30 years ago, finding an answer meant going to a library, pulling several books on the same topic, and spending hours skimming through chapters to piece together what you needed.
In 1996, two graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, built a search engine called "BackRub," which later became Google. For years, Google defined how people searched: you typed keywords, scanned blue links, and made decisions based on what you found.
That model still exists, but it is no longer complete.
The Shift
Search has expanded into a wider ecosystem, and consumer behaviour has shifted with it. I was listening to Neil Patel describe this change: Google is no longer the single "source of truth," and traditional search results are not the only place people go for answers. Depending on the question, people increasingly choose platforms built around community, video, commerce, or AI. He summed it up like this:
- What to trust? Reddit threads and reviews.
- What to buy? Amazon and TikTok Shop.
- What to think? YouTube videos and podcasts.
- What to believe? ChatGPT and other AI models.
The implication is straightforward: discovery no longer happens in one place.
People now form views and make decisions by stitching together inputs from multiple platforms: reading threads, watching videos, comparing reviews, checking social content, asking an LLM, and then deciding.
What This Means for Businesses
For businesses, this shift matters because visibility is no longer limited to ranking in one search engine. Companies that continue to treat "search" as synonymous with Google risk missing meaningful demand that sits elsewhere: in social discovery, community-led research, video-first education, and marketplace-native shopping behaviour.
This does not mean "SEO is dead." It means the definition of optimisation has expanded. It's that SEO on its own, in the old sense, is no longer enough. And whilst it remains foundational, it's no longer "Search Engine Optimization" but "Search Everywhere Optimization."
The market is still searching. It is simply searching in more places than before.
Why I Built Cited Agency
That is exactly why I built cited.agency: an AI-driven search visibility agency designed for this new reality. We help businesses become the answers people find whether that discovery happens on Google, on social platforms, in marketplaces, or inside AI tools. This is done by building a consistent, credible presence across the platforms that now shape decisions, and optimising it end-to-end so visibility matches how people actually search today.