Picture a typical Saturday. Someone is scrolling their phone on the train, half-watching a short video of a plumber fixing a leaking tap in under two minutes. They are not looking to hire a plumber. They are simply killing time. Three weeks later, their own tap starts dripping, and they open Google, type in a business name, and book the first result that matches what they already half-remember from that video.
To anyone measuring performance from a dashboard, that booking looks like a branded search conversion. Job done, tick the box. But the real decision was made weeks earlier, on a platform nobody was tracking, and the search itself was little more than a formality.
This is the pattern showing up across almost every industry right now, and it has real consequences for how businesses should be spending their marketing budgets.
The funnel has not disappeared, it has been rearranged
For years, marketers described the customer journey as a fairly straight line: awareness, then interest, then desire, then action. Search engines earned most of their credit in that middle stretch, when people were still working out what they wanted and typing in broad, exploratory queries.
That model is looking increasingly out of date. A more accurate version of the journey now looks like this:
- Passive exposure – a person sees a product, service or brand mentioned somewhere they were not actively searching, such as a social feed, a forum thread, or a recommendation from a friend.
- Preference forming – over time, and often without realising it, that person builds an opinion about what “good” looks like in that category.
- Confirmation search – by the time they open a search engine, they already have a shortlist, or a single name, in mind.
- Purchase – the search simply closes the loop.
The clue is in the type of query people use closer to purchase. Searches that happen right before a booking or a sale tend to be short and specific, often just a brand name paired with a product or service, rather than the broad, undecided phrases search engines used to see at that stage. That pattern only exists because the exploring has already happened somewhere else.
Why this is a problem for how budgets get allocated
The trouble is that the early stages, passive exposure and preference forming, are extremely hard to measure. A video that shaped someone’s opinion of a plumber, an estate agent or a software tool rarely appears anywhere near the eventual conversion report. All the analytics platform sees is the search and the click that followed it.
Because that earlier influence is invisible in the data, a lot of businesses end up allocating spend as though search is still doing all the discovery work. In reality, search has increasingly become the confirmation stage rather than the discovery stage, and money aimed purely at capturing last-click searches misses everything that happened beforehand.
This is exactly where reporting and analytics work earns its keep. When a business can see beyond last-click data and understand where genuine interest is forming, budgets can be redirected towards the channels doing the real persuading, rather than the one simply recording the outcome.
Video and social proof are doing more of the early work
Two channels in particular have become disproportionately influential during that early, invisible stage: video platforms and open, unmanaged conversations such as forum threads and review sites.
Video works well here for a fairly practical reason. Platforms with large libraries of transcribed content give AI systems and search engines something structured to pull from when generating an answer or a recommendation. A business with a solid library of explainer or demonstration videos is more likely to be surfaced by an AI tool that is trying to summarise “the best option” for a category, simply because there is more material to draw on.
Human trust follows a similar pattern. People consistently rate video content, and the creators behind it, as more trustworthy than traditional advertising when weighing up a purchase. Younger buyers in particular now treat a recommendation from a trusted creator as closer to a personal referral than an advert.
None of this means paid advertising has stopped working. It means the groundwork for many purchase decisions is being laid somewhere other than a paid search campaign, and a strategy built entirely around bidding on keywords will only ever capture the tail end of the process.
AI tools repeat what the internet says about you, not what you say about yourself
There is a further wrinkle worth understanding. When an AI answer engine is asked to recommend a product, service or supplier, it does not simply repeat a company’s own marketing copy back to the user. It draws on everything published about that brand across the wider web, including independent reviews, forum discussions, comparison articles and third-party mentions the business itself never wrote.
That means brand reputation and search visibility have effectively become the same discipline. A company that ignores what is being said about it on review sites or discussion forums is leaving a large part of its AI visibility entirely to chance.
This is precisely the territory covered by AI search optimisation, sometimes called answer engine optimisation. Rather than optimising purely for a ranking position on a traditional results page, the goal becomes making sure a brand is described accurately and consistently everywhere an AI tool might look for information about it.
Do not abandon traditional search, reposition it
None of this is an argument for pulling money out of search. Search volume has continued climbing, and for plenty of purchase categories, particularly higher-consideration ones, a well-optimised website is still doing genuine persuasion work once someone lands on it.
The mistake is not overinvesting in search. The mistake is expecting search alone to handle a job it is no longer built for: introducing people to a brand they have never heard of. Search remains excellent at confirming and converting a decision. It has simply become weaker as a discovery tool on its own.
A properly built SEO strategy still matters enormously for that confirmation stage. Someone who has already decided they like a brand still needs to find the right page quickly, trust what they see when they land on it, and be able to complete a purchase or enquiry without friction. Losing that stage after doing all the earlier work to earn someone’s attention would be a wasted opportunity.
Three practical steps for businesses right now
- Build a genuine video library. Answer the questions customers actually ask about your product, service or industry, even without a paid media budget behind it. This becomes raw material for both human viewers and AI tools looking to summarise your category.
- Get the basics of data health in order. Product feeds, business listings and on-site information need to say the same thing everywhere. Inconsistent details across channels make it harder for any algorithm, human or artificial, to trust what it finds.
- Show up where the conversation already happens. Forums, review platforms and comparison sites are shaping opinions about your business whether you take part or not. Monitoring and responding to that activity is no longer optional extra work.
The bottom line
Search has not lost its importance, but its job within the buying journey has shifted. Fewer people are using it to discover options from scratch, and more people are using it to confirm a decision they arrived at somewhere else entirely. Businesses that keep measuring success purely through last-click search data will keep missing the moments where the real persuasion happens.
If you want a clearer picture of where your customers are actually forming their opinions, and how to build a strategy that covers both the discovery stage and the search stage, get in touch for an audit.
Graig Upton
Graig Upton is a UK SEO and Google Ads consultant with 23 years of hands-on digital marketing experience. Google certified in Ads, Analytics and Conversions, he has helped businesses ranging from local providers to national brands - including Nando's and Financial Times - dominate search and scale their leads. Based in Preston, working with clients across the UK.