I haven't felt this excited about search in years.
And strangely, the reason I'm excited is because traditional search appears to be getting harder.
Google is answering more questions directly. AI-generated answers are taking up more space in search results. Organic links are being pushed further down the page, and companies far bigger than anything I run are openly talking about pressure on their organic search traffic.
For a lot of website owners, that sounds like bad news.
For me, it feels like an opportunity.
It reminds me of the early days of the web, when being technical, curious and willing to experiment genuinely gave you a chance to compete with companies hundreds of times your size.
When I felt like I could compete with anyone
I've been building websites and working online since the early 2000s.
Back then, I never really thought about the size of the company I was competing against.
A business might have had a huge turnover, offices full of staff and an enormous marketing budget, but if I understood the web better than they did, I still felt like I had a chance.
The advantage wasn't necessarily money.
It was understanding how things worked.
You could build a better website. You could understand what search engines were looking for. You could structure pages differently, spot opportunities earlier and move much faster than a large organisation.
There was a period where one technically minded person sitting at a computer could genuinely compete with the big boys.
I loved that.
Over time, though, SEO became much more mature.
Businesses hired SEO agencies. Ecommerce platforms improved. WordPress plugins handled much of the technical work automatically. Everybody learned about keywords, title tags, internal linking and long-form content.
The gap narrowed.
Then AI arrived.
Search is becoming an answer engine
The phrase being used more and more is Answer Engine Optimization, usually shortened to AEO.
The basic idea is simple.
Traditional SEO was largely about getting your page to rank highly enough that somebody clicked on it.
Answer engines behave differently.
Google, ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI-driven systems increasingly try to understand the information available across the web and assemble an answer directly for the user.
That changes the question website owners need to ask.
Instead of only asking:
How do I rank this page?
We also need to start asking:
How do I become one of the sources these systems understand, trust and use when constructing the answer?
That distinction is enormous.
Why I think this creates an opportunity for technical people
If AI systems increasingly consume websites as structured sources of information, then the technical layer becomes incredibly important again.
Things like structured product data suddenly matter more.
So do clean page architecture, accurate product information, relationships between products and articles, feeds, sitemaps, entities, internal search, availability, pricing and properly organised content.
None of these things are particularly glamorous.
But computers love them.
And that is where I think technically minded people have an advantage.
I can notice something happening in search, change the way one of my sites works, add structured information, build some tracking around it and see what happens.
I don't need to arrange a meeting with an agency.
I don't need six departments to approve it.
I can change it tonight.
The really interesting opportunity is for affiliates
This is where I think things get particularly interesting.
Most people think of affiliate websites as competing with other affiliates.
I don't think that's necessarily where the biggest opportunity is anymore.
I think the opportunity may be to get ahead of the retailer.
Imagine a retailer selling hundreds or thousands of products.
They have to manage stock, suppliers, fulfilment, customer service, returns, staff, advertising, margins and everything else involved in actually running an ecommerce business.
An affiliate doesn't have those responsibilities.
That means I can obsess over something much narrower:
How do I create the best possible discovery experience for somebody deciding what to buy?
If I can answer that question better than the retailer, I don't actually need to replace them.
I need to sit above them in the buying journey.
The affiliate becomes the discovery layer
The journey I am interested in looks something like this:
- Someone searches for a product or asks an AI system a question.
- My site becomes part of the answer or discovery process.
- They land on a useful product page, guide or comparison.
- They decide the product is right for them.
- They click my affiliate link.
- The retailer handles the transaction.
- I earn the affiliate commission.
I'm not trying to become the retailer.
I'm trying to become the layer that helps the customer decide what to buy.
And AI search may make that layer more valuable than it has been for years.
A small experiment made this feel very real
I've been seeing this first-hand while developing one of my affiliate sites.
I've spent a lot of time recently improving the technical side of the site rather than simply publishing more content.
That has meant better product pages, structured product information, pricing, stock information, internal search, articles connected to products, sitemaps, feeds and first-party visitor tracking.
Then something happened that I found much more interesting than seeing a big traffic number.
A visitor arrived from Google directly onto a product page.
Within seconds, they clicked through to the shop.
That visitor didn't browse ten articles.
They didn't spend five minutes wandering around the site.
They arrived on exactly the information they wanted and almost immediately continued towards the purchase.
That made me think differently about falling click-through rates from search.
Maybe fewer clicks isn't automatically worse
For years, the assumption has been that more organic traffic is better.
And obviously, in most cases, more relevant traffic is still a good thing.
But AI search introduces another possibility.
If Google answers more informational questions itself, perhaps some of the casual clicks disappear.
The user who simply wanted a quick definition might never leave Google.
The user who actually wants to investigate or buy something still needs somewhere to go.
That could mean the remaining click becomes more valuable.
I don't yet know whether that will prove true at scale, but I think it is worth paying very close attention to.
I would rather have 100 visitors with genuine buying intent than 1,000 visitors who only wanted an answer that Google can now provide directly.
Large retailers might not react quickly
This is another reason I think there is a window of opportunity.
A large retailer might simply notice that organic traffic has declined.
They might blame an algorithm update.
They might commission another SEO audit.
They might publish more blog posts.
They may not immediately realise that the search interface itself is changing.
Meanwhile, somebody smaller can ask a different question:
If search is becoming an answer engine, what information does that answer engine need from me?
That leads to very different work.
Instead of producing another generic article, I might improve the underlying product data.
I might make sure a machine can clearly understand the product name, brand, description, price and availability.
I might connect an article about an ingredient to the products containing it.
I might monitor search queries that reach the site but currently have no useful page behind them.
I might build better internal relationships between topics, guides and products.
I might create my own analytics so I can see what happens after somebody arrives from search.
That's not really traditional SEO anymore.
It's infrastructure.
The advantage is being able to build the system
This is the part that excites me most.
A lot of SEO work became commoditised.
Almost anyone can generate an article now.
Almost anyone can install an SEO plugin.
Almost anyone can produce a keyword list.
AI has made content creation easier still.
So simply creating more pages cannot be the long-term advantage.
The advantage may increasingly come from the system underneath those pages.
Can your products be understood properly?
Can your content be connected?
Can your data stay fresh?
Can you spot new demand?
Can you measure what people actually do?
Can you adapt quickly when the search interface changes?
That is a much more technical game.
And I like technical games.
It feels like the early web again
I don't know exactly how Answer Engine Optimization is going to develop.
Nobody does.
There will inevitably be agencies, tools, dashboards, courses and best-practice documents built around it.
Eventually it will become more established, just as SEO did.
But right now, it still feels uncertain.
And uncertainty creates opportunity.
It means people are experimenting.
It means the rules haven't completely settled.
It means a curious technical person can still spot something before a much larger company does.
That is what reminds me of the old web.
For the first time in a long time, I feel like I can look at a much bigger business and think:
I might understand where this is going before you do.
And as an affiliate, I don't even need to beat that retailer at selling its own products.
I just need to get to the customer first.
The opportunity isn't to become the retailer
The opportunity is to become the answer.
If somebody asks which product they need, I want my site to help answer it.
If they ask what an ingredient does, I want my site to explain it.
If they want to compare options, I want my site to organise them.
If they are ready to buy, I want to send them to the retailer through my affiliate link.
The retailer can keep the warehouse.
I'll happily build the discovery layer.
And if AI search really is resetting the way people discover things online, this might be one of the most interesting opportunities technical affiliates have had in years.
