Erik Wikander, the cofounder and CEO of Wilgot.

Opinion

January 13, 2026

Why everyone is wrong about the future of search

Search is being disrupted by AI tools that remove the customer journey from query to click. However, trying to fix that with generative engine optimisation (GEO) is a dead end

Erik Wikander

4 min read

The impact is already visible in healthcare, legal services, finance, software and education. The old funnel, a linear user-driven journey where discovery happened via search engines, followed by comparison across multiple sites and finally a visit to a brand to make a decision, has vanished.

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Erik Wikander

Erik Wikander is the cofounder and CEO of Wilgot, specialising in agentic product optimisation and the creation of agentic entities that make organisations discoverable in AI-driven search environments.

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