Rise of AEO and the future of search

I attended an interesting event in Mumbai yesterday: the launch of Saga AI’s software for AEO as opposed to SEO (reachsaga.com).

The company’s pitch is simple but significant. It wants to help clients improve their performance on “Answer Engine Optimisation” or AEO. In other words, ensuring that a client’s content and data appear prominently and get cited when people search through AI systems rather than through conventional search engines alone.

What struck me was not just the product itself, but what its existence says about how rapidly the internet is changing.

The explosion of AI, hallucinations and all, has already created an entirely new category of software tools. In some ways, this feels similar to what Google Analytics and related products once did for SEO, when businesses first realised that visibility on search engines could make or break them.

But this shift feels even faster.

These kinds of products, at least in their current commercial form, perhaps did not exist even two years ago. Yet they are now becoming central to how brands think about visibility, influence and discovery online.

The logic is straightforward. Users tend to click automatically on the top result. Increasingly, that “top result” is not a website link but an AI-generated answer box. If your brand, data or perspective does not appear there, you are effectively invisible.

What is also interesting is that we now seem to have multiple layers of search operating simultaneously.

There is classic search: type a query into Google and receive a list of links.

Then there is AI search: ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or multiple AI systems the same question and receive synthesised answers. Apparently, using several AI engines simultaneously is now referred to as “co-use”, per Google. 

Even within traditional search, the distinction between search results and AI-generated answers is beginning to blur. Earlier, search was mainly about discovery and comparison. AI search, by contrast, is increasingly about direct answers.

That shift has consequences.

One obvious outcome is the deliberate flooding of the internet with content designed to influence AI systems. This means generating large volumes of blogs, tweets, Reddit posts, Quora answers and similar material so that AI engines repeatedly encounter and surface a particular client, company or viewpoint.

But here the contradictions begin.

Google and other platforms are also starting to penalise low-quality or obviously AI-generated content in an effort to prioritise more organic human-created material. So the system simultaneously rewards scale while attempting to preserve authenticity.

I am still not entirely clear how this tension between organic and synthetic content will eventually play out in search and discivery. But it is clearly going to shape the future of online visibility and influence in ways we are still discovering!