I’ve spent 2025 understanding Generative Engine Optimisation and AI Search Summary preeminence at an academic level. The complacency regarding this phenomenon in business is shocking, but from a behavioural psychology perspective not unexpected. Thankfully it’s not too late for your business to capitalise.
The Most Dangerous Assumption in Search Right Now
The most dangerous assumption business owners are making today is not that AI search will fail. It is that it will behave like search always has.
Those working closely with Generative Engine Optimisation already know the uncomfortable truth. Search is no longer primarily about ranking pages. It is about being recognised as a source of truth inside an answer that may never send a click at all. Yet across industries, business leaders remain curiously relaxed. Revenue still comes in. Rankings still look acceptable. Dashboards do not scream emergency.
This is precisely the problem.
AI summaries do not announce disruption with penalties or crashes. They erode relevance quietly. They absorb demand upstream. They reward authority before most organisations realise authority is being measured differently.
For years, visibility meant position. First page. Top three. Number one. The mental model was simple and it worked. Now the interface itself has changed.
‘The search engine no longer asks users to choose. It decides, synthesises and presents a conclusion. If your brand is not present in that synthesis, you are not competing. You are absent.’
Many business owners struggle to internalise this because absence is invisible. There is no warning light for being excluded from an AI-generated answer. Traffic does not collapse overnight. Leads taper slowly. Performance reviews become conversations about seasonality, budgets or market conditions. The real cause remains unseen.
Complacency is reinforced by past success. If traditional SEO, paid media and brand recognition have delivered growth for a decade, it feels reasonable to assume they will continue to do so. That assumption is understandable. It is also historically naïve. Every major platform shift has rewarded early adopters and punished those who waited for certainty.
There is also a deep misunderstanding about what AI systems value. Many businesses believe that being good at what they do is enough. Decades of experience. Strong client relationships. Industry reputation. None of this automatically translates into AI authority.
Generative systems privilege clarity, consistency and structure. They reward entities that are easy to understand, easy to verify and easy to cite. Expertise that lives only in people’s heads, sales conversations or poorly structured content might as well not exist.
This is confronting. It implies that real-world authority is not sufficient. That uncomfortable implication is often dismissed rather than addressed.
‘Another factor is fatigue. Business leaders have lived through years of algorithm updates, platform volatility and digital false dawns. Each new shift sounds like noise until it becomes unavoidable. AI summaries are therefore filed mentally alongside blockchain, voice search or the metaverse. Interesting, perhaps important one day, but not urgent.’
The flaw in that thinking is scale and intent. AI summaries are not an experiment at the edge of search. They are becoming the interface itself. They sit directly between demand and discovery. They collapse the journey from question to conclusion.
When experts raise the alarm, they are often ignored because they are early. Early warnings always sound theoretical. Yet AI systems do not wait for consensus. They learn continuously. They establish citation hierarchies long before markets agree they matter. In other words, they value early adoption.
So by the time AI summary inclusion is widely recognised as critical, the sources deemed authoritative will already be entrenched. Catching up will be far harder than acting now.
This is not about chasing another optimisation tactic. It is about ensuring your business is legible to machines that increasingly decide which voices are heard at all.
‘The real risk is not being outranked. It is being unrecognised.’
Unrecognised businesses do not fail dramatically. They fade quietly, wondering where the demand went, while answers are being given elsewhere.
Steve Coulter is a four decades Sales and Marketing professional and enthusiast who has embraced the Internet and e-Commerce since 1999.