citable. They want to be the best, right?

If you look at Google, the only defense that it ever had against its position as the number one search engine is the fact that it was, um, giving people the answer that they needed as quickly as possible.

AI Overviews and the Google question

If you look at Google, the only defense that it ever had against its position as the number one search engine is the fact that it was, um, giving people the answer that they needed as quickly as possible. That advantage has now gone. Yes, they're building AI overviews into all of what they do, and this is why I'm saying there is a possibility that traditional search disappears and disappears quite quickly.

Maybe I'm on mushrooms or crack, but, um, I really wanted to ask people- With this video, do you believe, do you accept that it is possible, um, that, you know, Google as we know it, Google as we know it may disappear, right?

Site tour: question.marketing / Institution / Limitless

Um, if you wanna bob on to the question.marketing website, there's tons of articles on here that I've written in the past around ranking and strategy and SEO and, um, there's even a free SEO course on here. There's a YouTube ads course that I've built over the years. Our website, um, although I've rebranded, and I have rebranded as question.marketing, my old agency was Institution, and the agency before that was Limitless.

Um, I've rebranded now as question.marketing, and that YouTube channel has over four hundred videos on it that, you know, hopefully add to the weight of what I'm saying, right? I'm not jumping into this as somebody who's an SEO or wants to...

Gold-rush tools warning

You know, the amount of AI tools that, um, people are trying to sell to people at the moment is ridiculous, right? The, "Oh, let's just check where you rank in AI," or I saw one the other day that's aimed at agencies for $49, so aimed at me. It costs me $49 a month.

I'm supposed to resell that at $1,000 a month to clients to say that I can get you ranked in AI search and LLMs, right? Please watch out what you are buying because we are absolutely in the gold rush. This is the biggest change that you are gonna see in search.

Ads in AI search aside

I remember when, obviously, well, I was ranking sites on Lycos and Ask Jeeves and other sites, and then Google, right? And Google won. Course it won.

Can it win now? Yeah, it probably can because of the resources it has. Its ad revenues are still increasing, um, and that's a whole nother topic that I'll talk about in another video because ads in AI search, and I touched on it earlier, quick overview, if I was searching for golf clubs, I will receive ads for golf clubs, clearly because I'm in market.

But once you're in AI, it can ask you so many more questions and refine that search, and effectively it may eventually go into AI sales mode, as in AI becomes a salesperson, starts selling you a product. It would probably be, um, open and honest about that, so it'd probably start talking to you about, you know, "I am now representing TaylorMade golf clubs, and Simon, we think that this p- product is ideal for you because," right?

There'll be a whole pushback against all that sort of thing as well because people have the, the ability to have their own preferences. But, um, I go live twice a week. I talk about this subject.

Hopefully, you can see I'm quite passionate about it. I enjoy it. I love it.

I love the ability to talk about where search might be going. Um, talk about it between yourselves.

Close: optimise for answer engines and voice

Think about, do you need to start optimising for answer engines? I think you do. Do you need to start optimising for voice engines or voice optimisation?

I think you do. Um, I might be wrong. I might be sat here in three or four years sending a review of this video saying, "Simon, why did you say that?" Um, I stand by what I say.

I think we're at the, the cusp of a huge shift. Of course we are. We can all see that coming.

As people adopt AI and AI search and the whole SEO industry starts moving towards AEO, GEO, and search engine optimisation drops away, um, I think we then see proper answer engine optimisation, generative engine optimisation.

Hopium SEO rant and foundations

As people adopt AI and AI search and the whole SEO industry starts moving towards AEO, GEO, and search engine optimisation drops away, um, I think we then see proper answer engine optimisation, generative engine optimisation. We see businesses pushing into how do you achieve that, and there will not be shortcuts. This is where the whole SEO industry, for my mind, is at fault of selling people hopium, selling people the, "Here's a product.

I'll get you to the top of Google," and then not accounting for the fact that, or attributing sales to, um, the work that they are doing or taking credit for stuff that, you know, they're not, they're not necessarily res- or have achieved. And selling that, they had systems, or most of those SEO companies, and I'm, I mean most, I'm not bemoaning all of them because there's an awful lot of good SEO companies out there.

Um, but the majority of those SEO companies are selling a recipe and doing the bare minimum, and that's the foundation. You know, if you're not doing that nowadays and using AI, and you can use AI to build all your pages, your internal links, uh, your H1s, your page titles, your schema, uh, checking through your site, auditing it, a-attaching it to your Google Search Console, your analytics, everything, right? All of that is the basics, and that is like, it just feels like it's out of date.

You need a partner who can, um, help you gain those citations and get your content listed and help you produce unique content that is going to rank. Um, oh dear, I used the word rank. A bit of an old school SEO saying, right?

Close: questions, not keywords

We're not after keywords. We're after questions. And if you wanna convert people, there will be a series of questions that you need your website cited for to answer somebody's search.

And when they asked a question in AI, were you cited or were you the resource that that knowledge was pulled from to then influence someone's decision?

Attribution, share of voice, racing past incumbents

Uh, Google's now working on being able to give you the tools to attribute AI or LLM, um, visibility and citation or, as some people would call it, share of voice, um, giving you the ability to then come up and be cited and be shown, and then that attribution coming through and showing that that came to your website. There are sites that have been at the top of search for five, 10, 15 years, right? The ability to go past them now is, well, I'm not gonna say easy, but with the right structure, you will race past all of those sites because search is getting swept aside.

Um, I'd love to know.

Outro

Um, I'd love to know. Please follow me. Look, if you believe this content is, is useful, please follow me.

Um, I'll be releasing more of this on a weekly basis, and, um, I hope you guys find it useful. Speak to you soon.

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