Search Is No Longer Searching

^{Image: Front Door Communications}

Seaside towns in October don’t usually draw much of a crowd. Brighton, last week, was the exception. Some 11,000 people descended on the Brighton Centre for brightonSEO, and very few of them had come for the pier or a stick of rock.

They came for search. Not the most glamorous corner of the digital world, you might think, and not one that has traditionally troubled the boardrooms of Britain’s retailers. For the best part of two decades, search has been treated as a technical discipline, something best left to a small team somewhere near marketing, armed with keywords, link-building budgets and a monthly report that few people read.

Until now.

The way shoppers find products is changing more profoundly than at any point since the arrival of the smartphone. As one of what felt like a handful of retail people in the building, I was struck by how far ahead of the retail industry the search community already is.

From searching to asking

For as long as most of us can remember, the deal was straightforward. A shopper typed a few words into Google, was presented with ten blue links and clicked on one of them. Rank near the top and the customer was yours. Rank lower and you paid for an advert to make up the difference. It’s a model which has underpinned digital marketing budgets for twenty years.

That model is being quietly dismantled. Increasingly, consumers aren’t searching at all; they’re asking. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude. AI Overviews are fielding questions such as “what’s the best waterproof jacket under £100 for walking in the Lake District” and returning not a list of links but an answer. Often just one or two products, complete with the reasoning behind the recommendation.

The implications for brands and retailers are stark. If you don’t feature in that answer, you don’t feature at all. There is no page two to fall back on and no paid listing to buy your way in, at least not yet.

The search community has a name for this: answer engine optimisation, or AEO. Whatever the acronym, it marks the moment search stops being a marketing tactic and becomes a matter of commercial survival.

Strip away the jargon and much of it comes down to something surprisingly unglamorous. These AI tools are only as good as the information they can find and trust. Patchy product descriptions, inconsistent pricing, out-of-date stock levels, missing sizes and unhelpful images all count against a retailer, and the AI will happily recommend a competitor whose data is in better shape. Product data, in other words, has become the new shop window.

Steve Dennis put it neatly when he joined me on What’s in the Box earlier this year. A shopper asks a retailer’s site for “Taylor Swift’s football jersey” and is served up her latest album, when what they actually wanted was her fiancé’s shirt. Any shop assistant would get it in a heartbeat. Machines, for now, need rather more help.

Nor is this purely an online concern. Shoppers now do their research long before setting foot in a store, and if the AI doesn’t know a product is in stock five minutes down the road, that visit simply never happens. Footfall, as ever, begins well before the front door.

For retail leaders, the priorities are clear enough: bring the search specialists into the room where strategy is set, treat product data as a strategic asset rather than an IT housekeeping exercise, and spend ten minutes asking an AI assistant about your own category to see who it recommends. The results can be sobering.

There is no shortage of hype surrounding AI, and plenty of it deserves a healthy dose of scepticism. This isn’t one of those occasions. The search industry is already well into this conversation, and retail needs to catch up, because the next battle for the customer won’t be won on the high street or the home page. It will be won in the answer.