Remember when searching online just meant typing two or three words into Google and scrolling through a page of blue links? That’s not really how it works anymore. More and more, people are asking full questions to AI tools and getting an answer handed to them right away. No scrolling. No comparing ten open tabs. Just an answer.

We’ve been watching this play out across the brands we work with, and honestly, it’s not a small shift. It’s changing how people find businesses, how they weigh their options, and eventually, who they decide to trust with their money. So let’s walk through what this actually looks like at each stage of the customer journey, and what you can do about it.

What Do We Even Mean by AI Search

AI search is what happens when a tool like ChatGPT search, Google’s AI Overviews, or Perplexity reads through several sources and hands you one answer, instead of a list of websites to sort through yourself. Sometimes it tells you where that answer came from. Sometimes it doesn’t.

This is a real departure from how search has worked for the past twenty years. The old model matched keywords to pages and called it a day. What we’re seeing now is a tool that actually tries to understand what you’re asking and responds the way a genuinely knowledgeable person would. That’s a big difference, and it changes what “getting found online” actually takes.

The Way People Ask Has Changed

Nobody searches the way they used to. Instead of typing “interior designer Kochi,” someone’s more likely to ask which designers in Kochi are known for minimal, budget-friendly homes. It reads more like something you’d ask a friend than something you’d type into a search bar.

Because of that, content stuffed with keywords just doesn’t hold up anymore. What works now is content that actually answers the question, in language a real person would use, not language written for a crawler.

You Don’t Always Need a Click to Be Discovered

One of the more interesting shifts we’ve noticed is zero-click search, when someone gets their answer straight from the AI result and never opens a website at all. For simple questions, this is fast becoming the norm.

At first, that sounds like bad news if you rely on website traffic. But here’s the flip side: if your business happens to be the one mentioned inside that AI answer, people still see your name, even without clicking through. That builds a certain amount of trust before anyone’s even landed on your site.

Research Now Happens Inside a Conversation

Once someone has a rough idea of what they need, they start comparing their options. And increasingly, that comparison happens through a back-and-forth with an AI tool rather than a dozen open browser tabs. Someone might just ask the AI to list a few good options along with the pros and cons of each.

This is where your online reputation starts to matter a lot. AI tools build their answers from reviews, articles, and content already sitting out there on the web. If your business isn’t part of that wider conversation, you’re just not going to come up. That’s really why AI search engine optimization has gone from “nice to have” to something you can’t really skip anymore.

By the Time Someone Decides, Their Mind Is Often Already Made Up

Here’s the part that tends to catch people off guard. By the time a customer is ready to decide, they’ve often already read an AI-generated summary about your brand and formed a fairly solid opinion, all before ever opening your website.

And when people do click through after an AI search, they usually know exactly what they’re looking for. They’ve already done the comparing elsewhere. So the traffic coming in through AI search might be smaller in number, but it tends to convert better, as long as your business made it into that AI answer in the first place.

Getting Mentioned Takes Its Own Kind of Work

This is generally called generative engine optimization, or GEO. Put simply, it’s about improving the odds that an AI tool mentions or recommends your business when someone asks a related question. In practice, that means writing content AI tools can easily pull clear answers from, staying consistent and credible across the web, and making sure your business information is accurate everywhere it shows up.

SEO Hasn’t Gone Anywhere

We get asked this a lot: does SEO still matter? It does, and we don’t see that changing anytime soon. SEO builds the underlying authority and trust that AI tools lean on when deciding what to include in an answer. AI search optimization and GEO sit on top of that foundation, helping your business actually get named inside those answers. One doesn’t replace the other. From what we’ve seen across our own clients, the businesses holding onto their visibility best are the ones doing both, not picking one over the other.

Where This Leaves Us

The customer journey doesn’t move in a straight line anymore, if it ever really did. AI search has changed how people move from search, to discovery, to research, and finally to a decision, and a good chunk of that decision-making now happens inside an AI conversation, long before your website even gets opened.

For businesses, this means visibility isn’t just about ranking on a results page anymore. It’s about being present, accurate, and genuinely trustworthy inside the answers AI tools are giving people. Bringing traditional SEO together with AI search optimization and GEO is quickly becoming something you need to do, not something you can put off, if you want to stay visible as all this keeps changing.

FAQs

1. How is AI search changing the customer journey?
It’s making the journey more conversational. Instead of browsing through multiple links, people now discover, compare, and decide with help from AI-generated answers and recommendations.

2. What is the difference between traditional search and AI search?
Traditional search hands you a list of links based on keywords. AI search actually understands the question you’re asking and puts together one answer using information from several sources at once.

3. Does AI search reduce website traffic?
Sometimes, yes, especially for simple questions where people get their answer without needing to click anywhere. That said, showing up in AI answers still brings real value: better brand recognition, and often higher-quality traffic when people do click through.

4. How can businesses optimize for AI search?
By writing content that clearly answers real questions, keeping their online reputation in good shape, using structured data where it makes sense, and building GEO into their overall content strategy.

5. What is GEO and why does it matter for AI search?
GEO, or generative engine optimization, is about improving your odds of being mentioned or recommended within AI-generated answers. As more people turn to AI tools first, this is getting harder for businesses to ignore.

6. How can businesses measure their AI search visibility?
By keeping an eye on brand mentions within AI answers, referral traffic, branded searches, and overall visibility across AI platforms. At Adox Global, we treat this as part of our regular performance tracking, not something we check once and forget about.