AI doesn’t find the best answer.
It finds the most common one.
That’s a problem if your business sounds like everyone else.
Scott Galloway said something on a podcast that stopped me mid-stride.
He was on the Diary of a CEO explaining how AI search actually works. He put it in terms that cut straight through the noise:
“It looks for the median of things, the average — what is the most often used 7th word after these 6 words are strung together. It’s pushing people towards the middle.”
That one sentence ‘prompted’ me to write about how your business gets found in 2026.
Because if that’s how AI search works, then being found is no longer just a website problem. It’s a positioning problem. And that’s a conversation that belongs in every TAB board session this year.
The Difference Between Google and AI Search
Most of us use Google and AI tools interchangeably. We see a box and are invited to type a question, we get an answer. It feels the same from the outside.
It isn’t.
Google asks: Which existing page best matches this query? It finds your website.
AI asks: What does the whole internet say about this topic? It finds your reputation.
These are fundamentally different machines with fundamentally different goals.
Google crawls the web, indexes pages, and ranks them by relevance and authority. It’s a retrieval system pointing you to a shelf of that particular knowlege. It looks at your website: the words on it, who links to it, how well it’s structured.
AI search generates a response from patterns learned during its training – patterns built from billions of documents across the entire internet. It filters, summarises, and responds. And as Galloway correctly observed, what it filters and determines is the most statistically common view. The median of everything that’s been written on a topic. Not the sharpest answer. The most expected one.
Where Things Actually Stand in 2026
The numbers may surprise you – AI feels everywhere, but the traffic tells a different story. More on that below. First, the two strategies that now matter.
Two Disciplines. Two Different Strategies.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation): How you get found by Google.
Focuses on your website: keywords, page structure, links, technical foundations.
Classic and still essential. Your investment is still paying off.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation): How you get included in AI-generated answers. Focuses on your reputation across the web: how consistently and widely you’re described, cited, and talked about. The new game, and if it is important to your business, get aboard.
| SEO – Google | GEO – AI Search | |
| What it scans | Your website | The whole web |
| What it rewards | Well-structured pages | Consistent reputation signals |
| How you build it | Keywords, links, content | Mentions, citations, clear brand language |
| Who controls it | Largely you | Largely others talking about you |
| Time to result | Months | Years – long game |
Recommendations for 2026:
Google – Optimise your website with SEO. Still 97% of search traffic.*
AI – Optimise your presence across the web with GEO. How consistently you’re described. Who mentions you. Whether your expertise shows up in multiple places, in the same language, pointing to the same conclusions.
Up your social game in business.
GEO is built significantly by what other people say about you, not just what you say about yourself. It’s not unlike how referrals work – your reputation is shaped by what your clients and peers say in rooms you’re not in.
The GEO Median — and What It Means for Your Positioning
Back to Galloway’s comment on feeding back on the median.
If AI gravitates toward the average, vague positioning gets overlooked.
Clear, specific, consistently repeated positioning gets learned.
Is your identity consistent across multiple independent sources? Your website says the same thing as your LinkedIn profile, which leads to your staff using the same language, and carries through to that critical testimonial on a third-party platform, review, article, or social shoutout.
Give AI every chance to encounter a consistent pattern. It will learn to associate your business with your expertise.
Generic positioning –“we help organisations achieve their goals” – gives AI nothing specific to anchor to.
Your positioning and online presence now needs to be training machines to recognise everything humans have written about your business. If the AI’s version of you doesn’t sound like you – that’s the gap worth closing.
It’s the same principle we work on in every TAB board session. Clarity of who you are and who you serve. The stakes for not having that clarity just got higher.
Five Things Worth Doing Now
None of these require you to become a digital marketer.
They do require you to be intentional.
1. Don’t abandon your website. Google is still the primary game. A well-structured, clearly written website with your core services, location, and expertise stated plainly remains the foundation. If the SEO basics aren’t in place, start there.
2. Audit your language consistency. Open your website, your LinkedIn profile, your Google Business listing, and any other profiles side by side. Do they all describe what you do in the same terms?
3. Get others talking about you. Guest articles, industry directory listings, client testimonials on third-party platforms, contributions to business media. Each one is a data point that trains AI to associate your business with your expertise. You’ve heard of how compound interest works – this is the digital version.
4. Be specific. “I help business owners” – who doesn’t?
“I work with trades and manufacturing businesses in the North Island to reduce owner dependence and build leadership teams” has real AI traction. The more specific your language, the more useful it is as training data for AI, and the more context it gives to the humans reading it in the first instance.
5. Think of it as reputation infrastructure. The businesses that will be found by both Google and AI are those quietly building a consistent, credible, well-documented public presence over years. It rewards patience and penalises inconsistency.
The Question Worth Putting to Your Team
If someone asked an AI to name the best [what you do] in [your region] – would your business come up? And would the answer be accurate?
If you’re not sure, that’s your starting point.
Before We Close — One More Shift Worth Knowing
We’ve covered how SEO and GEO differ and function. A distinction of fundamentals worth understanding as a benchmark in how digital information is now searched.
However Google itself is no longer purely a retrieval engine.
Google’s AI Mode now generates filtered answers within search results, before showing any links. Depending on your search words, two people searching the same thing may see different AI-generated summaries. Your website may not get clicked even if Google uses your content to build the answer – refer back to the ‘median’ comment above.
Google rewards what’s on your page with a page-one ranking. AI rewards what the world says about you. The business that understands and builds for both will have a real advantage.
SEO remains the dominant game. That hasn’t changed and won’t change overnight.
What is changing is the type of query AI is training us to use. Complex questions. Research. Comparisons. “Who’s the best [type of business] in [region]?” – that’s the kind of search that needs to lead to your business in 2026.
* The numbers are taken from 2023–2025 studies across 10 search engines vs. 10 AI platforms:
- Google still handles roughly 97% of search traffic
- AI chatbots are growing at over 80% year-on-year
- Despite that growth, AI chatbots account for less than 3% of total search volume
- ChatGPT receives 26 times fewer daily visits than Google
Wayne Tancred is a Senior Design Partner and Facilitator with The Alternative Board New Zealand. He works with SME business owners on brand positioning, strategic clarity, and leadership development.
Interested in what a TAB board could do for your business? Find out more at thealternativeboard.co.nz