How to Win When Your Buyer Starts with ChatGPT, Not Google
The Vanishing Search Bar
The search bar isn't just dying; it’s being euthanized. For three decades, the digital marketing playbook was a simple war of attrition: win the "ten blue links," and you win the customer. But the familiar Google interface is rapidly becoming a relic. We are entering the era of "synthesis search," where conversational interfaces don’t just point users toward answers—they consume, digest, and recite them.
The numbers are moving faster than the C-suite can keep up with. In the U.S., traditional Google search volume has cratered by nearly 20% year-over-year. Gartner is even more pessimistic, predicting that traditional search volume will drop by 25% by the end of 2026. Discovery is no longer a keyword query; it is an AI-mediated conversation, and if your brand isn't part of the dialogue, it doesn’t exist.
From SEO to AEO: How Search Is Changing
As the search bar fades, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is sharing space with Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). In this new landscape, visibility isn't about ranking first — it's about being pulled into the final answer.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are the new power users. ChatGPT now triggers a web search in 31% of all prompts, averaging 2.17 searches per query to build its responses.
Winning in this environment requires a strategy shift. Research from Princeton, Georgia Tech, and the Allen Institute for AI shows that LLMs favor content based on relevance and topical authority — not keyword density. In fact, keyword stuffing now actively hurts AI visibility by making it harder for models to extract clean, usable facts. Brands that cite credible third-party sources see up to 115% more visibility in AI-generated responses.
"In traditional search, visibility meant appearing in a ranked list of links. In AI search, ranking still happens — but it's less about ordering pages and more about which pieces of content earn a place in the final answer." — Based on findings from Princeton University and Georgia Tech
The main changes: "synthesized into the final answer" became "pulled into the final answer," "semantic extractability" and "semantic similarity scoring" were cut or simplified, and the quote was cleaned up so it reads as a clear takeaway rather than a definition. The data and authority stay intact throughout.
The Bot-to-Bot Economy: Selling to the Agent in the Middle
The most disruptive shift is the rise of the "Agentic Shopper," where the buyer is increasingly a bot. Acting on behalf of a human, it handles discovery, comparison, and checkout on its own.
To support this, a coalition of Google, Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart built the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), a shared standard that lets AI agents move seamlessly across platforms. Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal are backing it too, making AI-driven transactions not just possible, but routine. The impact of this is much heavier in B2B and especially in discovery.
The UCP is built on three technical pillars that bypass the traditional landing page:
Dynamic Discovery: Businesses declare their capabilities (loyalty programs, fulfillment, inventory) in a standardized profile, allowing AI agents to autonomously identify and select merchants.
Secure Tokenization: Credential providers tokenize payment and identity data, allowing agents to complete purchases without ever seeing a user’s raw financial information.
Identity Linking: Using OAuth 2.0, agents can securely act on behalf of users to manage carts and accounts across multiple platforms.
Contextual Conversations: Ads That Feel Like Advice
Advertising is shifting from disruptive banners to recommendations that feel native to the conversation. OpenAI and Google are currently pursuing two different approaches to get there.
OpenAI is betting on sponsored responses that match the assistant's tone, like its "Bazaar" shopping carousel, where paid placements blend into the answer rather than interrupt it. Google is going further with "Direct Offers" in AI Mode, letting brands surface tailored discounts or loyalty perks at the exact moment a user is ready to buy.
The entry fee is steep. Early ChatGPT advertisers faced minimum commitments between $200k and $250k, making AI placement a high-prestige, high-stakes channel. That price tag comes after a turbulent internal period at OpenAI. During what the company called a "Code Red" quality crisis, Sam Altman ordered a full system overhaul and paused ad development to focus on building something that felt genuinely useful. That pause has since lifted. As of February 2026, OpenAI is officially testing sponsored content across its Free and Go tiers.
"The goal is to ensure that sponsored content feels like a helpful extension of the conversation rather than an interruption." — Sam Altman, OpenAI
The Trust Premium: Statistics are the New Keywords
Today, 60% of searches end without a single click to a website. In that world, showing up in the answer is the only visibility that matters.
AI models do not scan for marketing copy. They look for authority: credible sources, clear facts, and content that other trusted sources reference. Brands that understand this shift have three concrete ways to build that presence:
Quantitative Statistics (+40% Boost): Models favor hard data. Replacing qualitative descriptions with quantitative facts (e.g., "reduces costs by 47%") makes your content significantly more extractable.
Expert Quotations (+35-40% Boost): Including direct quotes from recognized industry leaders builds the "authoritative signaling" that AI models use to verify the quality of a source.
Recency Bias: Visibility is now a race against time. 65% of AI citations target content less than a year old. ChatGPT’s reference URLs are, on average, 393 days newer than traditional organic Google results, forcing brands into a hyper-accelerated content refresh cycle.
Social SEO: The TikTok/Reddit Research Loop
While AI handles more of the search experience, many users are moving in the opposite direction. They are going to social platforms specifically to escape ads and algorithmically curated results. The numbers reflect it: 54% of millennials now use TikTok for product research, and 24% of all consumers prefer social search over Google.
Reddit has become the go-to destination for shoppers who want a straight answer from a real person. The platform's appeal is simple: communities are harder to game than search results. Users trust lived experience over polished content, whether that content comes from a brand or a model.
"Shoppers aren't waiting for Black Friday or Cyber Monday anymore. They're starting research earlier to feel in control, seeking genuine recommendations from real people to avoid the noise of traditional ads." — Reddit Business Blog
The Reputation Era
We are leaving the era of the website and entering the era of reputation. AI doesn't just index your landing page; it evaluates your entire digital footprint across reviews, forums, and structured data to decide whether you are worth recommending. The Universal Commerce Protocol handles the transaction. That leaves brand authority as the only lever marketers still control.
When an AI is asked to describe your brand without your landing page, what will the data say?
Ryan Edwards, CAMINO5 | Co-Founder
Ryan Edwards is the Co-Founder and Head of Strategy at CAMINO5, a consultancy focused on digital strategy and consumer journey design. With over 25 years of experience across brand, tech, and marketing innovation, he’s led initiatives for Fortune 500s including Oracle, NBCUniversal, Sony, Disney, and Kaiser Permanente.
Ryan’s work spans brand repositioning, AI-integrated workflows, and full-funnel strategy. He helps companies cut through complexity, regain clarity, and build for what’s next.
Connect on LinkedIn: ryanedwards2