Strategies
Guest Author: Richard Askam, Founder of Print Island
Every industry needs storytellers, and few tell the story of personalization better than Richard Askam. The visionary behind Print Island and a driving force behind campaigns like “Share a Coke,” Richard has helped shape how brands connect with people in more personal, meaningful ways.
As one of Mediaclip’s personalization ambassador, follow Richard on our blog as he will share his insights, ideas, and inspiration to help bridge creativity, technology, and personalization.
Richard Askam explores how things are moving fast for search engines
When the internet first arrived in most people’s lives in the mid-1990s, finding anything on it was an adventure with no guaranteed destination. Early search engines like AltaVista, Excite, Ask Jeeves, etc., did their best, but the web was a vast, largely unorganised library with no helpful librarian to guide you. Then Google arrived in our lives, and everything changed.
Google didn’t just index the web more effectively than its predecessors; it introduced a logic to search that would define the next two decades of our digital behaviour. It ranked pages by authority, relevance, and the connections between them. From that logic, an entire industry was born. Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, became one of the most consequential disciplines in modern marketing, and for good reason. If Google was the gatekeeper to the internet, then understanding how the gatekeeper thought was commercially essential, and not just for the print business, but for all businesses.
For years, the rules of SEO were relatively predictable, if technically demanding, particularly if, like me, you were born before 1970. Keywords, backlinks, page speed, meta descriptions, mobile optimisation… it was all just white noise to me. But, like all new innovations, businesses hired newly established SEO specialists, agencies built practices around it, and an entire vocabulary emerged to describe the craft of making content legible to an algorithm.
The goal was always the same: to appear on the first page of results, be seen by the masses, and, in a perfect world, be ranked number one. Because, let’s be honest, everything below that was, to varying degrees, invisible.
But something fundamental has shifted in the last 12–24 months, and the pace of that shift is accelerating incredibly quickly.
The model worked because of how people searched in those early frontier days of the internet. They typed a query, a search engine returned ten blue links, they clicked on one… simple. The journey was linear, the transaction clear, and the brands that understood SEO thrived. For those that ignored it, regardless of the quality of their product, they simply weren’t found. A new game had begun.
The rise of AI-powered search tools, most visibly Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Microsoft’s Copilot, to name just a few, has introduced an entirely different relationship between question and answer.
Instead of a list of links, users increasingly receive a synthesised response. The engine doesn’t show you where to look; it tells you what you need to know. And, in doing so, it removes the middle step entirely.
No click required. No page visited. The answer simply arrives.
This has given rise to two new disciplines that are rapidly entering the mainstream vocabulary.
Answer Engine Optimisation, or AEO, is the practice of structuring content so that AI systems select it when generating those synthesised responses. It’s less about ranking and more about being cited. Less about traffic and more about authority.
The question shifts from “Will a user find my page?” to “Will an AI trust my content enough to draw from it?”
Structured data, clear and authoritative prose, FAQ formats, and schema markup all become more important. Thin content, keyword stuffing, and link manipulation become not just ineffective, but potentially counterproductive.
And then there’s Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO, which goes further still. It addresses how brands and businesses position themselves within the outputs of generative AI systems rather than within traditional search results pages.
As users increasingly turn to AI chat tools to research purchases, compare services, and make decisions, appearing favourably in those conversations—and hopefully being recommended, cited, and described accurately—becomes a new form of visibility that has no direct equivalent in the old SEO playbook.
The implications are significant.
Much of the traditional SEO market was built on the assumption that traffic was the prize. In an AI-led search landscape, influence may replace traffic as the primary currency. Being the source an AI draws on could matter more than being the link a human clicks.
None of this makes SEO obsolete. Not yet.
The fundamentals of good content—clarity, authority, relevance, and trustworthiness—remain as important as ever. What changes is the destination.
For thirty years, the goal was to be found.
But in the age of AEO and GEO, the goal is to be believed.
And that, in the end, requires exactly what it always has.
Earning it.
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