The Great Search Shift: How Retailers Can Adapt to the New Rules of Search

Today's retail landscape is no walk in the park. Communication has evolved unimaginably: endless forums and review sites sharing consumer opinions, expectations for highly personalized experiences, and digital giants like Google and Amazon.com, which have conditioned consumers to expect instant access and gratification. It's more demanding and competitive than ever, and meeting these expectations pushes brands to test their limits and ability to navigate this complex and ever-changing landscape.

With the advent of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), brands now face another test: maintaining visibility and engagement across Google, Bing, ChatGPT Search, and beyond in the changing search landscape.

New Meaning Behind Meeting Your Customers Where They Are

Today, meeting your customers where they are isn’t behind a counter in person — it’s online, where many consumers begin their journey via organic search.

While “organic search” used to be synonymous with Google, that’s all changing with generative search — and consumer behavior is changing, too. Before, consumers had to type keywords into Google and evaluate the results manually; now, generative search platforms (also known as generative AI assistants) allow them to converse naturally to find what they need in search, with answers summarized.

People aren't necessarily even searching explicitly — they're having a conversation, and search is part of that conversation. Brands must start thinking about how to become a part of consumers’ search conversations to simplify the customer journey, whether they’re searching on Google, ChatGPT Search, voice search like Siri, or any other platform.

Retailers must anticipate that the rise of conversational search will grow as GenAI becomes more and more embedded in technology and consumer behavior. And to be part of that conversation, they need to make sure their website can be found.

Visibility in a Fragmented Ecosystem

Brands constantly think about visibility. As the list of where to "be found" grows by the day — think traditional search engines such as Google and Bing, social media sites such as TikTok, and AI search engines such as ChatGPT Search and Perplexity — achieving visibility across all of them can seem overwhelming. Retailers are left wondering what they'll do when most conversations about their brand are held between a consumer and an AI assistant. How can they control their brand narrative in every conversation?

Because every significant and upcoming search engine now provides GenAI responses, retail brands that don't adapt will get left behind. You must be found when and where consumers search. And with more places to discover information, products and services, Google is no longer the only destination for recommendations. Retailers must strategize for their content to be included in AI-generated answers.

The fragmented ecosystem of search and endless ways to be found shouldn't be viewed as a challenge but rather an opportunity to lead the way in this new era of retail.

The good news? Consumers have been asking Google every question that comes to mind for over 25 years, and brands have access to their organic search data in Google Search Console. That data can become a prediction engine for searches across the fragmented ecosystem; after all, consumers aren’t asking new or different questions — they’re just searching in different places. Brands will best serve consumers by creating content that satisfies their intent, no matter where they search. For instance, informational queries (e.g., "top-rated vacuums") could lead to a well-researched buying guide in traditional search or a brand mention and link in GenAI platforms, while transactional queries (e.g., "buy Dyson V15") could drive traffic to optimized product pages on any engine.

So, how can retailers ensure their content is being shared with consumers everywhere they search and hold conversations?

Brands That React and Adapt to AI Search Today Will Be Tomorrow’s Big Winners

Brands must take a proactive approach to being found online. The key to being found by traditional and generative search engines is to appear in a website index, a reference catalog used as a source for answers. ​​These indexes are built by bots that find and catalog retailers’ websites. However, getting indexed isn’t always simple. Your freshest and most important pages need to be found in time to drive revenue, over and over again, by the bots that inform and update website indexes. And waiting for those bots to find your updates on their own is no longer enough. To be discovered by tomorrow's consumer, brands must prioritize the optimizations that help bots find and understand their websites and even bypass bots entirely by proactively pushing their site content directly to the indexes used by generative search engines.

Though we don’t know what tomorrow will hold, we do know that the search landscape is evolving at a breakneck pace. Retailers must remain agile in their efforts and be open to testing and adopting new strategies. Retailers will win with systems that leverage organic search, not in a silo, but as a central hub of their omnichannel plan.

Charli Rogers is the chief customer officer of Botify, an enterprise SEO platform.