Search becomes conversation
AI-mediated search changes how people express needs, evaluate alternatives and reach services. The answer’s synthesis also changes how brands and content are represented, compared and measured.
These changes share a common theoretical thread in Information Foraging Theory (Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card, Xerox PARC, 1999): people assess an information path through information scent — the relevance cues a title, snippet or link promises — and abandon it when the expected gain no longer justifies the time spent. A system that answers directly removes the path itself: there is no longer a trail to follow, and with it goes the attention economy link-based navigation was built on. The theory ties together, in a single mechanism, the drop in pages visited, the decline in serendipity, and the fading weight of on-page SEO signals (Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster — NN/g).
Changes in people’s behaviour
- Intent-based interaction: users express an objective instead of building a keyword query.
- The customer journey shortens: consideration moves outside the site and the path to the service becomes shorter.
- Serendipity declines: targeted answers reduce exposure to information users did not request.
- The conversations you cannot observe: a significant part of the conversations shaping choice takes place in private spaces, outside any measurement.
The consequences of these phenomena for brands, representation and error correction are covered separately in Emerging effects: Representation forms beyond owned channels, The brand reduced to comparable attributes and When AI gets the brand wrong.