For two decades, marketing ran on one principle: people search, compare, then buy. Win the ranking, win the traffic, win the customer. SEO built an entire industry around that logic.
While traditional search continues to prevail, people are increasingly turning to AI for searches and recommendations. Adobe’s most recent data shows AI-referred shoppers converting 54% better than non-AI traffic in May 2026, a sharp reversal from a year earlier when AI traffic converted at roughly half the non-AI rate. AI-referred traffic to US retail sites was also up 138% year-on-year in May 2026, after peaking at 1,151% year-on-year growth in December. Whatever pace the shift settles at, the direction is clear: a part of discovery is happening inside AI conversations rather than on a traditional search’s results page.
AI is becoming more than a discovery channel. It is becoming the new decision layer sitting ahead of the website visit. McKinsey estimates that AI agents could mediate USD 3 trillion to USD 5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030, even under moderate adoption scenarios. On the B2B side, Gartner expects AI agents to intermediate more than USD 15 trillion in spend by 2028.
So the question CMOs need to ask is changing. Not just “do we rank on Google” but “does AI understand what we sell, does it trust our information, and will it recommend us.”
SEO and GEO aren’t rivals, they’re different jobs
Search engines organise information. AI platforms synthesise it. That’s a real difference, and it changes how visibility works, though it’s less of a clean break than it can sound.
AI doesn’t rank pages the way a search engine does. It draws signals from across the web, a brand’s own site, but also news coverage, reviews and third-party commentary, and blends them into a single answer. A brand can still rank first on Google and be missing from an AI answer, because the rest of the web isn’t saying enough about it in a form AI can use. That gap is what researchers have started calling Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO.
None of this replaces SEO. Strong technical SEO is, if anything, a precondition for GEO to work at all, since AI systems still rely on crawlable, well-structured pages to find and read content in the first place. The two disciplines increasingly need to sit inside the same strategy rather than compete for budget or credit.
What the data shows
According to FlowBlinq’s study based on an audit of more than 500 Indian websites, which assessed 71 parameters covering structured data, product description quality, schema completeness and AI crawlability, the average GEO readiness score came out at 35%.
A few findings stood out: 91% of the sites checked had no clear guide telling AI what they sell and how their catalogue is organised. 47% were unknowingly blocking AI crawlers such as ChatGPT’s bot, often because a security plugin had quietly added the restriction. 62% had product descriptions too thin for AI to describe or recommend the product accurately, and 54% were missing the product codes AI needs to match and verify a listing.
None of this comes down to weak creative or a weak brand. It’s largely structural, and structural problems are fixable once a business knows where they sit. Free AI visibility audits, which score a site against 17 GEO pillars in about three minutes, are worth running before a competitor gets there first.
Why PR just got more important
Getting a website AI-readable is only the first layer. What actually determines whether AI recommends a brand is trust, and trust is built largely outside the website. AI models place real weight on editorial coverage, third-party validation, reputable publications and community discussions platforms when deciding which brands to surface. A well-structured site tells AI what a brand sells. Independent coverage tells AI whether to believe it.
That shift is already showing up in budgets. Gartner has forecast that PR and earned media budgets will double by 2027 as AI search replaces traditional search as the primary way people discover brands. It’s a bold prediction and worth treating as one, but it points to a real shift already underway, in Singapore’s B2B SaaS and fintech sectors, for instance, communications teams have already begun reframing their media relations programmes around a GEO objective.
This isn’t PR losing ground to technology, it’s the two converging. Technical optimization helps AI find and understand a brand. PR helps AI trust and recommend it. For CMOs, that means comms and SEO can’t sit in separate departments anymore, they’re feeding the same system.
The money is already moving
This isn’t a theoretical shift. Global venture funding hit a record $510 billion in the first half of 2026 alone, according to Crunchbase, already ahead of the $440 billion raised across all of 2025 combined. AI-focused companies captured more than 70% of that capital in the most recent quarter. Capital is following the same discovery shift that’s reshaping how brands need to show up.
What’s coming next
AI is moving from answering questions to doing tasks: researching, comparing and, increasingly, buying on a customer’s behalf. As agents make more of these calls, brands won’t only compete for a customer’s attention, they’ll compete for the AI’s recommendation too.
In India, the stakes are just as real. Estimates of the market’s size vary by methodology, Bain’s 2026 report puts India’s e-retail market at roughly $78 to $80 billion this year, while other trackers place it meaningfully higher, but every major estimate agrees on the trajectory: strong, sustained growth through the end of the decade. EY India estimates that generative AI could lift retail productivity by 35 to 37% by 2030. This is a market where AI-led discovery is about to matter as much as it does anywhere else in the world, and Indian brands that get their data house in order now will have a real head start.
The bottom line
None of this is optional anymore. A brand can rank first and still lose the recommendation, and that gap is exactly where competitors are moving fastest. The task for every CMO isn’t to abandon SEO or chase a new acronym, it’s to make sure AI can actually understand, trust and recommend the brand it represents. That’s not a project for next year’s budget cycle. It’s worth starting today, before a competitor already has.
(Views are personal)
