There’s a fundamental shift in how we think about getting information from the internet: Search engines are being replaced by Answer Engines.

(Did you know that this is just an excerpt from the complete and free newsletter that is available here? Sent out once a week, original viewpoints, insights and interesting things to read.)

For the past few decades, we’ve optimized content for search. Someone types in a query, the search engine offers a list of links. Basically search engines act like a sort of filtering mechanism of the data on the internet.

But now, increasingly, people don’t want options of what is out there. They want the answer, one synthesized response. The algorithm doesn’t suggest where to look. It tells you what to know (well, hopefully people will apply some critical thinking to the LLM and ask where the data came from).

This changes how content needs to be built.

In the age of search, content was created to attract clicks to make sure you’re included in the filter. In the age of answers, content must bedesigned to provide answers.

I am not an SEO expert, but the shift in mindset from search engine optimization to answer engine optimization is the key. FAQs are a good example of optimizing for this model, but maybe they need a lot more content in each answer with more examples? Each answer you write might be the exact snippet a language model feeds to a user in response to a query (oh how I don’t want to be the webspam team of the various AI model makers right now).

This doesn’t mean we throw away beautiful imagery or storytelling, especially in hospitality where emotional resonance still drives conversions, reviews and great visual assets will remain important IMO. But we should ask: what part of this page answers something?

There’s no perfect playbook yet. This isn’t classic SEO. But it’s becoming clear: we need to move from optimizing content to be found, to designing content so it becomes the answer. It’s less about filtering the internet for links of possible answers and more about training the machines to use the content as the answer.

And the earlier we start shifting our content mindset, the better prepared we’ll be when those AI agents become the default front door to our websites.

Thanks for reading. Subscribe for free to receive new posts.

About me: I’m a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies helping turn them into industry leaders. I’m also the co-founder of 10minutes.news a hotel news media that is unsensational, factual and keeps hoteliers updated on the industry.

View source