On "AI Search Didn’t Remove Cognitive Load, It Moved It"

AI search trades one kind of friction for another instead of solving the problem. You're not saving cognitive load when you move from reading ten results to prompt-engineering your query, evaluating AI summaries for hallucinations, and verifying claims across sources—you're just doing the work in a different order and hoping the user notices the speed gain enough to forgive the new tax on trust. For SEO practitioners, this means the old play of "own the answer" is dead; the real game is becoming a source that AI systems feel confident citing, which requires a different kind of authority signal than ranking well ever did.