What Is AI-Search? And why it’s reshaping how we find everything

AI search is changing how people discover information online. Tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity don’t send users to long lists of links—they give answers directly. Often, they quote only one or two sources. This is reshaping how businesses get found on the web. To stay visible, content must be clear, trustworthy, and structured to be read and cited by language models.

Not so much a disruption, more a change in posture

Search hasn’t collapsed. It’s reorienting. The experience of typing into a box and getting ten links in return isn’t going anywhere soon, but it’s no longer the only, or even primary, way people are finding things.

More than 100 million people now use ChatGPT weekly. Perplexity, a newer entrant, has grown by 30% month-on-month since late 2024. Users are turning to AI not to browse, but to get to the point. Quickly.

When the answer appears directly in front of them—clearly worded, context-aware, and sometimes cited—there’s little need to click through.

What AI search actually is

Unlike traditional search engines that catalogue and rank web pages, AI search uses language models to generate responses in natural language. These tools interpret the meaning behind your question and deliver a summarised answer.

Sometimes those answers include links. Often they don’t. ChatGPT, for example, refers traffic primarily via its “browsing” feature and plugin ecosystem, which now sends users to over 30,000 unique domains. Perplexity and Gemini tend to cite more often, but still surface only a handful of sources.

This is not just a UX innovation. It’s a structural shift in how authority, visibility, and referral are distributed online.

Who gets quoted, and who gets missed

In this new environment, you don’t get visibility by ranking well—you get it by being usable.

LLMs favour content that’s:

• Up to date
• Written in plain, declarative language
• Structured semantically with HTML headers and a clean layout
• Rich in factual, verifiable information
• Authored by credible sources, with names and timestamps

These aren’t SEO best practices—they’re AIO fundamentals. If you want your brand to be cited in the answers, your content must be the answer.

You can see a full tactical breakdown in our guide to optimising for AI search, including how to structure your site and write content that LLMs can parse.

Traffic without a click

In 2024, 58.5% of Google searches ended without a click. This “zero-click” behaviour wasn’t caused by AI, but AI is accelerating it.

Users aren’t comparing. They’re accepting. And if your content isn’t quoted in the generated answer, it may not be seen at all.

AI search compresses the funnel. Instead of researching over multiple tabs, users ask a question and get a recommendation. When that recommendation includes your brand, you earn high-quality exposure. When it doesn’t, you may not get a second chance.

CloudFix is a textbook case. After restructuring its content to target specific enterprise AWS prompts, it became the top result in Perplexity for cost optimisation queries. The impact? A 32% increase in consultations, without any changes in traditional SEO or paid spend.

Why inbound marketing has to adapt

Traditional content strategy depends on optionality. You hope users compare you against others, follow a link, read a few paragraphs, maybe fill out a form.

AI search changes that. There's no scrolling. No visual stack. Just the model’s summary—and, if you’re lucky, a link or a mention.

We wrote previously about how this impacts brand control, and the point remains: your brand is now filtered through an interpreter that doesn’t show its notes.

Inbound marketing isn’t going away. But the version of it that relies on long journeys and wide funnels is shrinking. Attention is being compressed. And relevance is being redefined.

How to stay visible when the machine answers for you

Content that wins in AI search is not necessarily more creative—it’s more usable. That means:

• Leading with the answer, not the preamble
• Using subheadings that map to natural questions
• Including fact-checkable stats, summaries, and Q&A structures
• Keeping pages technically lightweight and semantically clean

It also means embracing some new infrastructure. If you haven’t explored llms.txt, it’s worth considering. Just like robots.txt it helped early SEO, this emerging standard can guide LLM crawlers to your best, most interpretable content.

Final thought

AI search isn’t a trend—it’s a quiet redesign of how people interact with information. And while the mechanics of discovery are changing, the goal remains the same: to be found, to be trusted, to be chosen.

At Glafos, we’re helping businesses build content that’s legible to machines and persuasive to people. If you’re ready to be part of the answer, not just another page in the index, join the beta.



Photo by Arkan Perdana