Andrew Higgins is CEO of Parsnipp, an AI search marketing company.
In the first part of this discussion, I argued that marketers need to think more soberly about GEO. It’s important, but right now, most of the market is treating GEO/AEO and AI search marketing as synonymous. They aren’t.
Strip away the new terminology, and AEO is essentially the organic-discovery piece of AI search. If consumers are increasingly using AI search as a new surface, or even a new home page of the internet, how do you show up in the answer?
Saying AI search marketing is just AEO is like saying social media marketing is just organic posting. We all know that’s not true. Social eventually became a much broader ecosystem of advertising, influencer, commerce, measurement and brand building.
AI search is headed in the same direction, with its own organic, paid, commerce and brand needs.
AI Search Owns More Of The Customer Journey
AI search differs from traditional search because it can own a much larger portion of the customer journey. Search helped with discovery. You clicked a link and entered an environment the brand controlled. AI search is different. Awareness, research, comparison, recommendation and eventually purchase can all happen inside one interaction between a consumer and an agent.
Meaning marketers need to walk and chew gum at the same time. You have to think about organic alongside paid and commerce without losing sight of what is uniquely your business.
In some ways, brand may actually become harder to communicate because the customer may never land on your website. You have to work harder on PR, editorial, messaging and genuine brand building so that what makes your company different can still soak through when AI is acting as the intermediary.
Advertising Will Become A Channel Within The Channel
Advertising is one of the biggest pieces that is still only in its early days. A lot of the internet is free because brands subsidize it through advertising. Google search is free. Facebook is free. The idea that AI search will somehow operate under completely different economics doesn’t make much sense to me.
AI search is not a monolith. For years, marketers chased one dominant Google search algorithm. With AI, there are multiple channels and models, and they may all behave differently. More importantly, they may attract different audiences. A brand selling Porsche vehicles may care about a different combination of platforms, users and subscription tiers than a brand selling inexpensive children’s clothing.
The advertising products will likely differ, too. Some platforms may become heavily commerce-focused. Some may offer more granular audience targeting. Some may stay more traditional with only brand-focused paid placement opportunities. Other labs will avoid advertising altogether. So marketers will need to map their strategy to the channel and audience rather than treating “AI” like a single destination, and this will take time.
Meta and Google spent years getting the intersection of commerce and advertising right. TikTok is another useful example. There was a period when TikTok had enormous consumer usage but very limited advertising infrastructure. Its early ad products had little analytics and limited tracking. Over time, it became a real advertising channel with metrics, measurement and performance use cases.
I expect AI search to follow a similar path, by starting as a relatively novel, top-of-funnel activation and gradually becoming a more meaningful part of the digital advertising stack.
Agentic Commerce Will Take More Than A Buy Button
Commerce is the second major shift. If people increasingly use AI to decide what to buy, it’s logical they will eventually transact through those systems, too. Agentic commerce is complicated, however, because commerce itself is complicated.
You have to manage product data, inventory, currencies, markets, retail partners, marketplaces, transactions and integrations with advertisers. Then you have to connect each of those to the customer journey in a way that makes the experience seamless.
There are two things that need to evolve to make that possible. The first is technology. The infrastructure has to become easier for brands to enable and easier for agents to use reliably. The second is consumer behavior. A large portion of consumers may already use AI search somewhere in their buying journey, but purchasing entirely through an agent is still a relatively new behavior.
E-commerce followed a similar arc. People didn’t suddenly move all of their purchasing online overnight. Adoption grew as technology improved and consumers became more comfortable with a new way to shop. I think agentic commerce will be similar. There’s clear direction, but both the technology and the behavior have to mature.
Brand May Matter More As AI Gets Smarter
The third bucket is brand. There are a lot of early AEO tactics that have almost nothing to do with building a real brand. Some of them work right now. But I don’t believe that more will always equal more value.
Today, you can create near-derivative content, generating answers to slightly different questions to fill space and attempt to increase the likelihood that a brand appears in AI results. Over time, I expect diminishing returns from approaches like these. As AI gets smarter, it should behave more like the human it’s supporting. Humans inherently value brand, and it plays a major role in how people make purchase decisions. That means quality, substance and real authority should matter more.
The loudest brand will not always win. Strong PR, real editorial, subject-matter expertise, original content and factual product information should become more valuable as AI becomes better at distinguishing genuine relevance from volume. Brands shouldn’t assume they can publish the 94th version of the same answer and call that a durable strategy.
Think Of AI As A Channel, Too
AI is both a channel and a technology, just as the internet is both. It can change how you operate internally, manage inventory, support customers and run factories. It’s easy to spend so much time talking about AI as a world-changing technology that we forget that people are also using it to shop for sneakers. If you sell sneakers, that’s an important fact.
The new front page of the internet is increasingly becoming AI search. Marketers need to acknowledge that and begin building the playbook. Organic is one piece. Paid is another. Commerce is another. Brand runs through all of them.
AI may feel new and complicated, but the basic marketing problem is familiar. Customers are moving to a new channel. We need to understand how they use it, figure out how to perform well there and build the playbook as the channel matures.
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