A few years ago, a shopper looking for a baby cream typed three words into Google: "baby eczema cream." They scrolled through ten links, opened five tabs, and decided. A few minutes, several clicks, done.
Today, the same shopper types twenty-three words into ChatGPT: "Is this Soothing Skin Cream safe for my six-month-old's eczema flare? How often should I apply it and when will I see improvement?" A single prompt covers the whole journey, and the answer arrives in seconds.
This shift is happening faster than most brand teams realise.
When AI Mode handles a Google search, clicks drop by about 60%. By 2028, McKinsey expects AI search to overtake traditional search as the primary way people discover products. The same report estimates AI assistants will influence around 750 billion dollars in consumer spend by then. For context, that is more than people spend on Amazon and Shopify combined today.
In B2B the numbers point the same way. AI search drives less than 1% of traffic right now, but it converts up to 23 times better than a standard click. And 94% of B2B buyers say they already use AI tools like ChatGPT somewhere in their purchasing journey.
The point is not that Google disappears tomorrow. The point is that the moment of decision is moving. It used to live across ten tabs. Now it lives inside one conversation.
You may already be drowning in acronyms. GEO, AEO, LLMO, AIO. They all describe the same problem from slightly different angles.
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimisation. AEO is Answer Engine Optimisation. LLMO is Large Language Model Optimisation. AIO is the catch-all: AI Optimisation. Different analysts coined different terms. They all aim at the same question. How do you get your products mentioned, accurately, when someone asks an AI assistant?
At info.link we tend to use GEO because it has caught on most widely. The label matters less than the work. Whatever you call it, the job is the same. Make sure AI can find your product, understand it, and quote it correctly.
The stats above can make the ground feel like it is moving under your feet. There is a more useful way to read them.
In e-commerce, around 80% of what AI assistants cite back to a shopper comes from brands and retailers themselves. Not from reviews. Not from Wikipedia. Not from random blogs. From you, and from the retailers carrying your products.
The same pattern holds in B2B. A recent MarTech / Brandi study looked at 1,000+ prompts across 29 B2B tech brands. Owned media showed up about twice as often as earned media in the answers. Your website, your product pages, your documentation: those are the sources AI reaches for first.
This is a big deal. It means you are not at the mercy of an opaque ranking algorithm. You already control the raw material AI uses to talk about your products. The question is whether it is in a shape AI can actually read.
Most brand teams wrote their product pages for humans clicking through a website. The pages lead with mood, then product family, then features. AI assistants do not read that way. They scan for clear facts, specific numbers, named third parties, and structured data.
That gap is where AI visibility is won or lost. A product page can be beautiful to a human and almost invisible to an AI at the same time. The good news is that closing the gap rarely means rewriting your brand. It usually means giving the same information in a form AI can quote.
That is what info.link/answers does. We will get into the how across the rest of the help center. For now, hold this picture in your head.
The traffic that mattered five years ago is moving into AI conversations, where a single prompt covers what used to take a whole funnel. The brands that win in that world have product information AI can quote without guessing. That work is in your hands, not Google's.
McKinsey & Company, The Future of Search (2025), via OMR Masterclass "No Traffic from AI Search," May 2026.
Semrush, ChatGPT Traffic Analysis, February 2026 (clickstream data, January 2025 to February 2026).
Semrush US Search Data on average Google query length.
Ahrefs and 6sense, The Science of B2B Buyer Behaviour (2025).
MarTech / Brandi study, February 2026: 1,000+ prompts across 29 B2B tech brands and four AI engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, Google AI Mode).
House of Change / info.link, OMR Masterclass: No Traffic from AI Search, 6 May 2026.
