For the best part of two decades, marketers have built their digital strategies around a predictable behaviour: people search for information, brands compete for visibility, and those that appear first have the greatest chance of winning attention. That model hasn’t disappeared overnight.
Google remains an incredibly important part of the customer journey and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Recent data from Google supports this, showing search activity continuing to grow and reinforcing how central it remains to how people find information. However, in today’s world, focusing solely on search risks missing the bigger shift taking place.
How people discover brands is becoming increasingly disjointed. Customers no longer rely on a single platform, source, or format when researching products and services. They move between search engines, AI assistants, social platforms, podcasts, video content, review sites, and communities, gathering information from several sources before they visit a website.
Discoverability has moved beyond search
For years, discoverability and search visibility were almost interchangeable concepts. If your SEO strategy was strong, your brand was discoverable. Today, that picture is far more fragmented.
A potential customer might first encounter your brand through a LinkedIn post shared by a peer. Later, they may hear your name mentioned on a podcast, watch a YouTube review, ask ChatGPT for recommendations, and only then perform a branded search. In many cases, they’ve built a perception of your brand before directly interacting with it.
The question is no longer “How do we rank for this keyword?”, it’s becoming “How do we ensure our expertise, authority and credibility show up wherever our audience is looking for answers?”
Customer journeys are no longer linear
Customer journeys have become difficult to predict. For years, we’ve tried to map neat funnels and attribution paths. Awareness led to consideration, consideration led to conversion, and every interaction could be assigned a value.
The reality is that modern customer journeys rarely behave that way.
People consume information across multiple devices and platforms. They research independently, dip in and out of conversations, and revisit brands weeks or even months after their first interaction. The path to purchase often looks less like a funnel and more like a constellation of interconnected touchpoints.
I believe the brands that will succeed are those that develop a deeper understanding of their audience and focus their efforts where those audiences spend time. Thankfully, there’s plenty of data available to help locate these places from first-party customer insights, audience research, sales conversations and behavioural analysis.
The challenge is shifting our mindset away from optimising individual channels and towards understanding the broader ecosystem in which customers are making decisions.
AI is changing how decisions are made
The emergence of AI-powered platforms has accelerated this shift.
Tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity aren’t only helping users find information; they’re helping users interpret information, compare options, and make decisions.
Traditional search engines present users with a list of potential sources and leave them to evaluate the answers themselves, whereas AI platforms are increasingly synthesising information and presenting recommendations directly within the response, creating a new competitive landscape for brands.
Historically, visibility was often enough. If you ranked well and attracted a click, you had an opportunity to persuade. Now, there’s a growing possibility that the recommendation itself becomes the point of influence.
Being cited is useful. Being recommended is powerful.
The brands that appear most consistently across trusted sources, industry conversations, customer reviews, expert commentary and authoritative content are far more likely to become part of those recommendations.
This is why the fundamentals of good marketing remain as important as ever. Authority, trust, expertise, and brand recognition are becoming increasingly valuable signals for both customers and the systems helping customers make decisions.
Why content strategy needs to evolve
For a long time, many content strategies centred primarily on written articles designed to attract search traffic. While written content remains important, it’s no longer sufficient on its own because consumers are using multiple sources for gathering information. Between podcasts, YouTube reviews, and recommendations from loved ones, discoverability is becoming increasingly tied to content diversity.
Because of the different ways audiences now consume information, brands need to think about how they communicate expertise across multiple formats and environments. The brands that connect most effectively with their audiences will almost certainly outperform the brands that publish the highest volume of content.
Measurement needs to catch up
Perhaps the biggest challenge for marketers is measurement. For years, we’ve relied heavily on clicks, traffic, and attribution models to demonstrate value, and while they still have a role to play, they no longer tell the whole story.
As AI-generated answers, recommendation engines, and zero-click experiences become more common, influence is becoming harder to measure through traditional means alone.
That doesn’t mean influence has disappeared; rather, it’s showing up differently. Visibility across AI platforms, brand mentions, share of voice, and recommendation frequency all matter. The ability to understand whether your brand appears in the conversations, prompts, and discovery journeys that matter to your audience is becoming an important measure of success.
For many brands, this will require a broader approach to measurement, one that combines performance metrics with a broader understanding of brand visibility and market presence.
The opportunity for brands
It’s easy to look at the rise of AI, changing customer behaviour, and fragmented journeys as challenges, but they’re opportunities.
The brands that succeed over the next few years won’t necessarily be the ones with the biggest budgets or the largest content libraries. They’ll be the brands that develop genuine authority, communicate consistently, and show up where their audiences need them.
At Trunk, that’s exactly why our approach centres around three simple principles.
We Consult with curiosity to understand the audience, the market, and the real drivers behind customer decisions.
We Craft content, campaigns, and experiences that communicate expertise with purpose and impact.
And we Connect every marketing touchpoint so brands can present a consistent story across increasingly fragmented customer journeys.
The channels may be changing, but the challenge remains the same: helping people make confident decisions.
Looking beyond rankings
The conversation around GEO often focuses on tactics. Which platforms matter? Which prompts should we track? How do we optimise content for AI?
Those are all worthwhile questions, but they risk distracting us from the bigger strategic shift taking place. The future of discoverability isn’t about gaming another algorithm or replacing SEO with a new acronym; it’s about earning trust where decisions are being made.
For years, the goal was to be found; today, the goal is to be chosen, which is why I believe the new battleground isn’t rankings, it’s recommendations.
