Answer engines: a new challenge for content writers, bloggers

25 September 2025

The biggest year-on-year declines were at Forbes (down 53% to 85.5 million visits — the steepest decline year on year for the second month in a row), Huffington Post (down 45% to 41.3 million), Business Insider (down 44% to 66.6 million), and News 18 (down 42% to 146.3 million). The Independent, CBC and Washington Post also closely followed with drops of 41% in year on year site visits.

Nearly all of the world’s top fifty English language websites have experienced declines in traffic, to greater or lesser degrees, in the last twelve months. Only one has bucked the trend, Substack, but I’m not sure that’s good news. But the reason for the sometimes sharp falls in visitors? AI overviews generated by many of the search engines, that’s what.

People searching for information online are increasingly satisfied with the AI generated summaries, that appear, as the first “result”, in response to a question they have. These overviews are created by drawing on webpages carrying relevant information, and spare search engines users from the need to visit said webpages.

It’s great for those looking for a quick answer to a query, provided of course the overview is accurate. It’s not so good for the people who wrote articles, or blog posts, that feed the AI generated overviews, as they no longer see a visit to their website. But this is the future of online search. Instead of search engines though, we will be using answer engines to source information.

In short, answer engines results will be similar to the AI overviews we see at present. Everything a searcher needs to know will be displayed in the result. There will be no need to visit individual webpages again.

From a content writer’s perspective, it can only be hoped answer engines will cite the sources used to concoct their response to a query. This for however many people who might still wish to verify the information provided by the answer engine, that is.

But not everyone writes content to be indexed by a search engine, and many actively prevent their websites from being looked at by the search engines. I get the feeling this may not be the case for answer engines though. Writers and bloggers are all too aware of AI scraper bots marauding their content, whether they like it or not, to train AI agents.

But going forward, this might be something content writers have to expect, accept even, it they want their work to be recognised. We can all see where this is going. The end of SEO, and the advent of — I don’t know — AEO, being Answer Engine Optimisation. Those wanting their content to be found by the answer engines are going to need to figure out how to optimise it thusly.

No doubt help will at be hand though. AEO experts and gurus will surely be among us soon, if they are not already. But that’s enough good news from me for one day.