I always wondered what the outcome would be if everyone with a website opted for SEO. It would hardly be any different from the elite athletes at the Olympics, where ability will take you to the world arena, but the winner will be determined by randomness. Network effects would do the rest.
SEO has persisted. But the newest kid on the block is AEO. Websites now try to edit their content to get tagged by AI-powered “searches”. Google, for instance, starts virtually all its searches with a summary generated by AI, a venture I sometimes rely on, but which diminishes the relevance of search.
It makes me wonder, just as well, what the end goal would be if everyone opted to do AEO. Would it be similar to SEO? What, then, would it achieve? A new wave of popular websites? AI-determined? How will ads work?