For those who need to reach specific people with their messages (which includes all of our clients) the world is shifting under everyone's feet.

In our experience of the last 20 years, to 'Google' something has been like going to do the 'Hoovering' - it's as synonymous with finding out as that brand was to vacuuming. It feels so normal to say it.

But just like 'Tweeting' your thoughts used to be a thing, that everyday activity is changing right before our eyes, in a jarring way.

Answer engines, not search engines

I don't know about you, but I already turn first to an 'answer engine', rather than a search engine. I go to an AI that is primed to process what I'm asking it, weigh the best sources for an answer and then present me with everything I need to satisfy my query and probably to get on and solve the thing I was stuck on, often in a very useful step-by-step fashion.

If you're not doing that already, you will be soon, I promise - it's just a button away ('AI mode') in Google now. It makes the old Google (and Bing, but who uses that, right?) approach look like something out of the 1980s.

It gets you straight to the point with the (theoretically) best possible answer instead of first having to scroll past the adverts and paid links only to click on the result that had the best SEO instead of the best information. That's the AI future I was looking for.

Be wary of motivations

Of course the risks and rewards intrinsic in this new landscape are huuuuuge. Is the answer you're getting always going to be the best one? Right now, it generally is pretty good, but when everyone cottons on, the battle for those eyeballs and clicks is going to be the new Wild West.

In fact, there's plenty of evidence it's already happening. One expert speaking at an event I attended recently explained about the return of the dreaded white-on-white text on web pages. This is content created to be hidden from human eyes, but readable by machines - a dodgy practice from the bad old days of SEO that's making a return in a bid to spam large language models with false information.

It's amazing how quick humans can be to use good things badly.

The service providers of AI search will need to decide whether they prioritise information quality over income (or even ideology). Nothing is more certain than that some will favour the latter - either of them.

This is the new reality. The question business owners have to ask themselves is how they are going to address it?

Authenticity is everything now

We have strategies, research and understanding of how to make our clients the trusted sources that will be taken seriously and more likely to be referenced by these 'answer engines', but it's going to take a pivot in the production and sharing of information. Not everyone will be able to take part because they are going to need authority and recognition of themselves as experts in order to be valued in this new ecosystem.

That almost feels strange to say when we know that AI can very easily just make things up - "hallucination" in the optimistic parlance of San Francisco technologists...

We'll go into this more in future posts (sign up to our newsletter below if you want us to keep you in the loop on our learnings in this and related areas).

But, if you thought getting ranked on the first page of Google was hard, being one of a handful of trusted sources for an AI answer engine that wants its output to be credible is going to be gold dust.

You'd better be top of your game and, crucially, ready to prove it, if you don't want to vanish from sight as the tectonic search plates shift.