How answer engines are reshaping the internet

Since November 2022 when ChatGPT was first released to the public, our online habits have been rewired at record speed. In just a few years, large language models (LLMs) have moved from novelty to what can feel like a necessity. 

What began as playful experimentation has fundamentally changed how we find information, make decisions, and interact online. Search, once a space for exploration and serendipity, is being replaced by answer engines that deliver instant responses without detours or discovery rabbit holes.

For brands, this transition is deeper than simply switching keyword strategies. It calls for becoming genuinely useful and relevant in the contexts in which people now seek answers. That means understanding the cultural, creative, and commercial forces shaping this new internet, and the narrowing window to adapt.

_______

Brunni Corsato: You’ve talked about the internet moving from “search” to “ask” (SEO to AEO). Can you speak more to that? What are the concrete implications of that shift, and what should brands and founders take into consideration when planning for that new internet?

Sadiya Shiraj: I remember being on Twitter when ChatGPT came out and went viral. People were prompting it to do silly things like write fake Bible verses and parodies of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Now we’ve had it for a few years, and people use it multiple times a day.

Last week I went to a dance class where we paused in the middle to prompt ChatGPT to transcribe the lyrics to a song because we couldn’t find them on Google. It sparked a long discussion among this group of working-class women, ranging from our early 20s to late 40s, about how much we rely on ChatGPT and how some of us were convinced it’s self-aware and conscious.

And now we take it for granted that whenever we think of something we can just prompt an LLM to get an answer instantly, without having to even see any ads or irrelevant links like we would on a typical search engine. 

But we forget that search engines were a place we went not just for answers to our questions but to explore our curiosities. You would start with one question and be presented with many choices for where to get your answers. You would have to decide which sources to trust, which to use. Often it would lead to even more questions and more searches and more discoveries. 

But now with LLMs, it’s almost like we’re just talking to ourselves, really. Which isn’t a bad thing per se — I use LLMs too — but more for brainstorming and ideation, not search.

It’s important for brands and founders to recognize this new and changing landscape. If you’re still optimizing your business for SEO, you’re optimizing for a discovery channel that is very quickly losing traction to these new answer engines.

If LLMs are being optimized to be more relevant and useful, brands must do the same for their customers. That may lead to more visibility in answer engines, but the real goal is maximizing utility for customers, not necessarily optimizing for answer engines. The one thing brands can control is staying close to their customers. That proximity is what will help them endure the rapid changes in tech and search.

Brunni: On LinkedIn, you framed AI’s remixing of art not as theft, but as a misalignment of incentives. What would a creator-first approach to AI-generated content look like in practice?

Sadya: The biggest frustration people are having with AI-generated content is not with the fact that someone is breaching copyright when they make a video of Darth Vader in a ballerina costume, but with the reality of their social feeds being saturated by click-bait and spam content, more of which is now not just being made with AI tools but also deployed by AI agents and bots. 

It’s interesting when you look at where the incentives are with AI content now. The tech companies want more of it, and are actively making bets on the future of the internet being populated with more and more AI content. 

The major copyright holders say they want less of it, claiming breaches of IP, but behind the scenes they’re replacing artists and creators with AI in their content production pipelines. So really it’s not a fight for control of AI, but a fight to capture and profit off people’s attention. 

The focus with AI-generated content shouldn’t be on how people use it — which we’re never going to be able to control — but on allowing people to opt-out of the kind of content they don’t want to see, whether AI-generated or otherwise.

The only way creators can win in this environment is if they could gain control of the platforms they use to reach their audiences. I personally cannot see this happening with existing media platforms. The economic incentives for platform providers to lock users into their algorithmic feeds are too great. 

That’s why new platforms are needed that give more control to creators and users alike. It’s why I love platforms like Patreon and Bluesky. These platforms are creator-first and decentralized platforms, and doing important work to pave the way toward an internet led by creators. I am hoping to join the ranks with my own startup Corral, in the realm of music media.

Brunni: You’re part of a digital native generation. How has that shaped your relationship to technology, and do you think Gen Z’s definition of autonomy online is different from previous generations? What still gets lost in translation?

Sadiya: One thing I’ve noticed since going public as a startup founder is that I’m seeing people from every generation, not just Gen Z, starting to realize the benefits of being visible online. 

I grew up hearing all the adults in my life and in the media belittling my generation for spending too much time online and looking up to influencers. Now we’re all spending so much time online and following influencers of all kinds, for all sorts of reasons.

I’ve noticed especially since the pandemic and with all the changes in the economy how more and more people are starting businesses and turning to social media to promote them. Social media is almost a necessity now if you want to start a business. 

And not just to be noticed, there’s so many ways to get people’s attention outside of social media, but to really solidify yourself in the lives of your customers. It’s not enough just to be seen. You have to stay top of mind. This way, when the need for your services or solution arises, they know to come to you almost instinctively. 

There are still so many people who judge social media creators for being attention-seekers and look down on social media as this societal ill, but those same people take for granted the fact that they don’t need to be on social media to stay connected to people close to them. 

A lot of people, especially Gen Zers, are on social media not out of choice, but out of necessity. That’s why it’s so important that we actually have these conversations about who controls the platforms we use to connect with each other. Intractable prescriptions like telling people to reduce screen time, be online less, “touch grass” more — these things don’t help anyone in the long term.

Bruni: You’ve been outspoken about AI hype missing the point when it overlooks Web3 and blockchain technologies. In your eyes, what’s the deeper story here? What values or power structures are we ignoring when we treat AI as the next frontier but skip the decentralization piece?

Sadiya: My theory that AI without web3 is like cars without roads stems from my belief that these machine learning algorithms that we’re calling “intelligence” are only as useful as the ways in which we can imagine using them. 

So far, almost all research on machine learning is coming from, or being dictated by, Big Tech companies who have made these huge commercial bets on the future of AI being built on data and energy hungry hyperscaled LLMs. 

It’s no coincidence that the only ways we are allowed to imagine using these algorithms — because that’s all AI is really, it’s just new ways of using math and computing data — is to replace so many writers, artists, and knowledge workers. 

The only way these companies can think to commercialize their models is to sell them as chatbots and administrative assistants with the promise that it will make people X times more productive without paying any mind to what we’re actually producing, or questioning why we’re doing all this easily automated work in the first place.

Without the decentralization not only of machine learning technology, but also the digital landscape in which they collect, compute, and create data, the more the web will continue to reflect the cultural values and commercial incentives of an increasingly small percentage of the world’s population. 

Not just tech billionaires, but also people who are privileged enough to attend the elite universities where all the AI research is happening and where the graduates (and increasingly the dropouts as well) go on to work at these Big Tech companies or start their own VC-backed startups.

_______

Sadiya Shiraj is the founder and CEO of music media startup Corral, and has been tracking shifts from the center of where tech and the creative industries intersect. Known for her outspoken views on data sovereignty, sustainable business practices — especially in creative industries — and diversity in tech, she offers a perspective that bridges the cultural impact of AI with the strategic realities brands and creators are facing today. She writes about tech, business, and marketing.

Corral is an internet radio platform being built to democratize the sharing and discovery of music on the web. They are an artist-led organization that prioritizes creators by imagining new ways to commercialize music beyond the streaming era.