How AI Is Changing the Customer Journey in 2026: From Search to AI Recommendations

AI Is Changing the Customer Journey

The traditional customer journey is changing.

For years, online discovery followed a relatively familiar path:

Need → Google search → Search results → Website → Comparison → Decision

That journey hasn’t disappeared.

But artificial intelligence has introduced another route:

Need → Ask AI → AI researches and compares → Recommendations → Website → Decision

Consumers can now describe exactly what they need to tools such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity and receive a synthesised answer rather than manually researching dozens of webpages.

And increasingly, those answers can include products, services and businesses that the AI believes are relevant to the user’s request.

That changes something fundamental for marketers.

The battle for visibility no longer begins exclusively on a search engine results page.

It can begin inside the AI-generated answer itself.

What is an AI-assisted customer journey?

An AI-assisted customer journey is a customer journey in which artificial intelligence helps a consumer discover, research, compare or evaluate products, services and businesses before making a purchasing decision.

Instead of searching several individual keywords and visiting multiple websites, someone can provide their requirements in one detailed prompt.

For example, rather than searching:

“Best CRM software UK”

a buyer could ask:

“What CRM would you recommend for a UK B2B company with a five-person sales team that needs email automation, HubSpot integration and costs under £100 per month?”

The difference is significant.

The first query asks a search engine to find information.

The second asks an AI system to interpret a requirement and help make a decision.

That distinction is beginning to reshape the customer journey.

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The data: consumers are already using AI to make decisions

This isn’t simply a prediction about where search might eventually go.

Consumer behaviour has already started changing.

50% of consumers are already using AI-powered search

McKinsey’s 2025 AI Discovery Survey found that approximately half of consumers already use AI-powered search.

Among AI-search users, more than 70% use it at the top of the funnel to learn about categories, products, brands or services.

More importantly, McKinsey found that 44% of AI-powered search users considered AI search their primary and preferred source of insight, compared with 31% for traditional search, 9% for retailer or brand websites and 6% for review sites.

That’s an important shift.

AI isn’t only helping consumers locate websites.

It is increasingly participating in the research and consideration process itself.

58% of consumers prefer GenAI recommendations over traditional search

Capgemini Research Institute’s What Matters to Today’s Consumer 2025 surveyed approximately 12,000 consumers across 12 countries, including the UK.

It found that:

58% preferred product and service recommendations from generative AI tools over traditional search engines.

And:

68% were prepared to act on recommendations made by generative AI.

Capgemini’s subsequent research involving 10,000 consumers across 13 countries found that 53% had already made purchases based on generative-AI recommendations, while 64% were open to buying new products suggested by AI.

That moves AI considerably further down the funnel.

It isn’t merely:

“Help me find information.”

It can become:

“Help me decide what to buy.”

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AI is compressing the research stage of the customer journey

Imagine someone planning a holiday.

Traditional search journey

They might search:

Best hotels Sardinia

Then:

Best areas to stay Sardinia

Then:

Cagliari vs Villasimius

Then:

Hotels near beaches Villasimius

Then they may visit review websites, hotel websites, travel publications and forums before comparing their options.

AI-assisted journey

The same traveller could instead ask:

“Where should a couple stay in southern Sardinia for five nights if they want beautiful beaches, restaurants within walking distance, somewhere quieter than Cagliari and a hotel under £200 per night?”

AI can interpret all of those requirements simultaneously.

It can research possibilities, explain the differences and potentially recommend particular locations or businesses.

The customer’s discovery and comparison stages begin to merge.

That is why AI search matters commercially.

AI can influence which brands make it into the consideration set in the first place.

AI referrals are growing rapidly.

Adobe provides another useful piece of the picture because its dataset measures actual website behaviour rather than consumer intentions alone.

Adobe Analytics analysed more than one trillion visits to US retail websites.

It found that traffic from generative-AI sources to retail websites increased 4,700% year-on-year in July 2025.

The absolute share remained relatively small compared with established channels such as paid and organic search, but the growth rate illustrates how quickly a new discovery channel emerged.

Adobe’s survey of more than 5,000 US consumers also found that 38% had used generative AI for online shopping.

Among those uses:

53% used it for product research

40% for product recommendations

36% for finding deals

30% for creating shopping lists.

This matters because it shows AI operating across several stages of the buying journey rather than occupying a single touchpoint.

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AI-referred visitors may also arrive further into their decision journey

There’s another interesting signal in Adobe’s behavioural data.

Compared with visitors arriving through non-AI sources, consumers referred to retail websites by generative AI spent 32% longer on the site, viewed 10% more pages and had a 27% lower bounce rate.

Correlation doesn’t prove that AI caused the higher engagement.

But there is a plausible explanation.

A traditional search visitor might still be trying to understand what options exist.

An AI-referred visitor may already have:

described their problem → explored possible solutions → compared options → received a recommendation

before clicking.

By the time that person reaches the website, part of the discovery process may already be complete.

For businesses, that raises an interesting possibility:

AI visibility may influence not only how many visitors reach a website, but how informed those visitors are when they arrive.

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But AI is also creating customer journeys without a click

This is where the change becomes even more significant.

Not every AI interaction produces website traffic.

Research from Pew Research Center analysed browsing behaviour from 900 US adults and found that Google’s AI-generated summaries significantly affected click behaviour.

When an AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional search result in only 8% of visits.

Without an AI summary, users clicked a traditional search result in 15% of visits.

Links contained within the AI summaries themselves were clicked in only 1% of visits.

And 26% of visits containing an AI summary ended the browsing session entirely, compared with 16% for traditional search-result pages without an AI summary.

That introduces an important new marketing problem.

A consumer could potentially:

discover your brand → learn what you offer → compare you with competitors → remember your name

without generating a website session at that moment.

Traditional analytics may never record that interaction.

Longer and more specific searches are especially important

Pew’s research reveals something else businesses should pay attention to.

Only 8% of one- or two-word Google searches in its dataset generated an AI summary.

For searches containing 10 words or more, that increased to 53%.

And 60% of searches beginning with question words such as “who”, “what”, “when” or “why” generated an AI summary.

This matters for content strategy.

Traditional SEO has often concentrated heavily on short keyword phrases:

accountant London

project management software

commercial cleaning company

AI-assisted discovery encourages much more contextual queries:

“Which accounting firms specialise in helping small ecommerce companies selling across the UK and EU?”

or:

“What project management software would suit a small creative agency that needs client approvals and doesn’t have a dedicated project manager?”

These questions contain intent, context, constraints and relationships between concepts.

That means businesses need content capable of answering them.

Search itself is becoming an AI experience.

AI search shouldn’t be treated purely as traffic coming from standalone AI platforms.

Traditional search engines are incorporating generative AI directly into their products.

Google announced in 2025 that AI Overviews had reached more than 1.5 billion users across 200 countries and territories.

Google is also developing AI Mode as a more conversational way to research complex questions through Search.

In other words, the distinction between:

“search engine”

and

“AI assistant”

is becoming increasingly blurred.

For marketers, the practical consequence is that SEO and AI visibility shouldn’t be treated as competing strategies.

Businesses increasingly need both.

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The customer journey is moving from keywords towards intent

Traditional search often required users to translate their needs into keywords.

AI reduces that requirement.

A customer can simply explain the problem.

Consider these two searches.

Traditional

“best payroll software UK”

AI-assisted

“We’re a UK company with 22 employees and currently manage payroll manually. We need something that handles pensions and HMRC reporting but is simple enough for someone without payroll experience. What should we consider?”

The second query gives an AI system much more context.

To recommend a company confidently, the system needs information capable of matching businesses against those requirements.

That makes clarity increasingly valuable.

What information does AI need to understand about a business?

There is no single page or piece of structured data that guarantees an AI recommendation.

Different AI systems retrieve, rank and generate information differently.

But businesses can make their digital presence significantly clearer.

At minimum, a website should make the following easy to determine:

* What the company does

* Which products or services it provides

* Who those products or services are for

* Which problems they solve

* Where the company operates

* Relevant expertise or specialisms

* Evidence supporting important claims

* Pricing or purchasing information where appropriate

* How the business differs from alternatives

* Clear relationships between services, industries and customer needs

This is useful for traditional SEO.

It is also useful for humans.

And it gives AI systems better information from which to understand the business.

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The rise of the “AI consideration set”

Marketers traditionally talk about a consideration set: the small number of brands a customer seriously considers before purchasing.

AI introduces a new gatekeeper into that process.

Suppose a customer asks an AI assistant:

“What are the best cybersecurity companies for a 50-person UK professional-services firm?”

There may be hundreds of companies capable of providing that service.

But the AI answer may mention only a handful.

The commercial question therefore becomes:

Why were those businesses included?

And equally importantly:

Why weren’t the others?

A business could offer exactly what the customer needs and still fail to enter the consideration set if its online presence doesn’t communicate that relevance clearly enough.

This is the emerging problem of AI visibility.

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AI visibility doesn’t replace SEO

This distinction is important.

SEO is not becoming irrelevant.

Search engines continue to generate enormous volumes of discovery and commercial traffic, and many AI systems themselves depend on searchable web content and third-party sources.

Instead, the discovery ecosystem is expanding.

Businesses now potentially need visibility across:

Traditional search

AI-generated search results

Standalone AI assistants

Review and comparison platforms

Industry publications

Communities and forums

Authoritative third-party sources

Pew’s research illustrates the importance of that wider information ecosystem: Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit collectively accounted for 15% of sources cited in the Google AI summaries it analysed, while government websites were proportionally more common in AI summaries than ordinary search results.

AI visibility therefore isn’t simply about changing a few words on a homepage.

It involves building a digital presence that makes a company understandable and credible across the web.

What should businesses do as the customer journey changes?

Businesses don’t need to abandon their existing marketing strategy.

They need to adapt it.

Start by asking a different set of questions:

Could an AI system clearly explain what our company does?

Does our website explicitly state who our products or services are for?

Do we answer the detailed questions potential customers actually ask?

Are important claims supported by evidence?

Is information about our company consistent across authoritative sources?

Do we have useful content covering problems rather than only target keywords?

Can AI distinguish us from businesses offering something slightly different?

These questions sit at the intersection of SEO, AEO and GEO.

SEO, AEO and GEO now work together.

 The customer journey hasn’t disappeared. It has gained a new layer.

The biggest change created by AI isn’t simply another marketing channel.

It’s where the decision-making process begins.

Consumers can now research categories, understand products, compare businesses and receive recommendations before opening a company’s website.

For businesses, that creates a new visibility question.

For years, marketers have asked:

“Can customers find us when they search?”

In 2026, businesses increasingly need to ask another:

“Can AI understand when we are relevant enough to recommend?”

That is the gap ORBA is being built to help businesses understand.

ORBA analyses how clearly AI systems can interpret a website, highlights potential visibility gaps and provides practical recommendations for improving how the business is communicated to AI.

Because as customer journeys change, being online is no longer the same thing as being understood.

Frequently Asked Questions

How is AI changing the customer journey?

AI is changing the customer journey by helping consumers research, compare and evaluate products and services before visiting individual websites. Instead of relying entirely on search-result pages, consumers can ask AI assistants detailed questions and receive personalised explanations and recommendations.

Are consumers actually using AI for product discovery?

Yes. Capgemini’s 2025 consumer research found that 58% of surveyed consumers preferred generative-AI product recommendations over traditional search engines, while McKinsey reported that roughly half of consumers in its 2025 research used AI-powered search.

Can a business guarantee that ChatGPT or another AI will recommend it?

No. There is no legitimate optimisation technique that guarantees inclusion in an AI-generated recommendation. AI systems use different models, retrieval methods, sources and ranking mechanisms. Businesses can instead improve the clarity, authority and accessibility of information available about them.

How can ORBA help improve AI visibility?

ORBA identifies areas of a website that may make it harder for AI systems to understand the business. It then provides prioritised recommendations and an action plan, allowing businesses to make improvements and run further scans to track how their AI Visibility Score changes over time.

Does ORBA guarantee that my business will appear in AI recommendations?

No. No platform can guarantee that a business will be mentioned or recommended by an AI system. AI-generated answers depend on many factors, including the user’s question, the AI model being used and the information available to it. ORBA helps businesses improve the signals they can control: how clearly and effectively their website communicates information about their business.