I get across this question a lot while I do the discovery and consultation calls with the business owners in Singapore. They see it more as a buzz word or something that landed up in the ecosystem from the outer space. But in simple terms, AI has provided us more contexful & insightful responses.
The Gap
Well that’s not the case- there was a huge gap in terms of what people were searching over the internet over the years, and the kind of output they were getting. SERPs (Search Engine Page Results) were somehow not the right way of getting an output of what input you entered. Websites were ranked on the basis of the optimization they had done- the supplier had the most control on how they wanted to get indexed over the internet, which might not be the best for users. In other words, suppliers had an edge on how they wanted to show up, on what keywords, more like a linear mechanical thing like a bot.
Due to this experience gap, users may need to get through a lot of websites, skim the complete web pages(which was later changed excerpts but again limited) to get the information they were looking for. It was time consuming, not user friendly and turned out to be a bad user experience. Even in most of the cases users weren’t satisfied with the output. Because output doesn’t match the intent of search- the outcome.
Why this gap?
The Traditional ecosystem of the internet heavily relied on backlinks. Search crawlers used to determine the Domain Authority(Website Authority) on the basis of how many websites they are linked to via content. The notion used to be- more you’re having your links or content on higher DA websites, you’ll be prioritised as it will boost your domain authority and page rank. Now the user is nowhere in this equation. The web was just validating each website’s presence in this manner only. This algorithm was the playbook for quite some time.
The Black Hat SEO or Grey Hat SEO were born out of this only. Website owners use these malpractices to get their website higher ranking. Sometimes they were caught and got penalised, but still they bet on. In my earlier days, I used to get a lot of these requests to get their website ranked via this practice. Crazy days!
The Leap of Change
Gradually, users started spending more time on Reddit, Quora and Medium. Why? Simply because they have more real content and context. They were able to find what they were looking for. It has real user reviews, opinions and thoughts that equipped and enabled the user to make a better decision.
Google then started giving more weightage to the content but still

the offsite(backlinks) was still considerably factored in the ranking algorithm. Website owners used a mixbag of content and backlinks, still the user wasn’t getting anything out of it. Website owners started using Private Blog Networks (PBNs), keyword stuffing etc to get the results now. Keyword stuffing doesn’t provide any meaningful information, it was just for crawler bots again. User again missing in the picture!
Finally the Google AI Mode On
Google gradually(especially after Covid) launched a series of updates that somehow gave users better user experience than before. You must have noticed now you have a quick read whenever you search anything. Google AI skims all the related relevant websites, scans their pages and gives you information pulled directly from different websites, which is again more meaningful, contextual, personalized and engaging. This has enabled the user to make a decision fast.
So the bigger question is if traditional SEO is still relevant in 2026?
Short answer is yes. SEO is the fundamental checklist of making website search engine friendly and getting rank for your keywords. Simply, a SEO website is only eligible to get AI mentions over ChatGPT, perplexity and obviously open doors to get optimized your website via answer engine optimization.Every website which is cited over answer engine sites is always optimized and generally ranking in the first 3 pages of the search engine ranking results. I think the bigger questions are now-
- Is traditional SEO alone enough for search/answer engine presence?
- Is getting clicks<traffic important after Zero clicks?
- What’s the impact of google ads over Google AI?
- Are CTR, CPCs, CPA metrics relevant anymore?
- Do Google start showing sponsored results in AI overview
……..bigger one
AEO is good/relevant for my business in Singapore?
Short answer is Yes. Yes, if your content is structured well and it really provides valuable information. AI is smart- we are not talking of content copy, plagiarism etc. AI can really read through between the lines and raise the true winner. Paradox is that content creation and distribution is easy these days by AI, but the same AI can judge the sub par content which doesn’t have depth and doesn’t offer any value.
One more thing, standing out in the competition is a quality game now, not a volume game. Consistency is the compounding factor and time put in your website and content will definitely stay with you. Don’t worry but start acting.