GenAI Search Is Disrupting Customer Engagement

From the customer’s point of view, AI-driven search is delivering more tailored and relevant results. This may lead to better user experiences compared to traditional search.

At the same time, I believe that AI-driven search and the rise of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) will fundamentally reshape how your customers discover your websites and brand. With GEO search, the power is shifting from the indexer to the answer generator. This claim may still sound speculative; after all, ChatGPT’s search market share is only about 1% in 2025, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) still dominates (BrightEdge).

However, I believe the situation will change faster than many expect: tools like Gemini (Google), Perplexity AI, Grok (xAI), Meta AI, Claude (Anthropic), DeepSeek, Microsoft Copilot, and ChatGPT (OpenAI) will soon act as the primary gatekeepers of digital customer engagement and “how we find stuff in a messy market”.

GenAI Presents Definitive Answers To Your Customers

GEO leverages LLMs to create high-quality, contextually intelligent content optimized for AI-driven discovery. This introduces new layers of bias, hallucination, and manipulation to search. In this context, GEO search throws up a new type of risk for branding because AI presents synthesized answers that feel definitive to your customers. 

In the eyes of your customers, such a definitive response can become the perceived truth about your brand. Just imagine the damage to branding and customer engagement initiatives if AI misrepresents your brand and sets false expectations. 

The disintermediation of brands is a real concern in this evolving search environment. As Ralf Gehrig, CXO at WongDoody, Infosys’ creative technology agency, observes:

“A key challenge for brands is that their content is often absorbed into aggregated answers, with brand attribution reduced to a minor footnote. As a result, lead generation through GEO search is weaker than with traditional SEO.”

GenAI Search Represents A Paradigm Shift

For marketers and customer experience designers, GEO represents a paradigm shift: optimizing content for AI-powered search engines and conversational platforms. Brands struggle to predict which content will be selected by the underlying LLMs, how it will be balanced, and how long the time lag between optimization efforts and observable results is.

Hence, a core difficulty with GEO search is the lack of clarity and evidence around what works and what doesn’t. As a marketer and customer experience designer, you should:

• Redesign your customer journey mapping approach. LLMs have transformative consequences for customer journey mapping. They are redefining brand interactions and altering go-to-market strategies. For decades, customers have relied on “searching” and “clicking” during the discovery phase of a product search. Today, customers are moving from searching to prompting. Traditional customer engagement approaches, such as product configurators, are losing their attraction as customers increasingly expect AI to anticipate and pre-select products for them.
• Rethink the role of interfaces for your customer engagement. Customers demand intelligent, instant, and seamless two-way engagement. They want interfaces that understand their needs, offer proactive and personalized recommendations, and deliver engagement across all digital touchpoints. For this vision to succeed, agentic AI will play a critical role in enabling continuous, end-to-end interactive experiences and agentic shopping. LLMs are sending off agents to do their own searches in the background.
• Redefine the KPIs that measure your brand. Identifying accurately which marketing touchpoints contribute to a desired customer action is essential for effective customer engagement. Attribution is changing: Are click-through rates, impressions, and bounce rates still as relevant? You don’t know if a customer chose your brand because of a Perplexity answer or a Claude recommendation. Moreover, under GEO conditions, traffic will no longer be the main marketing metric; instead, the brand mentions in AI output will. Your competitive brand advantage will increasingly come from owning unique data sets and making them LLM-friendly.

AI-Driven Search Is A Strategic Matter To Many Stakeholders

The filtering algorithms of LLMs introduce a new layer of gatekeeping, potentially shaping which brands are visible or promoted. Search turns from a niche topic into an increasingly strategic issue for many stakeholders outside the search optimization team in digital marketing.

Of course, this is not the first time the search market has been transforming. But this AI-driven search transition will profoundly impact your customer experience design, engagement strategies, marketing, and brand management. Hence, AI-driven search should matter to your teams dealing with product development, sales, IT, customer service, strategy, and brand building.

False Dichotomies Kill Strategy: SEO and GEO Need Each Other

Currently, around half of all traffic generated by digital marketing campaigns still originates from SEO. It is no surprise that most brands continue to invest heavily in SEO. However, digital marketing is undergoing rapid transformation.

In the coming years, GEO will erode the dominance of SEO as LLMs reshape search behavior. While GEO and SEO tools crawl websites in similar ways, their ranking mechanisms differ significantly. To be clear, though, great GEO customer experiences will still depend on optimized SEO. Hence, don’t underinvest in your SEO activities, as:

• Search behavior is already diversifying across platforms. Google handles about 8.5 billion daily searches, but users are increasingly turning to alternative platforms and vertical search engines, including Amazon, LinkedIn, and TikTok. In this broader context, Google’s market share is already smaller than often cited.
• AI regulatory frameworks will impact the SEO-GEO dynamics. Corporate approval of LLM tools for employee use will impact how employees conduct B2B searches. Moreover, LLM crawling of product specifications could raise concerns about industrial espionage. Hence, as a marketer and customer experience designer, you need to pay closer attention to how AI regulatory frameworks like the EU AI Act or the EU Data Act, which govern privacy, copyrights, and customer data protection, are evolving.

Participate In My Ongoing Research On AI Search

In a forthcoming report that will be published as part of the SITSI research program, I will explore how generative AI is transforming customer engagement and which strategic steps to consider for both business and technology leaders. 

Please contact me (d.bieler@pacanalyst.com) if you want to discuss any of these themes or contribute to the research.