By Lara O’Reilly, Geoff Weiss
Publication Date: 2025-12-01 12:51:00
Artificial intelligence is transforming online search.
Rather than peruse the list of long links on a search engine results page, users are increasingly being served AI overviews — snippets of content that aim to immediately answer their questions — or consulting chatbots and answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity when researching purchases.
About half of US consumers are using AI-powered search to evaluate and discover brands, per a recent McKinsey report.
The shift is upending the world of search engine optimization (SEO), a practice that involves designing web pages and securing links from high-quality sites to help brands rank highly on search engine results pages.
New cottage industries like generative engine optimization (GEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO) are emerging as companies strive to keep their brands visible — and accurately represented — within AI-driven interfaces.
For Business Insider’s recent series on the shifting search landscape, we asked experts at some of the biggest AI platforms how brands can best position themselves for this new era of conversational, AI-powered search.
