Buyers don't search anymore, they ask

Buyers don't search anymore, they ask. Whether it is for the "best spots in Amsterdam for fresh hash browns" while planning a day out with friends, or researching the "most tolerant sealants for waterproofing FPV drones" while building out a precision agriculture stack for their company.

Almost all of the research, deliberation, selection, and even solicitation, is now increasingly being done through this AI medium, which gives it the ability to:

1. shortlist brands it deems fit for the user's context,
2. present a brand's positioning, including the offerings, compliances, strengths and weaknesses, and differentiators amongst others, based on its understanding drawn from training data, the brand's website, and other sources that may mention the brand,
3. directly book appointments, request quotations and even make purchases for advanced set-ups.

We call these the three gates, where a brand can drop out of contention for a buyer.

And this is not all. It can also decide to tell the user that a certain industry is not mature enough, driving them away from what would otherwise convert more convincingly into a prospect for brands operating in that industry. This is just one of many ways that the AI channel now influences the buyer journey and shapes the buyer's decision.

This calls for a change in the way brands address their digital marketing strategy, with SEO no longer guaranteeing visibility and desired perception. This is where GEO and AEO come in, coined to encapsulate the efforts needed to ensure that a brand is included in answers where they want to be present, whilst being understood correctly and being accessible to the potential buyer using AI to solve their problem.

Two things a brand must do to adapt

1. Figure out the baseline. Where do they stand right now?

In order to do this, it is important to identify who their buyers are, group them into personas based on region, languages, markets and product lines, simulate conversations mimicking what that customer asks while describing a problem that their brand claims to solve, and finally evaluate this over the relevant engines enough times to cover all the different ways an AI may choose to respond to the same conversation, ensuring statistical relevance.

2. Incorporate AI visibility into their overall strategy. How can they improve and maintain their standing as the brand and the landscape keep evolving?

In order to do this they need to triage results from the baseline, run analysis on those results, gather actionable insights linked to business outcomes from the analysis, and determine the decomposition of tasks to work on these insights. The important part is performing these steps cyclically, as changes appear in the AI buyer journey landscape and as the brand grows and expands into new territories.

This is a sizeable ask

Most marketing teams are already running several channels that matter just as much. Doing the above properly means either hiring someone to own this channel outright, or spreading it across people who are fully committed elsewhere and watching every other timeline stretch.

This is where we come in

Three lenses on every finding

Being found and understood by AI is a technical question, a brand question and a human question at the same time, so we read every finding through all three:

• Technology & AI: how the systems work, which sources they draw on, and how those signals assemble into a picture of your company.
• Brand & Narrative: how you are positioned, and how an assistant builds its own version of that story from whatever it can reach.
• People & Behaviour: how buyers use AI for considered decisions, what they ask, and how the journey has changed.

Measurement built on your buyers

• Your buyers, simulated. Personas built from your real buyers, with their role, market, language and needs, running the conversations they would actually have, follow-ups included.
• Your facts, checked claim by claim. You tell us how you describe yourself: certifications, prices, regions, differentiators. We check each claim against what every assistant says and mark whether it matches, has drifted, or is contradicted.
• The source behind each gap. When an assistant gets something wrong, we trace where it learned it, which is often a LinkedIn page, a review site or a directory rather than your own website.
• Competitors and open ground. Per market and language: which brands are named, which are cited as sources, how each is described, and which questions no brand has claimed yet.
• Several engines, repeated runs. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, with each question asked at least ten times. SparkToro had 600 volunteers run the same prompts nearly 3,000 times and found less than a 1 in 100 chance of the same list of brands appearing twice, so one answer is a sample rather than a verdict. Across enough runs the share settles, and that share is what the work moves.

A watch on a landscape that keeps moving

Four things change underneath all of this, and we track them so you do not have to:

• Model frameworks. What the systems can do. Google moved AI Mode to a new default model worldwide in May 2026, and a new model can give a different account of the same business.
• Retrieval. What gets read before an answer is written. Google's AI features use "query fan-out", turning one question into many searches, which decides whose pages end up in the answer.
• Infrastructure. What you have to set up to be reachable. From 15 September 2026, Cloudflare applies new default settings for AI bots on new sites and unchanged free plans, so a business can become harder to reach without editing a page.
• Policy. What platforms allow. Google's spam policies now name attempts to "manipulate generative AI responses in Google Search" as spam.

Each shift gets turned into one of three calls for you: act now, keep an eye on it, or safely ignore it, with the reason attached.

What sets us apart

Every finding carries its reasoning. Which engine said it, which source it came from, which gate it belongs to, and what changes if you fix it. We assess against published frameworks rather than a score only we can see.

The work is about your business, not your category. The questions come from your buyers, the competitors are the ones you name, and the markets and languages are yours.

It ends in a plan, not a chart. Fixes ranked by expected impact, each with an owner in your team: engineering for crawler settings, brand for your LinkedIn page, support for replies to reviews. The work rarely sits in one department, so we plan it across all of them.

Where to start

Most clients start with The Check, a one-off review that shows where you stand across the three gates and hands over a plan. Some stay on a retainer afterwards for help putting it in place and for the ongoing watch. You can stop after The Check and keep the plan either way.

If you would like to know where your brand stands, we are happy to talk it through. In a 20-minute call we look at how a potential customer would describe the problem you solve, what the assistants say when they do, and whether optimising for the AI buyer journey is worth your attention right now. Sometimes the answer is that it can wait, and we will say so.

The call is free and you leave with a first read on your position either way.

Book a 20-minute call

Sources

1. SparkToro, "AIs are highly inconsistent when recommending brands or products," 28 January 2026. https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-ais-are-highly-inconsistent-when-recommending-brands-or-products-marketers-should-take-care-when-tracking-ai-visibility/
2. Google, "Google Search's I/O 2026 updates," 19 May 2026. https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/search-io-2026/
3. Google Search Central, "AI features and your website." https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features
4. Cloudflare, "Cloudflare Allows the Agentic Internet to Flourish with a Simple Philosophy: Your Content, Your Rules," 2026. https://www.cloudflare.com/press/press-releases/2026/cloudflare-allows-the-agentic-internet-to-flourish-with-a-simple-philosophy-your-content-your-rules/
5. Google Search Central, "Spam policies for Google web search" (updated 28 August 2026). https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies