Consumer behavior is shifting faster than most marketing budgets can follow.
Now, more than two in five online buyers are now starting their purchase journey inside an AI platform and that number is climbing. For brands that haven't yet built a strategy around AI discoverability, the window to act is narrowing.
According to a recent research brief from Bain & Company, across the US, 44% of online buyers mostly start their journey in an LLM or split their search between AI tools and traditional search engines.
Breaking down the data further, Gen Z and Millennials have adopted AI-driven search around two-times faster than Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation. While not entirely surprising, the important thing to note here is that this is happening while these younger generations are entering their peak earning and spending years. This means that the habits they're building now will define consumer discovery for the next decade. Many use an AI assistant to start their consumer journey — 52% of Millennials and 25% of Gen Z — compared with 30% who start with AI-enabled Google search.
Adapting to AI means that the top of your marketing funnel no longer begins on a search results page, increasingly it begins inside a chatbot. And if your brand isn't part of that initial conversation, chances are it won’t be considered at all.
Traditional search gave brands a fighting chance through SEO, by earning backlinks, optimizing content, climbing the rankings. But AI-powered search is different in a way that not every marketer has wrapped their head around yet, because it's such a tidal shift.
Bain's research found that 80% of consumers now rely on AI-written results for at least 40% of their searches — and 60% of searches now end without a website click. Website traffic is still a relevant metric to be considered by LLMs, but moreso, the competition among brands is whether anyone clicks on their website at all.
Though the urgency to adopt a stronger approach to AI differs by industry.
Nearly six-in-ten of all respondents who shop with generative AI — including 63% of millennials and 59% of Gen Z — use it for advice and decision support. CPG, e-commerce, and B2B software are among the heaviest-use categories because consumers trust AI for these cases to help compare products, shortlist vendors, or evaluate options before they ever need to talk to a sales rep.
When it comes to high-stakes professional categories, like legal advice, medical decisions, financial planning, it’s a different story. Consumer trust in AI around those topics lags substantially, regardless of age group.
So your primary market is consumer goods, e-commerce, or B2B technology, the question you should be asking is how quickly you can build a strategy around GenAI.
The old way of focusing on owned channels and assuming that great content will be seen isn’t a valid assumption anymore. An analysis of ScrunchAI data spanning roughly 500 million citations showed that 89% of unbranded AI prompts (those that don't mention a specific brand) are fulfilled by third-party sources.
When a consumer asks an AI "what's the best project management tool for a small team?" or "which skincare brand is good for sensitive skin?", the answer is almost never being pulled from a brand's homepage or ad. Instead, third-party review sites, industry publications, analyst commentary, social platforms, and affiliate-published content dominate LLM responses.
Thankfully, these changes in marketing represent a structural shift rather than a preference for AI slop. LLMs are trained to trust credibility signals, and credibility in the AI era flows primarily through third-party validation just like it did in word-of-mouth. Only with way more scale and speed.
Understanding how LLMs retrieve information is more than background detail, it explains what brands should actually be optimizing for.
AI search engines don't rank pages or evaluate content as a whole anymore, they assemble answers from multiple sources and pages. LLMs powering some of the leading AI platforms rely on a process called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) where a user's prompt is broken into several related sub-queries, that are each searched independently across the web.
This changes a few things for brands. First, natural, conversational language now matters more than keyword density since prompts sound like real questions, not strings of search terms.
Second, LLMs show a strong bias toward recently published or frequently updated content, weighing freshness as a key factor when selecting sources, especially for time-sensitive topics. But here comes the hard truth: A well-written piece from two years ago may simply lose out to a less thorough piece published last month. Consistent, fresh earned media needs to be a foundational piece of your marketing strategy as it is a core signal of quality to the LLMs.
Third, AI systems consistently pull citations from outside brand-owned domains. This is especially true for queries that are comparative, subjective, or evaluative, so where your brand appears across the web can matter more than how well you optimize a single page.
Given all we know, here’s how brands can plan to grow their presence for the next key targets:
Invest in consistent and strategically placed earned media: Coverage in credible third-party outlets like trade publications, review sites, industry blogs, analyst reports is what LLMs use most. Earned media isn’t vanity PR metrics anymore, but a measurement of AI discoverability. The goal is to make your brand a reflexive answer in your category, ensuring it appears frequently in the sources that AI already trusts.
Cover the prompts your customers are actually using: Think about how a potential buyer would phrase a question to AI when they're considering a purchase in your category and ensure your brand is visible in the content that answers those questions. By increasing engagement with earned media, affiliate management, influencer relationships, and reputation management, you’re shaping what third parties say about your brand — and what AI repeats.
Freshness compounds: I’ve said it before, frequent earned media doesn't just help with each individual placement. It builds a consistent signal to LLMs that your brand is active, relevant, and authoritative in your category. Sporadic press coverage doesn’t make a difference like a steady cadence does.
The bottom line
The brands that will win in AI discovery are the ones that treat earned media as infrastructure rather than just a campaign tactic. That means building a consistent presence in the third-party sources LLMs trust, covering the prompts your buyers use, and keeping that presence fresh.
Stacker's distribution platform sets you up for this new reality to get your editorial seen by major, trusted news outlets, touch new audiences, and build the AI visibility that compounds over time.
Are you on AI’s short list? Get in touch to see how Stacker can help.
Benjamin Chipman is a GenZ brand and content marketer at the intersection of media and storytelling. Informed by his experiences across the creator economy and the TODAY Show, Benjamin has a unique perspective about where traditional and new media converge. Passionate about where brands come together with culture and community, he brings this to all things brand and content at Stacker.
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