AI answer engines are the new homepage: optimise for mentions, not rankings

Ten years in technical SEO and 2026 is the first year my old playbook actively misleads clients. A growing slice of buyers never see ten blue links now - they ask an assistant and get one synthesised answer with three or four sources baked in. If you're not cited, you don't exist, and there's no page 2 to crawl back from. What that changes: 1) Mentions beat pages - the model cites entities corroborated across trustworthy places, not whoever stuffed the most keywords. PR and SEO have merged. 2) One canonical explainer beats forty thin posts. 3) No more "ranking" to watch - only a test: ask the top assistants your buyer's real questions, see if you're in the answer. Anyone auditing their "am I in the answer" rate yet? I suspect B2B is well ahead of consumer.