Generative engine optimization, we have a new acronym, right? AI overviews, answer engines, but for communicators, marketers who built their strategies around traditional SEO, what do you think is the single most important thing they need to rethink in this kind of age of AI?

If I could boil it down into a single headline for all marketers, I would say you are no longer optimizing from the entry point query alone.

You are optimizing for the whole end-to-end search experience, and you are optimizing for the decision.

So traditional SEO, very much centered on the page and the ranking.

You could rank number one for a keyword in a search engine everywhere, but that is simply not the landscape we're living in now.

Now, those things still matter, as we said earlier, but these AI systems are assembling answers from a lot of sources all at once, instantaneously, completely influenced by not only what's out on the web, but how you frame your question and your follow-up questions, and in some cases, those results are even personalized to the searcher based on how much they're using those platforms.

And so it's assembling this from all these sources, and it may be mediating the decision about what these people see without sending the user to one page or to a list of links to sift through themselves.

Wow.

Is it more prevalent on just social or do you also see some of that kind of

Oh, for sure.

The moment there is a new way to game the search engine or game the discoverability platform, people out there are going to go for it and try to exploit those weaknesses, that black hat opportunity while it lasts.

Although I will say in search, it tends to be temporary, right? Those things tend to get corrected for because people don't want to use a platform they can't trust for very long.

This is what bugs me about the metricification or whatever you can pay.

So if you have money, you can pay to prove you're real, which doesn't seem like a very big leap to me, but really any single verification badge might be a temporary signal of validity, but they cannot over the long term confirm identity or credentials or audience or claims or some combination of those.

And having a badge in search or some kind of verification signal is one of hundreds or even thousands of different signals that a person or a business exists or that they are who they claim to be or if their qualifications are real.

I don't feel unless the government actually steps in, we're going to see some meaningful change.