AI is changing how consumers discover, research, and choose brands. But that doesn’t mean search is disappearing. This was laid out in a session featuring Semrush Account Executive, Elliot Parkes and Senior Solutions Engineer, Will Fordyce at The Marketing Society’s AI Accelerator Day in partnership with The Financial Times. Their key message? Search is expanding beyond Google, and customer journeys are expanding with it.
The new shape of discovery
For one, search engine usage remains enormous, while AI is becoming another important waypoint in the customer journey. The result is not a simple migration from one channel to another. Consumers are moving between search engines, AI platforms, social media, communities, brand websites, publishers and marketplaces as they build confidence in a decision.
Semrush Journeys data illustrates just how connected these behaviors are:
- 80% of consumer journeys containing an AI waypoint also show AI becoming part of a broader path to purchase
- 90% of AI journeys also include a search waypoint.
Consumers aren’t swapping Google for ChatGPT, AI and search are working together.
That relationship becomes even clearer around purchase decisions:
- 40% of consumers use AI when shopping for products or services
- 59% primarily use it for product comparisons
- 75% trust AI recommendations.
- Yet search continues to act as a confirmation layer, with 68% checking any AI recommendations through search engines.
Therefore, a consumer might discover a product through AI, validate it on Google, compare opinions on Reddit, visit a brand site, explore a competitor and then return later to convert. A real retail banking journey presented, moves between Reddit, Google, NatWest, Monzo, Which?, Perplexity, ChatGPT and Experian before ultimately reaching an outcome.
The journey has outgrown the click
Consumer journeys are increasingly complex jobs-to-be-done rather than singular point purchases. Different waypoints can influence decision-making without ever generating a direct referral. AI might shape the shortlist, search may validate it, community content can build trust, and the brand website may ultimately close the decision. Those contributions and diversions are often invisible to legacy pixeling, campaign IDs, direct referrals and click-based attribution.
For complex organizations, that makes connected data increasingly important. Marketing teams need to understand whether the brand is visible in high-intent search, represented accurately in AI answers and recommendations, technically discoverable across its domains, and present throughout the real journeys customers take.
That means bringing SEO, AI search, and behavioral intelligence together rather than measuring each in isolation. Search is evolving and the customer journey is evolving with it. For enterprise brands especially, the opportunity is to build a connected view of both: understanding where the brand is visible, how consumers encounter it, and which touchpoints ultimately shape the decision.
Get a sample of the change your market is seeing with a tailored Semrush Journeys report. Dive deeper into all things AI search, brand visibility, and consumer discovery with 1,000 other marketing experts at Spotlight by Semrush.
Semrush are Partners of The Marketing Society.
