Trending: AI Search is the new Black(box) in 2025

Author

LLM Optimization
May 20, 2025

There’s a topic that is going to be HUGE in 2025 but not a lot of people are talking about it.

Maybe that’s because not a lot of people have deciphered it, or the ones that have are building quietly hoping that no one is catching on…

There’s barely any talk about it on podcasts and only a few Youtube videos talk about it which seams unheard of with every other AI topic there is.

So what is it?

Answer Engine Optimization. Or AEO.

Some may call it GEO, short for generative engine optimization, but I’ll save that for the geologists. I personally don’t think that GEO will catch on.

What is Answer Engine Optimization?

AEO is optimizing content so that a business ranks as a search result within one of the AI search engines. Think like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok, and DeepSeek to name a few.

What is Answer Engine Optimization?

Why is it important? Unlike traditional search engines like Google… I’ll let you name another (*coughs* bing, yahoo, brave, duckduckgo), AEO does not return pages of results. There is only one answer. For a search “What are the best injury lawyers in Austin, TX” only 8 lawyers were returned.

The stakes just went up.

There are winners and losers. Either be featured inside that answer or be irrelevant and lost in the ether.

“Where’s the best place to hide a dead body? Page 2 on Google”

Disrupting a $100 billion dollar industry

Google started to roll out AI Overviews in May 2024. You probably have seen them. They are text boxes that appear at the top of your search result.

Now almost every single search query returns an AI Overview box.

But doesn’t this hurt Google’s marketshare in the Search industry if they aren’t showing sponsored posts in the most prime real estate? Won’t this just cannibalize their search business and irritate their top-paying customers that want people to click on their ads?

Yes and yes.

I still don’t understand the underlying reason why Google decided to take up as much as 80% of “top-of-the-fold” (everything you see before having to scroll) for their AI overviews. My theory is that they are playing a long strategy here and may be flying at the seat of the their pants to regain authority in the industry as an leading AI research powerhouse.

The truth is, Google never cared about their customers paying for ads. The cost per click business model was and continues to be a manifestation of Google’s hegemony in the search space.

A single click for a personal injury lawyer can cost someone hundreds of dollars, even if that custom ends up not being a high intent buyer.

This industry was ripe for disruption and enter OpenAI with the public release of ChatGPT in November 2022 and everything changed.

ChatGPT’s user base is young, tech savvy, and means no business when finding the most efficient means to get to their answers. OpenAI reports over 120 million daily active users on ChatGPT.

It took just 2.5 years for ChatGPT.com to rank as the 5th most visited website in the world.

Ranking the world’s most popular websites by traffic

I’m curious to see what the future of AI search holds. Will private companies start implementing paid ads in LLMs or will it remain democratic. Do AI Search Engines just use Google and Bing search indexes under the hood or is there a greater mechanism that factors into whether a site appears in the answer result or not?

All I know, is LLMs are here to stay. Pretty soon, every device that has a chip will be running a local LLMs whether that be open source or privatized by one of these companies. I’m waiting for the day when your toaster has a private LLM that knows just how toasty you like your bagel in the morning.

Which AI companies today will become the Alta Vistas (what a flashback right?) or Ask Jeeves and remain a distant memory of the AI Gold Rush and which companies are here to stay? Will open source models surpass the common man’s intelligence and suffice for 99% of jobs while privatized models cater to the elite? Stay tuned and we’ll explore how you can optimize LLMs before they optimize you!