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AI search favors the challenger
The Old SEO Order
In traditional SEO, giants like Salesforce and HubSpot could write every content piece there was and dominate the results. A challenger like Insightly, a CRM that competes with both, could never outwrite them, and could never afford the sponsorships that put those names on a basketball star's jersey.
What AI Search Reads
Generative engine optimization, also called answer engine optimization, draws on different material. It looks at what people are saying about a brand on Reddit, the latest PR and media clips, and what is happening on review sites. A blog that has been running for 13 years counts for much less than it used to.
Who Gains
That opens a route for challenger brands to be surfaced and discovered in a new way. Category leaders have to make sure their own house is in order quickly, since the ground they held for years is no longer guaranteed.
How do AI search tools choose what to cite?
Many AI search tools fetch web pages relevant to a question and then have a language model write an answer from them. The technique is called retrieval-augmented generation and was described in a 2020 paper by Patrick Lewis and colleagues at Facebook AI Research. What gets cited depends on which pages the retrieval step finds relevant to the wording of the question.
Why does Reddit show up so often in AI answers?
Reddit threads are written as questions followed by first-hand answers, which matches the way people phrase prompts to an AI tool. Votes on posts and replies also act as a rough quality signal. Google and Reddit announced a content licensing agreement in February 2024, and OpenAI announced one in May 2024.
Why did big publishers dominate traditional search?
Google's original ranking method, described in a 1998 paper by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, treated links from other sites as votes for a page. A company with a huge archive collected links for years, and those links compounded into higher rankings. That head start was hard for a newer competitor to close by writing alone.
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