I was in a meeting yesterday to plan responding to an invitation to tender. One of the terms in the invitation is “AEO”, which I now know stands for “Answer Engine Optimisation”.
The naivety of this astonishes me. The answer engines in question are *not good actors*.
They can and will:
- steal content
- use it to synthesise an answer and (here’s the crucial bit)…
- that answer may or may not prioritise your URL and the odds are that it *won’t*…
…Think about this context for a bit:
- the answer itself is an amalgam of multiple inputs
- but it will usually lift one of the inputs to the top, sometimes two, in the sense of proffering a link (or two)
- when your content is part of the amalgam (good luck with that) it is more likely than not it will *not* feature in the one or two links
- the answer *strongly encourages* the ‘questioner’ to ignore the more conventional results below and instead engage directly with the ‘answer engine’…
…The implications of this *should* be bleeding obvious.
AEO is a MUG’S GAME. It will suck you in, wring you dry, and dessicate your soul.
LLMs will fuck over all but the largest businesses anyway.
So build a marketing strategy based upon nurturing relationships with people.
And tell AI, by implication, to get fucked.
…Returning to the above:
LLMs are an accelerant of acceleration. The acceleration is itself a manifestation of a tangled web of domination hierarchies and the basic behaviour of that is to funnel resources disproportionately to the top. It is a siphoning system.
So of course LLMs are going to take your content, and mine, and siphon it towards the top, the people that have the most resources. A game in which we *lose*
…I’ve said this before, but given that I am today listening again to Luke Kemp, it’s worth repeating.
A prerequisite for domination hierarchies is surplus in the form of *lootable resources*.
Luke’s phrase integrates 3 essential attributes of lootable resources:
- easily seen
- easily stolen
- easily hoarded.
Most of the entire world wide web is a lootable resource
Jonathan Schofield
P. S. F.