How AI SEO Is Reshaping the Customer Journey
This article was published on March 6, 2026
Categorized in: Digital Marketing, SEO, AI Marketing
Do you know what your customer journey looks like? When was the last time you assessed it? Well, the customer journey is not typically a standardized thing. It can change depending on a variety of factors, such as the climate in the industry, the mindset of the customers, and even outside factors, like the economy. Changes like these, though, don’t always have much of an impact, and as a result, don’t affect the customer journey all that much.
The opposite is true for AI SEO aka generative engine optimization (GEO). The changes that are happening in the marketing world are vast, and it starts with buyer behavior, or more specifically, search behavior. Here’s more information about this.
What Did the Customer Journey Touchpoint Look Like Before AI SEO?
Before we can understand what has changed concerning the customer journey, we need to understand what it looked like before the changes brought on by AI have occurred. The traditional journey usually started with someone searching for information in a search engine, usually in the form of a short keyword. The search engine would then return results, and the user would pick. The user would then click on your website if they liked what they saw from your link and use that to find out more information about you.
In other words, people would arrive at your website from the search engine, and they basically could be anywhere along the phases of the sales cycle. The search engines would connect them with the information they were looking for, and then they would find your website. Your job was to keep them engaged once they landed on your website.
With AI SEO (GEO) What Has Changed About the Customer Journey Now?
Now, the very way people have started discovering information is different than it was. AI has caused user search to change. Now, the beginning process is still the same. A person wants to find information so they input a search string. Two fundamental shifts have been occurring. The first is that queries are often longer and are down in questions and complete sentence. The second is where the queries are being inputted have shifted.
The first shift is that if someone is still using search engines, they may be reading the AI answers and not clicking any of the websites in the results that have been returned. If they aren’t still using search engines, they will visit the AI engine of their choice and ask their query. Once a “thread” is open on the AI engine, the user tends to stay there, asking follow on questions and gathering more information before visiting a single website.
When someone is actively searching for a solution that your company provides, this means that they are very likely doing the Awareness piece of the sales cycle outside of your website. This is new for the AI SEO or generative engine optimization (GEO) search era because it is AI that has slowly changed people’s behaviors.
What we have learned is that, amongst these changes, we have a new opportunity. The goal for businesses now is to find ways to get displayed in an AI engine’s results. For this it requires a slightly different way of thinking, and to add certain activities that will make this visibility possible.
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About the Author: Brick Marketing President, Nick Stamoulis
Nick Stamoulis is President of Brick Marketing and has over 25 years of digital marketing experience. He works directly with clients on strategy and implementation, helping solve complex marketing, lead generation and sales challenges. Nick Stamoulis is a strategist and expert with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), AI Search or Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), content marketing, social media, pay per click advertising, and conversion improvement. Nick Stamoulis has worked with over 500 companies in many industries and also provides digital marketing consulting and training classes, helping companies improve performance and achieve desired outcomes.
