What Marketers Must Know About How AI Is Reshaping the Path to Purchase to Drive Business

Small business takeaway:

• As AI platforms and agents rapidly rewire the consumer journey, retail and marketing insiders warn that traditional visibility strategies are losing their edge. For businesses across sectors, staying competitive means navigating three macro trends. First, AI systems now act as the initial filter between brands and buyers, with majority consumer adoption — led heavily by Gen Z — shifting the path to purchase toward AI-driven discovery and product selection. Second, traditional SEO is yielding to interpreting digital "signals," requiring companies to actively monitor how AI systems interpret their content and stack them against rivals. Finally, generalized branding is no longer enough; securing AI recommendations now demands that brands understand the consumer’s "need state, occasion, and context much more deeply."

The adoption of artificial intelligence as a tool in the path to purchase is forcing brands to rethink how they get their products on consumers’ radar.

Experts from NielsenIQ, the Acosta Group, and L.E.K. Consulting spoke with CO— about how the landscape is changing for marketers as more and more consumers adopt AI tools to help them discover and select the right products for their needs.

“A brand’s job is still to inspire consumers and earn consideration, but increasingly that means understanding the consumer’s need state, occasion, and context much more deeply,” said John Carroll, President of Connected Commerce for the Acosta Group, a consumer product marketing firm, in an interview with CO—.

AI-based product recommendations are based on “signals” that AI systems pick up from the content that is strewn across the digital universe, he said.

“Marketers have to manage their digital presence differently,” said Carroll. “It’s no longer enough to optimize a brand site or a product detail page for traditional search. Brands need to understand how AI is interpreting their content, how their products are being described and compared with competitors, and whether their intended positioning is actually showing up in the recommendation.”

More than half of consumers — and two-thirds of Gen Zers — use AI tools

More than half (56%) of shoppers surveyed in a recent Acosta Group report on AI-enabled shopping said they have used AI-based tools, including 67% of Gen Z respondents. The report found that shoppers look to AI-based tools to save money and time and to help them find the best products to suit their needs.

Saving money was ranked as the most important benefit of using AI in the shopping journey, cited by 44% of respondents. It was followed by comparing products (39%), saving time (36%), and getting more information about products under consideration (33%).

Among the 39% of shoppers who said they were influenced by AI in recent purchase decisions, 60% said it helped them choose among options, 43% said it helped them find a deal or promotion, and 40% said it led them to try a brand they had never bought before.

Another survey by research firm NielsenIQ (now known as NIQ) also found that more than half of consumers — 55% — said they use AI during product discovery. AI is “compressing decision making” in the shopping journey, NIQ said.

Liz Buchanan, President of North America for NIQ, said marketers seeking to optimize their brands’ presence in AI-driven shopping baskets should begin by searching for their own brands using AI tools in order to learn more about how they appear in those searches.

“Brands need to understand how AI is reshaping product discovery and purchase decisions,” she said in an interview with CO—. “If their existing data and measurement [strategies] do not capture how consumers are shopping for their products using AI tools, it limits visibility into an increasingly important part of the discovery process.”

The quality of content and the availability of structured product information are becoming as critical to sales performance as traditional merchandising and search visibility, Buchanan said.

[Read more: AI Is Revolutionizing Product Returns — And Every Business Can Benefit]

Moving from SEO to AEO: Now marketers need to focus on answer engine optimization to ensure brands turn up in the answers to questions consumers are asking AI

For years, marketers have used traditional search engine optimization (SEO) to get their brand to appear at the top of a list, said Chuck Reynolds, Managing Director at L.E.K. Consulting, in an interview with CO—. Now, marketers also need to focus on answer engine optimization (AEO), or ensuring that their brands end up in the answers to questions that consumers are asking their large language model platforms and AI agents.

“The questions are different,” said Reynolds. “On a search engine, consumers likely ask for ‘best grain-free dog food.’ With an answer engine [such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity], consumers are asking, ‘My 11-year-old lab has a sensitive stomach and is putting on weight. What should I feed him?' Answer engines need the context on when a product works well.”

In fact, he cited Purina as a brand that is doing a good job showing up in AI-driven queries. When he asked ChatGPT what to feed an older dog, Purina was the top recommendation, he said.

“Their product detail page is clearly marketing to humans and [AI] agents,” said Reynolds. “Their pages say plainly which condition each formula is for, often as simple lists, and there are a lot of reviews.”

Getting these results isn’t necessarily an expensive proposition for marketers, he said. Instead, it’s simply a matter of ensuring that digital content clearly ties products together with specific consumer needs and missions.

“One product clearly matched to one well-described need beats a catalog of vague claims,” said Reynolds.

The biggest challenge in the shift from SEO to AEO is that answer engines rely on sources outside of a brand’s website such as review sites, YouTube, Reddit, editorial articles, and other sources, he said.

“Your own website is an input, but not the most trusted input,” Reynolds said, noting that brands need to do a better job monitoring the shift toward AEO, he said.

“The fix is to take the top questions consumers ask and track how AI answer engines are responding, what are the sources, how is a brand showing up, and then engage on those topics and sources,” he said.

He also noted that although AI is helping shoppers sift through product information on their shopping journeys, very few shoppers are actually making purchases within an AI agent.

“Most still clicked through to a brand or retailer site and bought there, so while brands can experiment with agentic checkout, it isn’t critical yet,” said Reynolds.

[Read more: How Companies Use AI Social Listening to Spot Trends and Boost ROI]

Brands have yet to ‘crack the code’ in AI-driven search — but best practices are emerging

Carroll said he has not yet seen a single brand that has “cracked the code” when it comes to showing up in AI-driven product searches.

“What we are seeing, though, is a group of brands beginning to do the right things,” he said. “They’re starting with the fundamentals: strong, consistent product data; clear, benefit-led content; accurate attributes and claims; robust ratings and reviews; and consistency in how the brand is represented across retailer sites, their own digital properties, social platforms, and other sources that AI systems may reference.”

Some marketers are going a step further and testing the prompts that customers are using, such as questions around need states, use occasions, product benefits, and comparisons with other products, and then “evaluating whether their brand shows up, how it is described, what competitors it is compared against, and ultimately whether it is recommended,” Carroll said.

“That’s really the emerging best practice: Don’t just optimize content and assume it works,” he said. “Actively test how AI understands and represents your brand, identify the gaps, and continually improve the signals feeding those recommendations.

“We’re still at the beginning of this transition, so I think the advantage right now goes to brands that are willing to learn and experiment faster than the category around them,” said Carroll.

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