In early 1998 I sat down with an online WYSIWYG (“What You See is What You Get”) editor, determined to build myself a website. The site was called Bigfoot and, while I knew enough HTML to be slightly dangerous, there was this crazy new thing called CSS (cascading style sheets) that promised to bring consistency to the style and presentation of websites. It was revolutionary, separating design from content in a way that preserved the look and feel throughout every aspect of the site. Plus, it promised to improve page load time. Anyone who sat through the long moments waiting for the screeching dial-up tone to finally connect will remember that particular pain.
I was an artist at the time. I should have been graduating college that year, but instead I’d dropped out of art school two years earlier and decided to begin my adult life sooner rather than later. (In hindsight, a really dumb decision.) Nevertheless, the decades of hustle and grind had begun and I was young enough, stubborn enough, and motivated enough to make it work.
The interface of the Bigfoot site helped me learn CSS well enough that I soon graduated to building from scratch. It was the wild west in those days, when simple SEO techniques like buying a domain that included two of your keywords would get you halfway to the top of early engines’ ranking. Keyword stuffing was fun, throwing together dozens of relevant keywords on a colored background and making them the same color so they were virtually invisible to everyone but the search engine. The party was just starting, and I felt like one of the first guests to arrive.
Ask Jeeves, anyone?
Back then, meta tags and link-building through directories were the heart and soul of any decent SEO strategy. Meta tags have had a surprisingly long tenure, surviving Google’s announcement in 2009 that they were officially dead. Sure, they still help your click-through chances but when the world’s most influential search engine says they don’t matter where ranking is concerned, we should have been pivoting away from them oh-so-long ago. Why, then, have they endured so long?
- Old habits die hard
- SEO tools still flag “missing meta tags” as issues
- It feels like it should matter
- It’s easy, checkbox work that makes clients feel like you’re doing something
Now here we are in 2026, the year when the movie The Dawn of the Planet of the Apes told us that intelligent apes would take over (no comment). What it means for us marketers is that we have yet another pivot. This time, it’s a big one.
As it turns out, it’s not intelligent apes but instead artificial intelligence that’s threatening extinction of our old way of working and moving through the world. There’s a lot of refinement yet to come, but we cannot ignore how people are now searching for information and interacting with AI. The behavior of younger users, especially Gen Z members, has fundamentally shifted to looking toward AI as the authority for answers after checking social sites like TikTok and Reddit. Millennials walk the line, using both AI and search engines.
Nobody talks about Gen Xers, but I feel that we are just a few steps behind Millennials in turning to ChatGPT instead of Google. ChatGPT receives roughly 2.5 billion queries per day according to data cited by AirOps CEO Alex Halliday in a post on X announcing his company’s $40M Series B funding. While that figure may or may not be exact, we know that the tides have turned.
SEO is dead. Now it’s AEO.
What the heck is AEO? It stands for Answer Engine Optimization. Ironically, the same concept that fueled the Ask Jeeves platform in 1998 is fueling AEO. You can ask AI what you’re looking for in natural language, instead of relying on keywords. It matters now because of the sheer volume of searches that AI platforms like Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and others are handling. While AI sometimes gets attribution wrong, you don’t want to be left out completely.
As a marketing agency owner going into my 20th year, I feel a constant pressure to ensure our clients are staying ahead of the curve. We could rely on our old tools, checklists, and basic SEO practices that used to work and call it good. Or we can help bring our clients’ sites into the new era by making sure they’ll at least be considered in AI searches. If the AI can’t find your site, it is not going to come up in a ChatGPT answer.
Where to begin?
It’s not super scary to dip your toe in these waters. We’ve tried to make it as easy as possible. Even if you’re not a current client with LOKA, you can take this free audit for spin. It will give you a basic understanding of your current site’s visibility to AI platforms. Afterwards, if you want to improve your standing, we’ve got a solution.
Thanks for taking this trip down memory lane with me. I look forward to hearing your own story in the comments.
[Quote: “Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people.” – Steve Jobs]
Keep the faith,
Julie