Inteligência Artificial
Alexa+, Gemini, and ChatGPT: who controls discovery at the new top of the funnel
branddi ·
AI assistants are redesigning the top of the sales funnel, and your brand may already be losing ground without realizing it.
In the traditional model, the top of the funnel was dominated by search-optimized content and ads that captured clicks. Now, the initial filter can be a conversational algorithm that decides which brands are included in the final response.
We're talking about systems like Alexa+, the new generation of Amazon's assistant; Gemini, developed by Google; and ChatGPT, created by OpenAI.
Next, you'll understand who really controls discovery in this new scenario, and what your brand needs to do to avoid being left out of the conversation.
How did brand discovery move from search to the conversation with AI?
Although research into conversational interfaces has been around for years, this shift has gained scale since November 2022, with the public launch of ChatGPT, a milestone considered by analysts as the beginning of the modern phase of generative AI.
The system reached 1 million users in a few days, and it took just two months to reach the first 100 million. ChatGPT has become the fastest adopted technology in digital history, surpassing Instagram, Spotify, Facebook, Twitter and Netflix.
Graph comparing the time it took different technologies to reach 1 million and 100 million users.
Recent studies show that about 50% of consumers already use AI-based search experiences, and the expectation is that most discovery interactions included responses generated by artificial intelligence by the end of the decade. results.
What changes when AI assistants start to control brands' visibility?
AI assistants powered by LLMs have taken on the role of the main interface between user and internet.
Some of the biggest changes that this new model brings to brands:
Visibility is no longer just ranking in the SERP
For years, SEO meant appearing among the first results on the search page. With AI assistants, this logic changes because the answer can be delivered without the user seeing the traditional links.
The answers generated by AI eliminate the need for clicks and, consequently, drastically reduce the dependence on the classic ranking.
The brand starts to compete for space within the AI answer
If before the competition was for positions, now it is for citations within the answer. Assistants choose which brands to mention when constructing an explanation. The change requires GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) strategies, a set of mechanisms capable of making something more visible in AI tools.
Unofficial sources can be cited before the brand
AI systems tend to prioritize content from third parties and independent media when generating responses, often before official content from the brands themselves. This happens because the models look for authority signals distributed across the web.
In practice, reviews, marketplaces, comparators and user-generated content can define the narrative about the brand before it itself appears in the response.
The journey becomes shorter
Conversational search reduces stages of the journey because the user can search, compare and decide within a single interaction. However, this simplification comes with a loss of control for brands. The decision becomes mediated by invisible criteria defined by the AI system.
What is the risk of not preparing the brand for decisions mediated by AI?
The biggest risk of not preparing the brand for decisions mediated by AI isbecoming invisible precisely at the moment the consumer decides.
The very probabilistic and variable nature of AI systems means that the same question can generate different answers at different times, with brands appearing inconsistently or not appearing at all.
This volatility makes it much more difficult to measure and justify investments in visibility, as there are no traditional metrics, such as ranking position, that faithfully reflect how the brand is perceived by AI models.
Did you like the reflections? The main change is this: the more AI assistants mediate answers, the greater the risk that brands will lose control over how they are discovered, compared and recommended.
Want to know how to regain governance of the purchasing journey in the era of AI assistants? Check out Branddi's complete guide on the new consumer journey!