By Willem Shikongo
Anyone who has typed a question into Google lately will have seen an answer appear before the links.
For businesses this matters, because digital marketing has always rested on the assumption that being found leads to being visited.
That results page, known in the industry as the SERP, or search engine results page, was for twenty years a list of ten links, and the work was to rank as high on it as possible.
In May, at its annual developer conference, Google redesigned it for the first time in twenty-five years and merged its two AI answering systems into one.
AI Overviews is the summary that now appears above everything else, and AI Mode is the conversational version, where a customer keeps asking follow-up questions.
Together they reach around two and a half billion people a month.
The commercial effect is straightforward: customers find what they need at the top of the page, click-throughs to websites have fallen by roughly half, and the site that once received them now supplies the system that keeps them.
Four terms have appeared in response, most of which business owners meet only through a sales proposal.
SEM, or search engine marketing, is paid placement, lasting as long as the budget. SEO, search engine optimisation, is the unpaid equivalent, earned gradually through relevance and reputation.
AEO, answer engine optimisation, sets the link aside and targets the answer, which means putting the useful information in the opening lines rather than several paragraphs down, while GEO, generative engine optimisation, aims to have a company named within the answer itself, whether produced by Google, ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude.
These are often sold as four distinct services, though the work behind them overlaps almost entirely, since a page that is clearly structured, genuinely useful and widely referenced performs well against all four. Much of what is invoiced as GEO is conventional SEO under a newer name.
The more useful distinction is what each requires. Budget delivers SEM, time delivers SEO and structure delivers AEO, but nothing purchases GEO directly, because it depends on reputation, which cannot be assembled within a quarter.
The signal that matters has also shifted. Links measured authority for years; mentions have replaced them by a wide margin, since references to a company in ordinary text predict its appearance in AI answers roughly three times more reliably.
Adapting is less complicated than it sounds, though slower. What gets quoted is material that answers a question directly and supports it with verifiable detail, so the first change is editorial: state the answer early, then back it with figures, named sources and information unavailable elsewhere.
The second change is organisational. If mentions outweigh links, this work belongs closer to communications than to technical optimisation, which means publishing what only your business knows and ensuring it circulates where others repeat it.
The third concerns measurement, and it is where most companies will misread the situation. Traffic declines even where the approach works, as a well-answered question produces fewer visits, and anyone judging performance by visitor numbers will abandon the strategy at the point it begins to succeed.
The better indicators are how many enquiries arrive from people who already understand what you do, and how often your name is searched directly.
None of this removes the need to be findable. It means only that being found is no longer the same as being chosen, and those who adjust first will be quoted while their competitors are still buying position.
*Willem Shikongo (Digital Marketing Professional)
