Hey friends,

For years, the internet worked in a fairly predictable way.

If someone needed a plumber, a lawyer, a builder, or a marketing agency, they went to Google, typed in a few keywords, clicked through a few websites, compared options, and made a decision.

That model shaped an entire generation of business strategy. We built websites to rank. We invested in SEO. We obsessed over backlinks, keywords, page speed, blog content, and search position because if you were not visible on Google, you barely existed.

That world is changing much faster than most businesses realise. And this time, the shift is bigger than another search algorithm update.

We are moving into a world where people are not just searching, they are asking.

They are opening ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or AI-powered browsers and saying things like:

“I want to build a deck. What should it cost?”

“Can I fix this tap myself?”

“Find me the best person near me to help with this.”

That changes everything. Because the customer journey no longer starts with your homepage. In many cases, it may never reach your homepage at all.

AI can explain the problem, estimate the cost, compare options, summarise what matters, and then recommend a business. Increasingly, it can also help complete the purchase or booking without sending the user through the same old path of search result, website, contact form, follow-up, and quote.

For many businesses, that means years of effort spent optimising for traditional search could lose value very quickly.

We are already seeing businesses experience major drops in search traffic. Not because they suddenly became worse, but because the way people discover them is changing.

A lot of people want to turn this into a dramatic headline, SEO is dead, websites are dead, search is over.

That is not quite right.

Your website still matters. Your content still matters. Structure still matters. But what matters now is whether AI can understand you, trust you, and confidently recommend you.

That is a different question.

Traditional SEO was often about keyword relevance, backlinks, and technical ranking signals. AI search works more like reputation, context, and understanding. It is trying to answer a more human question: Who is actually the right business for this person, in this situation, right now?

That means your digital presence has to serve two audiences at once. Humans, yes. But also large language models.

Some people are calling this large language model optimisation. Others call it AI engine optimisation or AI visibility. The label matters less than the shift itself.

You now need to think about whether your business is legible to AI. Not just attractive to people, but understandable to machines.

This is where things get interesting.

For a long time, businesses were rewarded for making websites look impressive. Big animations. Endless effects. Layers of visual polish. Clever wording. Dense service pages filled with generic marketing language.

A lot of those websites looked beautiful and communicated terribly. And now AI is forcing a kind of honesty back into the system.

AI does not care how dramatic your homepage animation is. It does not care how many times you wrote “professional”, “trusted”, or “industry-leading”. It wants the bare bones of the truth.

What do you do? Who do you help? How do you do it? What makes your process different? What evidence is there that you are good at it?

Great communication was always supposed to be simple. AI is just exposing how often we forgot that.

In that sense, this shift may actually improve the internet. Businesses that communicate clearly, structure information well, and make their content more accessible are likely to be rewarded.

And that leads to one of the most overlooked parts of this whole conversation: accessibility.

One of the strongest signals in this shift is that accessible websites are not just better for people, they are also better for AI.

If your site is hard to navigate, overloaded with effects, poorly structured, or impossible to use without a mouse, you are not only creating a bad experience for humans. You are also making it harder for AI systems to understand your content.

That matters.

For years, web accessibility sat in the “nice to have” pile for too many businesses. Something discussed, rarely prioritised. Yet most of the principles behind good accessibility are also the principles behind clear machine readability.

Structured content. Logical hierarchy. Meaningful labels. Simple navigation. Clean code. Proper schema. Clear language.

If your content is easier for people with different abilities, different languages, or different ways of processing information, it is also easier for AI to interpret.

That is not a small thing.

There is a real possibility that AI browsers and AI search end up making the web more accessible than the web industry itself ever did. Not because people suddenly became more thoughtful, but because businesses will finally care when accessibility affects visibility.

It is a strange incentive, but I will take the improvement where I can get it.

One of the most important mindset shifts for business owners is this: AI is not just scanning your site for keywords.

It is building a broader picture of your authority and relevance. It is looking at what your website says, yes, but also what the internet says about you.

What are people saying on forums? What does media coverage say? Are there case studies? Do reviews reflect real outcomes? Have you shared useful knowledge publicly? Do you sound like someone who actually understands the problem?

That means authority can no longer be faked with fluff.

If someone asks AI for the best person to solve a specific problem, it is not just looking for the business that used the right phrase ten times. It is looking for the business that seems to consistently know what it is talking about.

This creates a huge opportunity for smaller businesses.

In the old world, big marketing budgets often dominated visibility. If you had the money for serious SEO, paid media, agencies, and content production, you had an advantage.

In the new world, businesses that share real expertise, explain their process, document their work, and build trust across multiple touch-points can punch far above their weight.

We are already seeing this in practice. More enquiries are being referred by ChatGPT and Perplexity directly. That means AI is not just answering questions. It is actively shaping who gets discovered.

This is where many businesses still get stuck. They want to protect their knowledge. They worry that if they explain too much, customers will not need them anymore. I think that mindset is now actively dangerous.

If you want to be recommended by AI, you need to put your expertise into the world. You need to explain how you think. Show your process. Share your point of view. Publish your case studies. Answer the obvious questions. Teach people something.

Not everyone who learns from you will become a customer. That is fine. The people who were never going to pay you were never your market anyway.

The people who are your market will see your thinking, understand your depth, and trust you more. That has always been good communication. AI is simply rewarding it more directly now.

The businesses that win here will not be the ones with the most generic content. They will be the ones with the most recognisable expertise and the clearest voice. And yes, this also means generic AI-generated content is becoming a liability.

If your website sounds like every other website because it was pumped out with the same prompts and the same empty language, AI will notice. In a strange twist, AI is getting very good at recognising content that has no real personality, no lived insight, and no differentiation.

You cannot outsource authenticity to ChatGPT and expect ChatGPT to be impressed by it.

Another shift I keep coming back to is that visibility is becoming more personal. People care about people. AI increasingly does too.

That means it is not enough for a company page to say the company is great. The people inside the business need to be visible. Leaders, founders, specialists, and team members need to share what they know and how they work.

What does the CEO believe? How does the strategist approach a problem? What have you learned from mistakes? What makes your process different?

That human layer is where trust lives. It is also where sameness starts to break.

When everyone has access to the same tools, the differentiator becomes perspective, judgment, voice, and experience. Those things come from people, not corporate filler text.

So if you are a business leader, do not hide behind the brand. Put your thinking into the world.

There is a very practical exercise here. Go into ChatGPT or Perplexity and ask the kinds of questions your customers would ask.

Not your brand name. Not the exact service title from your website. Ask the real question.

“Who is the best AI consultant in Geelong?”

“Who can help with tender automation?”

“Who is good at building accessible websites?”

“Find a local builder who explains the process clearly.”

Then see what happens. Do you appear? If not, who does? And why?

That exercise will tell you far more about your future visibility than another traffic report ever will. It is a little confronting, but it is one of the fastest ways to see where you stand.

This gets even more disruptive when you move into retail and e-commerce.

For years, online stores fought for traffic, optimised product pages, improved checkout flows, and tried to build loyalty through the website experience.

Now imagine a world where someone searches for a product inside ChatGPT, gets recommendations instantly, sees how it might look on them, compares reviews and price, and places the order without ever opening the brand’s website.

That is where this is heading. If the transaction happens inside the AI layer, then the website stops being the centre of the experience.

At the same time, AI is starting to remove friction from product decisions. If someone can upload a photo and instantly see how clothing will look, test a haircut, visualise a tattoo, or compare options without the usual uncertainty, the customer journey becomes much faster and much more informed.

For retailers, that creates both opportunity and danger. If customers ask for your brand by name, strong brand loyalty still matters.

But if they simply ask for the best product for a need, AI may choose for them. And if it chooses based on convenience, platform preference, or commercial partnerships, a lot of brands could become invisible very quickly.

That is why brand loyalty matters more, not less.

If someone tells AI to order ten pizzas, the system may choose any provider. If they say “order ten Domino’s pizzas”, the brand has already won the decision. That difference is everything.

There is another force building alongside this, and it is easy to underestimate. Live social selling.

We have already seen it explode in places like China, and it is growing in the US and India. It is only a matter of time before it becomes far more normal in Australia.

Instead of discovering products through search or brand sites, people buy through creators, live streams, recommendations, demonstrations, and direct social interaction. It is basically a digital version of old-school shopping television, except faster, more interactive, and built into the platforms where attention already lives.

So e-commerce is being squeezed from two directions at once. On one side, AI handles functional purchasing for people who want speed and convenience. On the other, live social selling captures attention-driven, influence-driven, lifestyle purchasing.

In both cases, the standalone e-commerce website becomes less central than it used to be.

Underneath the tactical business advice, there is a more serious question.

Who controls visibility in this new system?

If AI platforms become the gatekeepers of discovery, recommendation, and transaction, then power concentrates very quickly. The platform that controls the interface can shape what gets seen, what gets bought, and who pays to stay visible.

That is where things get uncomfortable.

Because the optimistic version of AI is more choice, more access, more personalisation, and more empowerment.

The darker version is a world where the largest platforms and deepest pockets take even more share, while everyone else becomes dependent on systems they do not control.

We need to pay attention to that.

I still think there is hope in more open interfaces, more consumer choice, and tools that aggregate across multiple models instead of locking everything into one ecosystem. I would much rather see a future where people have options than one where a single AI platform becomes the front door to everything.

That part of the story is still being written.

If I were simplifying all of this into a practical message, it would be this:

Your job is no longer just to rank. Your job is to be understood, trusted, and recommended.

That means:

Build a website that is structured clearly and accessible. Use schema properly. Make your content easy for both people and machines to understand. Share real expertise, not generic copy. Publish case studies, processes, stories, and useful insights. Show the people behind the business. Test how AI currently sees you. And stop assuming your website is the main event.

It may soon be one touchpoint among many, not the centre of the customer journey.

I do not think this is the end of business websites. But I do think it is the end of treating a website like a digital brochure and assuming that is enough.

The old internet rewarded whoever knew how to game visibility. The new internet looks like it will reward whoever can earn trust across the web, communicate clearly, and make their expertise easy to understand.

That is a much healthier game. Harder, maybe. But healthier.

And for smaller, smarter, more human businesses, this shift may turn out to be a bigger opportunity than people realise.

The question is not whether AI search is coming. It is whether your business will be visible when it arrives.

— Aamir

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