The Shift, The New Search Party

Consumers have fatigue around finding information for themselves. 37% now start their searches with AI rather than a search engine, and queries have gone from three to five transactional keywords to full conversations. The scale of adoption is what makes this shift so significant: ChatGPT took two months to reach 100 million users, where the internet took four years and the telephone 75. Even Google, whose market share has dipped below 90% for the first time since 2015, is reimagining search around AI, conversation, and agents that complete tasks for you.

Think of the internet as a shop. SEO was the practice of getting your product onto the right shelf, above everyone else's. With GEO, AI plays the role of shopkeeper. It pulls the products together and brings them to your doorstep, so the consumer never walks the aisles at all. Optimising for that isn't about keywords, H1 tags, or link building. It's about citation and context building, and it means every claim you make needs substantiation. If you say you're the best pizza in New York, AI wants to see the reviews, the awards, the proof sitting right next to the statement.

AI trusts what other people say about you more than what you say about yourself. Reddit alone is cited in roughly 7.5% of AI responses, so a thread debating whether your restaurant is the best in town carries as much weight as your own website. Brands used to control the narrative through their copy. Now public opinion has a direct effect on whether you surface at all, which makes alignment across your comms, your product, and how you actually behave a commercial imperative rather than a nice-to-have.

Four things. Citeability: substantiate your claims and earn third party references. Scannability: structure your site so AI can find answers quickly, with FAQs, subheaders, and key information high up the page, because AI companies don't want to spend compute digging for it. Build for prompts: match the conversational way people actually ask questions. And use language that says something. A headline like "we're passionate about transformative solutions" means nothing to a consumer, so AI certainly won't be able to pick it apart.

Ben Welcome to episode three of The Shift, where we talk about AI and how it's changing today's consumer. Today's episode, we're talking about the new search party, specifically looking at how consumer behavior is changing around search behavior. Is Google losing its grip? We don't know. We'll try and answer it today. Let's find out now.

Jesse Yeah, I think it's an interesting world we're living in now where people are- Aren't actually looking for information as directly anymore. They're not searching, as opposed to delegating to AI the effort of crawling through websites. Like if I'm looking for a hotel, for example, like, will I ask ChatGPT to s- Pull all that information together, or am I gonna spend, you know, ten minutes calling through every single link online? It's, it's really an interesting opportunity for businesses as well, which we'll talk about in a minute. But, I think let's start with the scale, and the setting of this. I think thirty-seven percent of consumers are now starting their searches with AI, instead of Google, which is quite a staggering figure, isn't it?

Ben Yeah, it is. And the other interesting part of it, I think, is the rate of adoption, you It only took two months for ChatGPT to reach one hundred million users. It's kind of- Yeah, it's crazy.

Jesse I think it took the internet four years to reach that many users, and the telephone seventy-five years. So it's, it's crazy like how quickly this has snowballed. And I don't think, you know, in terms of talking about consumer shift, this is probably one of the most staggering ones that we're finding, is this completely new way that people are engaging with the internet.

Ben And I think when you think about search- Historically, in, you know, Google, the king of search, the queries tend to be, I think the average length for a keyword search is kind of like three to five words, generally quite transactional or descriptive, and everything we're seeing now is, is going a lot more conversational, with the query in the first place, and a bit like you said before, like Consumers have fatigue around finding information for themselves now, you know, you're going on holiday, you're no longer trawling through three or four different top ten lists of hotels, you're asking AI to kinda create that information for you. So I think what does that do to, you know, your business in terms of like visibility, if, if your website's not getting clicks anymore, or if you're a business that's reliant on publishing this kind of information, what, what does it do? You know, it's a very-

Jesse Yeah, I think a good comparison, I think we were talking about the other day, is comparing the internet to a shop. You know, you walk around, you check the shelf, and try and see what you're looking for, and SEO, which is search engine optimization, which some of you may or may not be familiar with, essentially the process of making sure your app align with the shopper, right? Like you, you're listed above everyone else. but now with GEO, which is generative engine optimization, it's essentially AI is playing the role Of a shopkeeper, it's guiding you to the result or it's pulling all the products together and bringing it to your doorstep, so people aren't clicking as much as they used to. The effort of being online and looking for what you want is been completely eradicated essentially. Yeah,

Ben or well rewritten for sure, I think.

Jesse Yeah, I think it's also the, the change in gatekeeper. Google was really the gatekeeper for, consumers that the consumers had to interact with in order to find the information they were looking for, but now- Now AI is the new gatekeeper that brands have to start appeasing, you know, SEO is the practice of sort of brands elbowing for space at the top of Google, but now it's actually a lot more complicated than just, I guess, paying and, and, and paying against certain keywords.

Ben And to that point that there are more ways and more platforms, I guess, being used to discover information. Google are starting to lose a little bit of their monopoly on that, on that market. Yeah, I think below ninety percent their market share since two thousand and fifteen. Yeah, the first time it's fallen below that number. And actually They're responding by completely reimagining how search works as well. I mean, I think, just this week, hot off the press, May nineteenth, they introduced, or they announced their new approach to search, so kind of more AI-driven search And what that includes is bigger search boxes. So again, traditionally the search box in Google is actually quite condensed, it's optimized towards those, those short searches. the search box itself is gonna become like adaptive, depending on the length of the query that you're typing in. and then I think we're gonna see pretty fundamental changes in the results pages as well. so they're talking about

Ben agentic search agents, so this idea that agents, like you were saying before Can go off and complete different tasks while you, I guess while you're in the interface, so whether that's trawling kind of recommendation lists, as well as kind of Coding within the search results as well, so really that will be kind of presenting information back to you in dynamic, interactive, and interesting ways, and that takes us very far past the traditional list Of links with headline and description that we're used to. Yeah, yeah. And it's not just

Jesse how information is presented, but also how you expect to receive information. You know, like conversational interactions with Google are now gonna become a reality, whereas beforehand you just bubble down your search. Hotel in Barcelona, restaurants close by, maybe on a separate tab, and now you can basically have it all in one. I'm a, I'm in Barcelona for the weekend, I'm a massive foodie, is there anywhere I can stay close to an interesting area? And, and also building an understanding of you going on, I'm not sure that Google search in its current state has a real contextual understanding of you as a researcher. So there's something quite interesting in how it can really- Become your personal assistant, go off and do-- I mean, I don't know if I'm quite at the point where I'd give it my credit card, but it can go off and basically take care of parts of your life

Ben for you Yeah, and I think to your point before about the holiday, like rather than having all those separate tabs and all those separate searches and you being the one that pulls it together, like what Google's vision, or at least what their kind of press release says about this release is, you know, it will build the itinerary, and it won't only help you build it in terms of what you want to do, it's gonna present it back in like a beautiful kind of HTML artifact, that you can, you know, re- refer back to and follow. On your trip. And obviously that's Google reacting to

Ben the landscape, and Google does have like the search market still, I mean below ninety percent is still a, a pretty impressive stat, but obviously all of these things are possible and being done In Claude ChatGPT already.

Jesse It reminds me of the story about the yellow pages in the eighteen eighties in Wyoming, I think it was, where literally they ran out of white paper when they were printing this business directory, and they went for yellow, and businesses started elbowing each other for space on the yellow pages simply because it was different and novel. And I think we're seeing a similar shift where brands are really beginning to- Elbow each other for space on these language models, but the process behind it is a little bit more complicated than simply getting printed right or paying for to map your brand against key search words like SEO. There's a lot more involved, which is quite interesting.

Ben Yeah, I think so. Like at the moment, there has been no real advertising release around advertising AI, obviously ChatGPT have done it in the US, but very Very limited to big budget, Fortune five hundred brands, it's all a bit murky. There's no kind of like self service platform. Google are obviously the most naturally positioned to migrate their existing ad product into like an AI driven ad product or an ad product that starts kind of surfacing your brand into AI. But in the meantime, brands are left to what we're referring to as GEO, so generative engine optimization And I think the, the things that you as a, a business need to do to appear well in GEO or to, to rank in, not rank, I guess, but to, to surface in results is very different to SEO. And also like the language that you use on your website maybe isn't what you would be minded to write if you're trying to appeal to a consumer either.

Jesse Yeah, well, AI needs to be able to infer So your meaning very simply, right? And AI calling bots that will call through your website to find the most useful information possible, they don't need to meet any resistance, whether it's You know, information that's in an animation or something that's difficult to render, that takes energy on the part of the AI to, to, to render and process, and particularly trying to pick apart your meaning, so your brand Says it's the best pizza in New York or something. Is that statement substantiated throughout your website and, have you won awards for it, that sort of thing? It's like making sure that the proof is Not far away from the statement that you're making. I

Ben Think that's it. I think that's a really good practical example that we can pull on. So like, if you are the best pizza in New York, if you want to be surfaced by the AI for that exact search term, you need to validate that point and you need to reference it. So how many, how many reviews do you have versus the next best pizza in New York, you know, the most reviewed pizza in New York? Well, that's now a, a validated- Point, did you win the best margarita award of twenty twenty-six? It's a validated point, but AI is not going to accept general terms or general claims. I think if you want to appear for something, you have to, a, figure out what is genuinely true about your brand, your business or your product, and develop the required sub-substantiation around that, in order to get surfaced.

Jesse Yeah, and not just your proof as well, and it's third party validation is becoming important as well, you know, not just other websites referencing you, whether it's, I don't know, the Pizza Trophy Awards landing page linking you, but also Reddit is being pulled from quite a lot, social media. These AI bots will crawl through Reddit threads, and if there's, you know, without hands down eighty percent of Redditors on these pizza forums, it's making me hungry to talk about this, agree that it's the best pizza in the world, then And it'll take that opinion seriously, which just emphasizes the importance of word of mouth for brands as well. Quite, I mean, historically, brands have been able to control the narrative surrounding their brand through their website or through their copy, but now the opinion of the consumer has a direct effect on the traffic that you're receiving, so it's even more important than ever to control that. AI is also beginning to trust more what other people say about you than what you say about yourself.

Reddit, for example, is a massive channel that is being cited by AI in seven point five percent of responses, roughly. A Reddit thread out there debating whether your service is the best one in town or your restaurant is the highest quality is gonna become as important to AI in its response as your website. So you're no longer the gatekeeper of the narratives surrounding your brand. Word of mouth and what the public think about you is Now more important than ever, and controlling that is gonna become an imperative.

Ben Yeah, I mean, for the marketers out there, in, in, in this sense, it's not actually that different to the principles of SEO in a way. Yeah, no. You know, optimise your content, but the way you're optimising it is now different. It's not about keywords, it's not about H1 tags or title tags, and then, you know, what you would traditional, traditionally kind of refer to as link building, you know, getting- Your website linked from multiple sources, it's more now about like citation and context building. You know, the more places that you can have, the more people saying the same thing about your business, your brand or your product, the more likely you are to start surfacing in AI, in AI results for that. but I think the, the thing to really hammer home here is that generic won't do. Like, you, you, you, you really need to nail down Like what is, what is the single truth?

Jesse It's also brand sentiments that people put out all the time, you know, we're not just the best pizza in New York, but, you know, we're committed to excellence or, you know, we work on innovative solutions and business transformations of technologies.

Ben Yeah. Our people are our difference.

Jesse Exactly. Like what does that mean? Like if, if a consumer can't dissect your statement, then AI certainly isn't going to be able to. It needs to be able to lift that sentence or the paragraph Out of your website and be able to understand it in isolation. So the burden on brands to articulate themselves in a way that is clear is becoming even more important, and to be able to, you know, map your statement onto All the activity on your website. I think the way to think about it is that brand is how a company or an agency or, or product articulates itself, and I think that articulation is going to be the key, right? And if AI reads your website, and not just your website, your ad performance or public opinion of you, how well articulated your brand is is going to determine whether AI thinks you're dependable enough, really. Like, are your values, you know, Sometimes people think terms like values are fluffy, but now they're actually gonna have a real commercial impact.

And what do you surface? Is your, you know, is your, are the principles of your brand permeating all your behaviors and, and all your ads, and are your products and services aligning with what you're saying about your products and services? Is the value of your pro-prod- products, well expressed in the headline of your campaign? And, and, and also the, on the consumer end, like, are your consumers going- to agree with you on Reddit, you know, this whole journey of, or, or we should say, the, the life cycle of your service or product, is gonna become relevant. It's not just the top end and your website, where you control the narrative. It's almost out of the hands of brands now. What they can control, however,

Ben The one word that comes to mind for me as you say all of that, which I think is a really important takeaway, is alignment. You know? AI has this ability to very quickly look at hundreds of thousands of sources and come to an opinion, and you need to be aligned across your comms and your products and actually how you act, in order to show up well.

Jesse Brands are gonna start seeing a reduction in clicks through to their website simply because the AI is pulling everything the consumer needs for them. I think it's Sixty percent roughly reduction in clicks in the EU, or, or user journeys ending without a click, and you can't really blame them. And e-even some of the times, AI doesn't even surface links in its responses, so there will be a reduction in web traffic, in performance, but not to fear, they're getting the information they need, and it might lead to a conversion down the line.

Ben So what we're really saying is that the conversion path is still there, but, you know, it's being diverted, right? Yeah, absolutely. It's not- It's not the traditional search, click, explore website, convert, add to basket, checkout, you know, it's a much more complicated journey, I think, in some ways, and a journey where brand arguably is even more important, because you're not buying the click, because you're not getting the customer onto your website immediately What, what the AI says about you has to be memorable. Yeah, yeah. and you have to be memorable or authentic to get in the result in the first place. in many ways, people don't know for sure What leads to better AI performance, right? There's lots of theories, but it is a bit of a black box. Some of the things we've noticed start with language, so start with matching the way that people tend to search and expect answers with the way you present information on your website.

Jesse It's not just clarity, it's not just clarity of language, you know, we said before around authorship and, you know, substantiating any claims you make on your webpage, but also structure as well. Well, FAQs, answering queries early, so, you know, structuring it into subheaders, these are all ways that make the AI's user, quote unquote, user journey simplified.

Ben Yeah, and I think a really important point of that is that AI companies don't want to spend compute, right? Yeah. So the further down a page an AI agent has to go, or the more work it has to do to read a PDF to, you know, uncover a bit of information about you The worse, like clearly structured, clearly signposted information reduces the compute requirement of the AI and increases the likelihood of it actually getting to that information and, and using it. All

Jesse The more it has to render, right? Like if, if your website completely relies on Flash and animation and, and every piece of useful information is in a video or, or, or the AI isn't gonna want to load that video, it'd rather go to your competitor who has everything A needs on one page, and it's not to say that websites lose their color and their character, it just means that you have to keep in mind to the information that is presented. So it's a, it's a triple really, it's the siteability, so how well referenced you are or how substantiated you are, scanability, so how is the structure of your information, does it align with, as you just said, the structure, you know, of an AI response, and then building it for prompts, the language language of a prompt, bit more conversational, bit more down to earth, and then the main one, sorry, the fourth one, is language that actually makes sense and language that says something, you know, and that isn't overly sentimental or fluffy, you know, having a headline that says, We're passionate about transformative solutions. AI, AI isn't going to be able to pick that apart, so I don't

**Jesse ** Okay, so there's episode three of the shift. So what we've covered is essentially the importance of articulating your brand, with clarity, structuring your websites in a way that makes you, intelligible to AI search, but also the interesting- New developments that are happening, in, from Google and all these big tech players to essentially shift the user experience of information.

Ben Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the, the key takeaways, you know, we're recording this episode today, who knows what's gonna happen tomorrow? The, the pace of change in this arena is just so rapid, it's increasingly important to be curious, test things for yourself as well, and yeah