The New Search Landscape?
Google doesn’t want you to know this, but it’s old news. Despite being synecdoche for the way we search on the internet, it’s no longer the first place people turn to when they need an answer or want to find a product. Search engine optimisation (SEO) – the way companies made their products and information discoverable by the likes of Google via keyword targeting is being rapidly displaced by AI with people posing queries and receiving answers, not links to follow as in the days of yore. Data from Similarweb, which measures traffic to more than 100m web domains, estimates that worldwide search traffic fell by about 15% in the year to June, The Economist reports.
SEO shaped why much of the experience of web browsing has felt the way it did until recently: the style of headlines, the personal essay before a recipe, the oddly phrased sentences sandwiched in between normal ones. For a while there the web was for something besides the user – Google – until AI came along. We’re now in the GEO-era landscape (that’s Generative Engine Optimisation), a shift that is changing how brands can be made and stay discoverable in the face of a continuously developing technology. The ‘wordiness’ that characterised much of SEO-focused content is being displaced by easily grabbable chunks of information that AI can scrape and cite.
How consumers discover brands and products has changed too with Google, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, and even AI assistants now playing an important role. Lauren Park, head of ASO, M+C Saatchi Performance, concurs with this assessment, saying: “2025 saw AI redefining search,” noting that “discovery now happens all across Google, TikTok, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, and more and more through LLMs and AI assistants that summarise information without sending users to their page sources.”
Search is a Behaviour
What this tells us is that search is a behaviour, not just an action, and brands and marketers can’t rely on keywords. Presence is the new frontier and showing up on relevant platforms in relevant ways will be the path to success. It’s something WPP’s chief AI officer, Dr Daniel Hulme, cautions about drawing attention to the “profound transformation underway as AI reshapes discovery, creating a new class of customer – the AI agent – empowered to make decisions on our behalf. And we’re already seeing this action; OpenAI recently announced a shopping experience directly in ChatGPT to research products for consumers, a shift which has massive implications for both content and channel strategies.”
Andrew Britteon, SEO manager at VML UK, confirms that today “People are discovering, comparing, and deciding across a fragmented ecosystem… often without a single click back to brand sites.” He’s got the stats to back it up, saying “nearly 59% of queries now result in zero-click outcomes”. That’s a problem for brands’ visibility with “AI models independently crawling and summarising brand content, visibility depends on being the most quotable and authoritative source rather than the most clickable.”
“Generative AI has redefined discoverability,” confirms Mary Kyriakidi, global director, brand, Kantar. “Search is no longer a single destination but a behaviour spanning TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and AI assistants. For brands, visibility and authority now depend on being present where decisions are shaped. Nearly one-quarter of AI users already shop via AI assistants, and three-quarters seek AI-driven recommendations. If the model doesn’t know you, it won’t choose you.”
Not too long ago, the industry followed well-defined SEO frameworks and kept up with search engine updates to tweak strategies accordingly. The principles at the centre, however, remained the same. “For nearly two decades, the structure of digital marketing departments has been surprisingly uniform,” says Erwin Bossers, SVP media, DEPT®. “We built silos around specific disciplines. We hired heads of search, paid social specialists, and display managers. We viewed the digital landscape as a series of distinct, horizontal channels, each requiring a unique set of manual levers and knobs to operate successfully.”
Obviously, this is no longer fit for purpose with Erwin confirming “that old structure no longer works.” The rapid platform evolution and the rise of AI mean “there is no longer such strong differentiation. Search has become social, and social has become search. The uncomfortable truth is, the channel is dead.”
The Future of Content
For consumers, this is actually good news. Usability has improved and the pesky SEO-rich essayistic parables when searching for an answer or a product largely banished (though we may come to lament this). For brands, the news is less peachy following years of investment. Daniel’s view isn’t all doom and gloom and the way he sees it is that moving forward “doesn’t mean abandoning core SEO principles.”
No one is ‘cancelling’ the value of content, but its value needs to be reinscribed to mirror users’ more. “Owned content is still king, but to optimise for an agent-driven world, it must be rich, contextual and mirror the natural-language prompts users are actually asking,” explains Daniel. “Social platforms then become critical. While many are closed to deep crawling, AI models are adept at garnering signals from artefacts like video captions, page titles and public comments. They use this information less for direct discovery and more to validate what they have learned from other sources, like your website or earned media.”
What lives on a webpage still matters, Daniel says, offering an analogy. “Think of it this way: the claims on your product page are the thesis, but an authentic creator video on TikTok with positive comments is the third-party proof that confirms it for the AI. This underscores why reputation management and strong PR will become more, not less, critical in shaping your brand's public perception.”
Style over substance (or old SEO tricks before an algorithm) won’t be enough to entice AI. “In this zero-click reality, brand visibility needs to be built from presence and substance that goes beyond chasing page rankings. At M+C Saatchi Performance, we see it as a simple truth: AI works when humans direct it. And brands win when they show up as clear, verifiable experts across multiple sources,” Lauren says, asking us to think of this approach through a ‘brand demand’ lens. It’s made up of “authoritative quality content that earns citations, combined with the creative, fit-for-format media that drives memory and intent. So, if there’s a main idea brands should take in is that search should be understood as behaviour as opposed to a channel. And the brands that treat it as a behaviour to be decoded and refined will stay discoverable, even when (and if) the click disappears.”
From Channel to Ecosystem
The advice from Mary, from Kantar, is that brands “must create structured, accurate, machine-legible content that algorithms can interpret and humans find relevant.” There’s going to be a lot of value in variation, and more work for brands and their partners too. “Think recipes, how-to guides, and platform-specific formats: short-form video for TikTok, deeper threads for Reddit. Salience alone won’t secure algorithmic preference, differentiation matters. The strongest brands will be those that prime models with their meaning and value, shaping the story AI tells. In a landscape where technology mediates choice, brands that fail to adapt risk being optimised out,” Mary adds.
Andrew wants to see brands pivot to content “that is both human-friendly and AI-legible” which is clear, structured, factual, and easy for models to extract and reference. As AI assistants and chatbots increasingly act as the ‘browsers’ on behalf of consumers, brands must ensure their sites provide unambiguous, well-organised answers that position them as the source of truth.”
Perhaps ironically, it looks like AI is granting power back to humans by transforming search into discoverability and pulling from a range of sources that search engines didn’t. “Discoverability now relies on a broader presence across platforms that AI frequently pulls from – including Reddit discussions, YouTube explainers, and social content optimised for natural-language queries.”
A winning strategy emerges from “from pairing technical clarity with creative storytelling that reflects how gen z and emerging audiences search conversationally, and sometimes even visually. The brands that regain authority will be those that treat search as an ecosystem, not a doorway, and design content to be found, cited, and trusted, whether it leads to their website, or not,” Andrew adds.
For Daniel, “the winning strategy is no longer about driving clicks from a single channel. It’s about orchestrating a consistent trail of verifiable evidence across the entire ecosystem, ensuring that when an AI agent checks your references, your story holds true everywhere.” This means there are few places for brands to hide as showing up now means showing up authentically and being verified by humans, not just scraped by an algorithm.
Erwin draws attention back to the idea of ecosystems – channels are old news. “By building your plans, teams, budgets around the Google-, the Amazon- or the Meta and TikTok (and others) ecosystems brands will regain, improve, and protect their visibility with this approach, as it mirrors how their customers spend their time. With a fully collapsed funnel where a single ecosystem can encompass an entire customer journey, this is the way to go.” The tidbit of wisdom to take away from this? “The channel is dead. Long live the ecosystem.”
Though it’s difficult to say anything definitive where AI is concerned, it does seem like the way people search is changed for the foreseeable. It’s also a change that consumers are welcoming considering how much content until very recently wasn’t actually for them, but for search engines. As consumers ourselves, we have to admit that this is a positive shift. For the industry, it means more work to reconfigure how brands show up, compete, and stay relevant. A challenge at the intersection of technology and creativity with humans’ needs and behaviour embedded at the very heart.
