A while ago, I found myself asking what should have been a very simple question.
How do people actually find information today?
Not how marketers think they find information. Not how Google worked ten years ago. Not how most business owners assume the internet still works. How people genuinely discover information, products, services and answers in 2026.
The question didn’t come from a boardroom discussion or an industry conference. It emerged gradually through a series of conversations that made me realise I had been looking at search through a lens that was becoming increasingly outdated.
Like many people my age, I’ve spent most of my adult life thinking about search in a fairly predictable way. If I wanted to know something, I’d open Google, type a question and work my way through the results. It became such a normal part of life that I never really stopped to question it. Search was something you did. It was a destination. You had a question, you visited a search engine and you found an answer.
The more I paid attention to how younger people interact with information, however, the more I realised that the behaviour itself was changing.
Sometimes they’ll use Google. Sometimes they’ll search YouTube. Sometimes they’ll ask ChatGPT. Sometimes they’ll discover information through social content that appears before they even know they’re looking for it. Sometimes a recommendation comes from a creator they trust rather than a search engine at all.
What struck me wasn’t that one platform was replacing another. It was the realisation that search itself was becoming harder to define.
For years, businesses thought about search as a destination. Today, it feels more like a behaviour. People are still looking for answers, recommendations, products and services, but they’re finding them through an increasingly fragmented mix of platforms, technologies and experiences.
The more I reflected on it, the more I realised this wasn’t really a technology story.
It was a human behaviour story.
Those are often the shifts that matter most.
Technology changes constantly. New platforms emerge, old platforms evolve and entire categories can appear almost overnight. Human behaviour tends to move more slowly. But when it does change, it has a habit of reshaping entire industries. We’ve seen it happen with smartphones, social media, streaming services and online shopping. Search feels like it’s entering one of those periods now.
Over the last few years, I’ve spent a lot of time speaking with business owners about AI. Most of those conversations naturally focus on the technology itself. Which tools should we use? What can we automate? How will AI impact content creation? What happens to marketing?
They’re important questions, but I sometimes think they distract us from a much bigger one.
What happens when people stop looking for information the way they used to?
If someone receives an answer directly from ChatGPT, they may never visit a website. If they discover a product through TikTok, they may never perform a traditional search. If recommendations increasingly come from creators, communities or AI-generated summaries, then the customer journey begins to look very different from the one businesses have spent the last twenty years optimising for.
The destination may be changing, but the intent remains remarkably consistent.
People still want trusted answers. People still want reliable information. People still want confidence that they’re making a good decision.
That part hasn’t changed at all.
As I became more interested in these shifts, I found myself having regular conversations with people inside my own business who were equally fascinated by what was happening. Our SEO lead lives and breathes search in a way that few people do. He follows every algorithm update, every emerging trend and every shift in how search engines operate. Our CMO approaches the same topic from a different perspective, focusing more on customer behaviour, attention and how people actually discover brands in the real world. Then there were the conversations with my son, who simply interacts with the internet in a way that feels completely natural to his generation but often very different from the way marketers have traditionally thought about search.
What fascinated me was not that they always agreed.
In many cases they didn’t.
The SEO lead would look at search through data, rankings and performance metrics. The CMO would look at customer journeys and behavioural trends. My son would often describe how people his age naturally move between platforms without even thinking about it.
Yet despite approaching the topic from completely different directions, they kept arriving at a similar conclusion.
The way people discover information is evolving much faster than most businesses realise.
That’s partly why SEOOnly came to life.
From a purely commercial perspective, it probably wasn’t the obvious move. I already own a full-service marketing agency that provides SEO services, so there wasn’t an urgent business reason to create a separate brand.
What interested me was something deeper than that.
One of the strongest beliefs I’ve developed throughout my career is that businesses grow when talented people are given the opportunity to take ownership of something they genuinely care about. I’ve never believed that founders need to be the smartest person in every room. In fact, some of the best decisions I’ve made have come from recognising people who know more than I do about a particular subject and giving them the support, resources and confidence to build something meaningful.
SEOOnly is very much a reflection of that philosophy.
The brand wasn’t created because I wanted to become an SEO specialist. It was created because I could see a group of people who were deeply passionate about understanding the future of search and who deserved the opportunity to focus on it properly.
While I’m involved from a strategic growth perspective, the real expertise sits with the people who spend every day immersed in this world. My role was simply to help create the platform.
In many ways, that’s the part I enjoy most about building businesses.
Watching talented people grow.
Watching ideas evolve.
Watching something that begins as a conversation slowly become something real.
The creation of SEOOnly was less about launching another company and more about backing people who believed the future of search deserved closer attention.
When I look ahead, I don’t think search is becoming less important. If anything, I think it’s becoming more important than ever. The challenge is that many businesses are still preparing for the future by looking in the rear-view mirror. They’re optimising for the way people searched yesterday rather than paying attention to how people are discovering information today.
Search is no longer just about search engines.
It’s about visibility, trust and discovery in a world where information can come from almost anywhere. And the businesses that understand that shift early won’t simply have an SEO advantage.
They’ll have a much deeper understanding of how human behaviour is changing, which has always been the most valuable insight of all.