Search Is Changing & So Are Buyers
Search Is Changing: So Are Your Buyers Search isn’t just evolving because of Google’s latest algorithm tweaks. The bigger shift is happening on the buyer’s side. People are no longer relying solely on traditional search engines to find what they need. They’re getting instant AI summaries, asking voice assistants for recommendations, and making purchasing decisions in conversations that never touch a web page you can track in analytics. The latest ebook from the Search Engine Journal, The Future of Search: 16 Actionable Pivots That Improve Visibility & Conversions, digs into this transformation and how marketers can adapt. It explores what “optimisation” really means when visibility, engagement, and conversions happen across fragmented, AI-driven channels. Here are five of the biggest insights from the report, and what they mean for your strategy. 1. Ranking Well Doesn’t Guarantee Visibility Once upon a time, topping the search results meant you’d get seen. Now? Not so much. AI summaries, voice assistants, and on-platform answers can intercept your audience before they even click through to your site. And even if you’re ranking first, your content might be invisible if it’s not structured in a way large language models can easily parse. Research shows AI-generated answers often pull single-sentence summaries or structured content like tables and bullet lists. They rarely rely on exact-match keywords, instead favoring clear, contextual responses. If you want to stay visible, you need to think beyond traditional SERPs and consider how your content is interpreted by multiple AI systems — not just Google. 2. Many Conversions Happen Offscreen Your analytics dashboard isn’t telling you the full story. High-intent actions — phone calls, text messages, in-person conversations — are often missing from attribution reports. But in service-based industries and B2B deals, these are exactly the moments that close sales. One business discovered nearly 90% of their Yelp conversions came from phone calls they weren’t tracking. Another saw appointment bookings surge once they connected organic search activity to call data rather than just clicks. We call this the “insight gap” — and closing it with conversation tracking can completely change how you measure success. 3. Listening Beats Guessing Marketers are swimming in customer input — from call transcripts to live chat logs — but much of it sits unused. Those raw conversations contain the exact language buyers use to describe their needs. When marketing teams analyze them, they gain a real competitive edge: sharper messaging, better-performing landing pages, and campaigns that resonate. In one case, a marketing agency boosted qualified leads by 67% just by swapping in customer-used terminology throughout their campaigns. It’s a simple mindset shift: stop assuming what people want to hear, and start using the words they already trust. 4. Paid Search Works Best When It’s in Sync Search behavior is messy — and so is the buyer journey. People bounce between organic results, paid ads, and AI-generated answers in a single session. The top-performing campaigns don’t treat these channels as silos. Instead, they keep messaging consistent across all touchpoints: ad copy that reflects real customer concerns, landing pages tailored to the buyer’s decision stage, and offers that match the problem they’re actively trying to solve. And don’t forget — optimising “after the click” is just as important as winning the click itself. 5. Attribution Models Are Behind the Times Most attribution models still assume conversions happen on one screen, in one session. Reality looks more like this: A manager sees your brand in an AI-generated snippet on desktop → sends the link to themselves on Slack → later calls your sales team from their iPhone after reviewing the content on mobile. If you’re relying on last-click attribution, you’re probably making decisions on incomplete — or misleading — data. Our report argues for models that account for multi-touch, cross-device, and offline activity. This isn’t about tracking everything just because you can. It’s about focusing on the signals that actually influence a buyer’s decision. Rethinking Search Means Rethinking Buyers The ebook, created in partnership with CallRail, is more than a set of tactical pivots. It’s a reminder that behind every search query is a human making a choice. Marketers who thrive in this AI-shaped landscape aren’t just optimising for rankings or clicks. They’re optimising for how people discover, evaluate, and decide — wherever and however that happens.
ChatGPT ~ Using Google Search?
ChatGPT Appears To Use Google Search As A Fallback SEO consultant Aleyda Solís recently uncovered an intriguing behavior in ChatGPT’s web browsing capabilities: when Bing fails to index a page, ChatGPT may turn to Google’s search snippets as a fallback source of information. The Experiment To test how quickly ChatGPT (with web browsing enabled) can discover new content, Aleyda created a fresh page titled “LLMs.txt Generators” on her site LearningAISearch.com. She immediately asked ChatGPT to find the page, but it couldn’t. Instead, it responded that the URL might not be indexed or could be outdated. Curiously, when Aleyda posed the same question to Google Gemini, it successfully fetched and summarized the live content, even though the page had just been created. She then submitted the page to both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for indexing. Google indexed it promptly. Bing, however, struggled. The Reveal After Google began displaying the page in search results, Aleyda returned to ChatGPT. This time, ChatGPT provided a partial summary of the page, mentioning only one of the tools listed. When she asked for the source, ChatGPT stated it had found a “cached snippet via web search”, likely from “search engine indexing.” The Search Engine Journal is reporting that the snippet ChatGPT provided matched Google’s search result, not Bing’s, which had still failed to index the page. This strongly suggests that ChatGPT was referencing Google’s publicly visible search snippets to answer the query. Aleyda explained: “I compared the text snippet provided by ChatGPT with Google’s search result for that specific page… and confirmed it was the same information.” Not an Isolated Case This isn’t a one-off event. Aleyda’s article also points to another case where a similar pattern occurred, ChatGPT used a snippet from Google Search when Bing hadn’t yet indexed the content. Aleyda also documented what happened on a LinkedIn post where Kyle Atwater Morley shared his observation: “So ChatGPT is basically piggybacking off Google snippets to generate answers? What a wake-up call for anyone thinking traditional SEO is dead.” Stéphane Bureau shared his opinion on what’s going on: “If Bing’s results are insufficient, it appears to fall back to scraping Google SERP snippets.” He elaborated on his post with more details later on in the discussion: “Based on current evidence, here’s my refined theory: When browsing is enabled, ChatGPT sends search requests via Bing first (as seen in DevTools logs). However, if Bing’s results are insufficient or outdated, it appears to fall back to scraping Google SERP snippets, likely via an undocumented proxy or secondary API. This explains why some replies contain verbatim Google snippets that never appear in Bing API responses. I’ve seen multiple instances that align with this dual-source behavior.” Why It Matters This behavior implies that standard SEO practices, like optimising title tags and meta descriptions, still matter, even for AI-driven tools like ChatGPT Search. If Bing can’t access your content but Google can, ChatGPT may still find a way to surface it, through Google’s snippet. As Aleyda notes, it would be helpful to check server logs to confirm whether ChatGPT attempted to access the page directly and what kind of HTTP response it received. That piece of the puzzle could clarify why it resorted to a search snippet in the first place. Still, the broader takeaway is clear: optimising for Google is still critical in the age of AI search. Even ChatGPT might be leaning on it when all else fails.
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)
Introduction: The Shift From Search to Generation For decades, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has been the cornerstone of digital visibility. Businesses optimised their content to rank highly in search engine results, mostly on Google, because that’s where people went for answers. But the rise of AI-driven tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and others has changed the game. Increasingly, people aren’t just searching for information, they’re asking AI for direct answers, recommendations, and insights. In this new paradigm, traditional SEO isn’t enough. Enter Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) — the emerging discipline of optimising your content so it is discoverable and favourably represented in AI-generated responses. What Is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)? GEO refers to strategies and techniques aimed at ensuring your content is recognised, interpreted, and included by AI systems (like ChatGPT) when they generate answers or recommendations. Rather than optimising for a list of ranked search results, GEO is about optimising for: This is not merely SEO 2.0, it’s a parallel but complementary strategy tailored to how LLMs (large language models) and AI systems generate knowledge and responses. Why GEO Matters Now GEO vs Traditional SEO: Key Differences Feature SEO GEO Optimised For Search engine algorithms (e.g. Google) Generative AI models (e.g. ChatGPT, Claude) Visibility Format Ranked lists of clickable links Synthesized, natural-language answers Ranking Factors Keywords, backlinks, Core Web Vitals Training data presence, structured data, citations, trustworthiness Interaction Users click to explore sites Users often stay within the AI interface Metrics Impressions, CTR, page rank Inclusion in AI output, citation, mention frequency How to Optimise for Generative Engines Like ChatGPT How SEO Still Plays a Role in GEO SEO and GEO are interconnected. Here’s how SEO tactics contribute to GEO: If ChatGPT uses browsing, or tools like Perplexity or Bing Chat do real-time retrieval, your SEO optimisations directly affect what gets pulled in. Challenges and Unknowns in GEO Still, as companies like OpenAI explore memory, web integration, and citation systems, it’s likely tools will emerge to help analyze and improve GEO performance. Preparing for the AI-First Web The future of digital visibility is not just about ranking on search engines, it’s about being included in the outputs of the AI systems people trust. Whether users are shopping, researching, troubleshooting, or comparing, they’re increasingly turning to AI-first tools. Generative Engine Optimisation is your pathway to staying visible, relevant, and influential in this evolving digital landscape.