Generative AI is changing the search game

Search is evolving. Your communications strategy must evolve with it.

Search isn’t what it used to be

For much of the internet’s history, the fundamentals of search have remained largely unchanged: users entered queries using engines such as Google or Bing, reviewed results, and navigated to external sources. In short, search showed you where to find your answer.

This environment had a clear set of engagement rules that communication professionals learned to master: optimising content to rise in rankings through SEO, or bypassing the system entirely through paid campaigns that placed brands at the top of results pages.

This model is now undergoing a significant transformation.

Generative search is disrupting these conventions and making us question what we know about the way search functions. Rather than showing you where to look, search engines now give you summary answers, based on a database of internet content and training data. Search is no longer just a directory, it’s become the source itself.

For the user, it’s a win – with less time and a desire for instant information, anything that removes effort and energy is a welcome development. But while faster and slicker, it’s also a major threat to the traditional ways companies and organisations achieve visibility.

The game is not over, but the rules have changed.

What is generative search?

Put simply, generative search is search that directly provides the answers to your questions using AI, or specifically, large language models (LLMS), and it’s already here at scale.

Google’s AI Overviews, which generate summary answers at the top of search results, are now active in over 140 countries, reaching more than 1.5 billion users each month. Meanwhile, tools like ChatGPT have over 400 million weekly active users, often bypassing traditional search engines altogether with users searching directly on the tool.

Google’s growing tension

This shift creates a growing challenge for Google, whose advertising model relies on users clicking through to websites (pay-per-click). Generative search reduces those clicks, as users often get what they need from the AI summary alone.

Fewer clicks mean lower engagement, fewer third-party sites visits and mounting pressure on Google’s revenue model. In response, Google may explore new monetisation approaches, such as sponsored answers or embedded branded content. But these changes will need to balance commercial goals with user trust and experience.

What’s clear is that the traditional search economy, driven by traffic and ad revenue, is being fundamentally disrupted.

The impact on search strategy

While not every search on Google produces an AI overview, for companies and organisations, the old rules of search visibility mostly no longer apply. Content may still be crawled, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be unequivocally included in the results page. Generative platforms often summarise information without linking back – so unless your brand or message is explicitly mentioned, you’re at risk of being effectively invisible.

This changes how brands need to think about SEO. It’s no longer just about ranking, it’s about how your organisation is described across the ecosystem – by journalists, social media, and your own channels. In fact, only 50% of URLs generated by generative search directly match the top traditional search results, showing that AI pulls from a broader and less predictable set of sources.

To shape what appears in generative responses, brands must shape the content feeding into them. That means tight alignment between owned content, earned media, and social voice. Even paid placements, once a shortcut to visibility, now sit below AI summaries and risk going unnoticed.

Regulators are paying attention

AI-powered search tools raise a variety of concerns for politicians: whether they’re worried that it will undermine the commercial viability of domestic publishers, entrench the market position of major technology companies, or create new avenues for the spread of misinformation and other online harms.

Over the past few years, Europe has been at the forefront of regulating the digital arena. Regulators have introduced bespoke legislation for AI systems, imposed pro-competition obligations for the largest digital players, and brought in new rules covering topics such as online safety and political advertising.

Many of these laws could impact generative search – in areas ranging from copyright to the visibility of different kinds of content, to the fair presentation of a firms’ own products by its search model – however, none of them have been designed with it specifically in mind. It remains to be seen how they will be taken up in the enforcement of existing rules, or in new initiatives such as the upcoming European Democracy Shield or the Digital Fairness Act.

Furthermore, the rise of generative search results is only one side of the coin. As AI-powered agents develop, there will be similarly tough questions asked about how they search for information, what they should base their decisions upon, and what is fair game to capture their attention.

The time to act is now

Generative search isn’t on the horizon, it’s already here. As the platforms evolve, so must the strategies of those who rely on them.

At FleishmanHillard, we’re already helping clients navigate this new battleground – mapping how they appear in generative results, aligning messaging across ecosystems, and adapting strategies for a world where AI decides what gets seen.

Today, it’s not enough to manage what appears on your own website. You need to manage how your narrative travels across the digital content ecosystem – because that’s where AI is looking. Generative platforms reward brands that show up consistently across owned, earned, and social channels.

If you’re not shaping the answers, you’re leaving your reputation to chance.