First Published: 27 January, 2026
TL;DR: User search behaviour is evolving. 60% of searches now end without a click, and AI answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity are processing billions of queries. Traditional SEO focuses on rankings, but Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) focuses on being cited and recommended by AI systems through entity association, structural clarity, and third-party validation. Businesses optimising for Google alone are building single-channel visibility whilst users diversify across multiple discovery mechanisms.
What you need to know:
Google still matters, but users are diversifying where they seek recommendations.
The behaviour pattern that defined internet search for two decades (scanning lists, opening multiple tabs, cross-referencing sources) is being joined by something fundamentally different. Users are asking AI systems for answers and adopting what they're told.
This represents a behavioural evolution in how information discovery functions.
Businesses optimising exclusively for Google are building visibility in a single channel, whilst their potential customers spread across multiple discovery mechanisms. Future-proofing requires understanding how these parallel systems operate and adapting strategy accordingly.
How User Search Behaviour Is Changing
Traditional search trained users to evaluate critically. You'd scan headlines, review snippets, open three tabs, and cross-reference until confident in your conclusion.
That behaviour hasn't disappeared. A growing user segment has adopted a parallel approach through AI answer engines.
When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity for a recommendation, they're not seeking a list to curate. They're seeking a result to adopt. The cognitive load required to evaluate multiple sources transfers from the user to the AI system.
The data reveals this parallel behaviour is expanding. Zero-click searches now represent 60% of Google searches in 2025, up from 58% in 2024. Users obtain answers without visiting websites. With AI systems integrated into search, this figure is projected to reach 70% by mid-2026.
When AI Overviews appear on Google, click-through rates drop to 8%, compared to 15% for traditional search results (a 46.7% reduction).
The pattern: Users are adding a new behaviour alongside traditional search. Obtaining direct recommendations rather than evaluating options themselves.
From Keywords to Conversations
The language people use when interacting with AI reveals the permanence of this shift.
Users have stopped talking to machines in "broken computer speak." Instead of typing "marketing agencies London," they ask "Who should I hire for this?" The relationship with the internet has fundamentally changed.
They're not looking for data anymore. They're looking for recommendations.
This conversational pattern represents an emerging durable behaviour. People increasingly prefer to delegate the mental work of "picking the best option" to a system they trust. As more users experience that convenience, they expand their information-seeking toolkit beyond traditional search.
The adoption velocity supports this. Perplexity AI processed 780 million queries in May 2025, up from 230 million in mid-2024 (tripling in less than a year).
Why Trust Supplements Scepticism
The trust shift happens because AI offers an alternative to the friction of search by providing conversational fluency.
Google's interface design intentionally highlights competition. You see different headlines, conflicting snippets, and advertisements. This visual clutter keeps your scepticism high.
AI engines use synthesis to merge conflicting voices into a single, confident narrative. Because the response is grammatically perfect and lacks the visual marketplace, your brain processes it with much less effort.
In psychology, this "ease of processing" is often subconsciously mistaken for accuracy.
These systems use authority cues like small citation numbers as psychological anchors. Even if you don't click the links, the mere presence of those citations makes the synthesised paragraph feel like a verified consensus rather than one person's opinion.
By presenting a unified front of information, the AI stops being a tool you use to look for data and starts being an advisor you listen to. It's effectively moving the goalposts from "here is what the world says" to "here is the answer."
Among users who have adopted AI for search, 79% believe it offers a better experience than traditional search engines. This segment is growing, creating a parallel discovery channel that businesses cannot ignore.
The Selection Mechanism
Understanding how AI systems choose which sources to cite reveals why traditional SEO strategies alone are insufficient in this evolving environment.
When you ask a question, the AI doesn't search for your words. It converts your intent into a mathematical vector and scans millions of indexed pages to find others that exist in the same neighbourhood of meaning.
This process is called Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). It starts with hundreds of potential sources but immediately filters them based on factual density and structural clarity.
If a page is vague or buried in code that a bot can't easily parse, it's ignored in milliseconds. Popularity on traditional Google doesn't matter.
The final selection is decided by consensus and citations. These systems look for a "trust cascade". They prioritise information that is consistently repeated across multiple authoritative sites like industry publications, Reddit, and Wikipedia.
If your site says one thing but three other trusted sources say another, the AI will ignore you to avoid hallucinations or factual errors. It values the unified front.
The sources that win provide sufficient context. They don't just mention a keyword. They provide a complete, standalone answer that the AI can easily extract and stitch into its final paragraph.
What Structural Clarity Actually Means
For content to be "snip-able" for synthesis, it needs clear landmarks that a machine can read in milliseconds.
This means using descriptive subheaders (H2s and H3s) that are phrased exactly like the questions users ask. If your header is "Our Methodology" and your competitor's is "How to Optimise Trial-to-Paid Conversion," the AI will grab theirs because the connection between the user's question and the content is explicit and structurally loud.
AI engines prioritise bullet points, numbered steps, and Schema markup (the invisible code that tells a bot "this is a price" or "this is a step-by-step guide"). These elements act as a highlight reel.
When information is trapped in a long, metaphorical paragraph, the AI has to work harder to extract the truth, which increases the risk of error.
If you present your information in a modular way (where a single section can be lifted out and still make perfect sense on its own), you've achieved the structural clarity that gets you cited.
The Shift From Links to Mentions
Traditional Google authority worked like a popularity contest based on voting. If a high-authority site linked to you, they handed you a vote of power.
You could rank a page without anyone actually saying your name, as long as you had enough of these digital pipes pumping authority into your domain. It was a structural, mathematical map of who-points-to-who.
AI entity association is different because it's semantic, not structural.
Instead of counting links, the AI builds a knowledge graph where your brand is a node. It scans the web to see how closely your brand name sits next to specific topics in a sentence.
If a trusted industry report mentions your company as a "leader in B2B SaaS" but doesn't link to you, traditional SEO would give you almost zero credit. For an AI, that unlinked mention is a massive signal.
It proves you are an entity that belongs in that conversation.
The data supports this mechanical difference. Only 12% of AI Overviews link to the #1 ranking result, breaking the traditional correlation between search position and traffic.
Being talked about in the right context is now more valuable than being linked to.
How Authority Gets Determined
In AI synthesis, authority is determined by entity association. Digital guilt by association.
The system looks at how often your brand name is mentioned alongside a specific topic across the web. If your name appears on high-trust platforms like industry journals, news sites, or major forums (Reddit, Quora) next to your core expertise, the AI creates a mathematical link between you and that subject.
It isn't counting backlinks. It's looking for co-occurrence in reputable neighbourhoods of the internet to verify that you are a recognised player in the conversation.
The second trigger is third-party validation through structured reviews and citations. AI models are trained on massive datasets where truth is often defined by consensus.
If platforms like G2, Trustpilot, or Google Reviews consistently use specific adjectives and nouns to describe your service, the AI adopts that as a factual attribute of your brand.
When the AI sees the same information about you mirrored across multiple independent platforms, it reaches a confidence threshold. Once that threshold is hit, the system classifies your content as a source of truth rather than just another marketing claim.
Building Entity Association
This means your marketing strategy must shift from building pipelines to seeding conversations.
Since AI looks for reputation through digital background checks, you need to generate high-context references on platforms that the AI already trusts.
The most effective action is digital PR and newsjacking. Instead of just publishing on your own site, you need your brand name to appear in the same paragraph as your target topic on third-party sites like industry journals, news outlets, and niche newsletters.
When a journalist or industry expert quotes your company on a relevant topic, the AI notes the proximity of your brand name to that high-value subject. Even without a link, that co-occurrence tells the AI that you are a relevant authority in that semantic neighbourhood.
Original research and data studies provide another critical path. AI systems prioritise information gain (new, unique data they haven't seen before). If you publish a benchmark report that other websites reference (even just by name), you become an original source.
Community presence in places like Reddit or industry-specific forums matters because AI models are increasingly trained on human conversations. Seeing your brand mentioned naturally in a "Best tool for X" discussion provides the consensus signal that triggers a recommendation.
The Indexing and Prioritisation Gap
A mention existing and an AI weighting it correctly are separated by a process called grounding and re-ranking.
AI engines don't crawl the entire web in real-time for every question. They first look at a pre-verified pool of trusted neighbourhoods.
A mention only gets prioritised if it occurs on a site that the AI's retrieval mechanism has already flagged as a high-confidence source for that specific topic.
A mention of your software on a tech-focused subreddit or an industry hub like G2 is prioritised over a mention on a generic local news site. The AI uses source re-ranking to score these mentions.
If your brand is mentioned in a high-traffic editorial context (like a comparison guide), it's weighted much more heavily than a passing name-drop in a comment section.
The second factor is semantic proximity to the user's query. AI doesn't just look for your name. It looks for your name acting as a solution.
If you are mentioned in a paragraph that directly answers a "How to" or "Best for" question, the retrieval mechanism chunks that specific block of text as a potential answer.
To the AI, a mention surrounded by clear, factual evidence or a direct recommendation is salient. It stands out as useful. If your mention is buried in vague marketing text, the AI's chunking process may filter it out as noise, even if it's on a reputable site.
What This Means for Future-Proofing
The emergence of recommendation-based visibility alongside ranking-based visibility expands the fundamental requirements for being found.
Traditional SEO focused on ranking within search engine results pages. Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) prioritises discoverability within AI-generated responses (many of which don't include clickable results at all).
The mechanics are different. The inputs are different. The outcomes are different.
Businesses optimising solely for Google are building visibility in a single channel, whilst user behaviour diversifies across multiple discovery mechanisms. Future-proofing requires expanding your approach to cover both.
Understanding the structural requirements for AI recommendation (entity association, structural clarity, third-party validation, question-focused content, and cross-platform consistency) provides the foundation for maintaining visibility as user behaviour continues evolving.
The technical environment evolution velocity exceeds most organisations' internal capability refresh rate. That velocity mismatch creates the visibility gap.
Closing it requires understanding the durable human behaviours driving adoption (trust-seeking, efficiency preference, conversational interaction) and the evolving technical mechanisms enabling it (synthesis, semantic search, knowledge graphs).
Future-proofing your visibility means recognising that optimisation can no longer be single-channel. Google remains important, but it's now one discovery mechanism among several. The businesses that expand their approach to cover emerging channels alongside traditional search will maintain comprehensive visibility. Those that remain focused exclusively on Google will find themselves visible in only one place, whilst their customers search in many.
Source: Rod Russell, Managing Partner, ADMATIC, 27th January 2026
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