Every decade or so, we get to experience a transformative internet event, and right now, we’re seeing a seismic shift in how we interact with the digital landscape and the various technologies that surround us. Just a short while ago, we were tiptoeing into “browserless search.” Today, we’ve leaped headfirst into a new paradigm. With the rise of generative AI, the way we seek and find information has evolved into a conversational search experience. This isn’t just another core algorithm update — it’s a transformative technology demanding a fresh playbook.

The big thing marketers need to consider right now is the web is transitioning from “surf and search” to “explore and exploit.” With the access barriers to using the internet dissolving and our ability to create new technologies more easily, it’s only natural that the way we use the internet is changing. We want to spend less time searching for resources and sorting them; we’d rather spend our time exploring topics followed by conducting (exploiting) actions with brands, such as conversion.

What is the browserless shift, you ask? We like to describe it as the departure from being required to use a web browser to use the internet. For decades, browser-based search engines have been our de facto tool for exploration and decision-making. We used to enter broad queries, scroll through pages of results, read articles, compare options, and eventually make an informed decision. It was a process of discovery that required us to sift through dozens of web pages of various levels of quality and integrity to find useful information. Now, that dynamic is changing as search becomes more conversational and AI-driven, simplifying the process while fundamentally altering how we find and evaluate information. AI is transforming search from a tool into an agent — an agent of access to information.

So, how do we think about this new way of searching?

Moving out of the traditional web-browser-blue-link paradigm for search and expanding into new mediums such as voice, conversational search, and social is already well underway, with more than 60% of Americans already using voice assistants and 40% using TikTok on the regular. Now, amplifying this transformation is the explosion in generative AI search products. Today, we have ChatGPT, SearchGPT, Gemini, and, I’d argue, Apple Intelligence. Soon, Amazon’s Alexa will be configured with Anthropic's Claude model— elevating the glorified "cooking timer" into a fully capable conversationalist. For a very long time, Google reigned supreme in the search space, but these new mediums pose an exciting opportunity for users but a serious threat to Google’s traditional model.

Recent Gartner predictions suggested a 25% drop in Google Search by 2026.  This is not about attacking Google; rather, it is about exploring how our relationship with technology has changed, resulting in new human behaviors and the mediums we find value in. What this means for marketers is that many of the bedrock principles of digital marketing are being disrupted. Digital Marketeers will also need to adjust their attribution models and ultimately the way in which they measure ROI.

The internet is now conversational.

The internet has become something that has wrapped around most of our daily lives. We consume it in various ways and sometimes in ways we don’t realize. This is the browserless experience. The obvious example is the transition away from the classic search bar to voice and conversational search mediums. But here’s the real question: how do we educate these new systems about our brands?

Traditional SEO has centered on site architecture and crawlability, making it easier for Google and Bing to index pages. Recently, we’ve focused on user experience and establishing trust. But where do we go from here? The answer lies in how we “feed” these new platforms (ChatGPT, SearchGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, etc.) the information about our brands in ways they can process and understand. Classic SEO playbooks relied heavily on keywords, focusing on content optimized for web crawlers that parsed pages and identified common terms. This was then stored alongside the page link. Think of it as a card-catalog system with a short description and tags that describe the link to the website. What is different about today is generative search actually consumes and interprets website content and stores it in localized knowledge graphs.

Knowledge Graphs allow us to connect the dots between arbitrary bits of material, thus producing knowledge. The knowledge graph concept isn’t new; it’s been around since the early 70’s (coined by German linguist Edgar W. Schneider), and its application to search isn’t new either. For some time now, both Google and Bing have been using this architecture to organize facts and concepts as they index the web’s information. This powerful information model allows its practitioners to link valuable information to entities that then can be searched and cross-referenced in multitudes of ways like how our brains store and retrieve information. 

Today’s knowledge graphs pave the way to Tim Berners-Lee’s early vision of a Semantic Web, where computers will be able to analyze and create value from the internet's trove of information. This new search machinery requires a new way of thinking about SEO. Semantic SEO, just like Semantic HTML is about providing structured, meaningful data that generative AI can interpret rather than relying on guesswork from page copy.

The subtly here is the transition from “indexing” pages via meta summaries to the creation of schema-oriented knowledge graphs that define, describe, and link concepts together in addition to the visible website.

So what’s next?

My prediction is that the on-domain experience — people actively navigating your site — will decline as conversational search becomes more pervasive in how we discover and engage with brands. Here’s what I think the future holds:

• The role of the webpage will evolve. It will become a streamlined brand portal requiring comprehensive schema markup to ensure conversational models can understand the subtleties of your brand. Today’s webpages serve two functions. First to feed the search engine, and second to communicate a visual brand story. We imagine a new era of “webpages for humans, and knowledge graphs for computers”.

• Brand discovery will increasingly happen in conversational and social ecosystems. This will push brands to adopt Semantic SEO to ensure their information is accurately represented in AI-driven searches, effectively decoupling the human and search engine experiences.
• Trust will take on new dimensions. It will be about more than just security or reputation; trust will mean consistently delivering accurate brand stories and ensuring that information is sourced reliably.

There's only so much information we can consume and ultimately derive value from because it takes a lot of energy to find, collate, and distill content into a meaningful analysis. What is exciting is that AI has evolved from a tool into an agent, meaning that it has the ability to synthesize points of information into something new, allowing us to spend more time thinking and solving problems rather than wandering the billions of web pages out there.

In a world where information is abundant but human attention is limited, AI's evolution from tool to agent is a game-changer. It now synthesizes data into new insights, letting us focus on solving problems rather than sifting through endless content.