A field guide for outdoor-sports brands that already “get” SEO/SEM and now need to win inside ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity & Microsoft NLWeb.

Intro

Remember when getting found online just meant stuffing keyword phrases like "moisture-wicking trail running shoes" into your H1 tag and praying to the Google gods? Now, your product is up against chatbots with Ivy League vocabularies and zero tolerance for bad schema. AI search has already rerouted the trail. If your brand isn’t showing up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews, it will soon be like trying to get consumers’ attention in a whiteout.

In this post, I’ll discuss:

Why AI search matters now
How consumers’ search habits are shifting
What your brand or business can do about it
An Ikea case study on how they’ve begun to leverage AI search.

Bike touring — 2012 ride through Death Valley. When 30mm tires were gravel tires and you navigated with a road atlas.

Why AI discovery matters: The data-driven reality check

400 million people use ChatGPT every week (Reuters, 20 Feb 2025). Your buyers are already shopping in chat.

Google impressions are up 49 % while clicks are down 30 % year-on-year since AI Overviews launched. Visibility has moved into the answer box from the link list.

AI Overviews now appear on 7–15 % of U.S. searches each week. One in eight queries skips the “ten blue links.”

About 66 % of AI-Overview citations come from pages that are not in Google’s top-10 organic results. Clean structure and authority leapfrog legacy rank.

Perplexity serves 600 million queries and 30 million monthly users. New search gatekeepers are emerging.

Boston Consulting Group forecasts AI-agent commerce will grow 45 % a year through 2030. Payment systems are already being rebuilt for agent-to-agent checkout.

From Traditional SEO to AI-Powered Discovery: What’s Changed

Input style

Then: Shoppers typed keywords like “trail shoes waterproof.”
Now: They ask full questions like “What are the best waterproof trail-running shoes under €150 for rocky terrain?”
Why it matters: Your content needs to answer real-world questions, not just target search terms.

Result format

Then: Google served a ranked list—10 blue links, with paid ads on top.
Now: AI assistants return a single, synthesized answer, often without links.
Why it matters: You can’t pay to appear. You need structured, trusted data to earn a mention.

Data freshness

Then: Crawlers scanned your site every few days.
Now: AI agents ingest real-time feeds and APIs, sometimes every minute.
Why it matters: Outdated price or stock info? Your product doesn’t show up.

Ranking signals

Then: Rankings were driven by backlinks, metadata, and keyword match.
Now: AI prioritizes schema structure, data freshness, and E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trust).
Why it matters: You need to structure your data and show your credentials—not just chase keywords.

Performance metrics

Then: Success was measured in click-through rates and cost-per-click.
Now: You track share-of-answer (how often your brand is cited) and assistant-to-checkout conversion.
Why it matters: Being mentioned in the answer is more valuable than being ranked.

5 Things Every Brand Can Do (No Code Required)

What to do	Do this	Why it works
1. Create a machine-readable “nutrition label” for every SKU.	Bots read Schema.org `Product`, `Offer`, `Review` → name, GTIN/SKU, price, stock, rating.	Structured facts outrank pretty prose.
2. Update that label hourly.	ChatGPT Shopping ranks on real-time price & inventory. (Reuters)	Stale feeds vanish from results.
3. Show your expert badge.	Google’s AIO prefers dated, by-lined, credentialed content. (BrightEdge PDF)	Trust moves you up the citation list.
4. Say “yes, you may quote me.”	Clear `robots.txt` & CC licences tell crawlers they’re welcome (and legal).	Bots cite permissive sources first.
5. Grab first chair.	OpenAI Operator & Microsoft NLWeb let you push your feed instead of waiting for crawls. (The Verge)	First-movers get first placement.

Case Study: How IKEA is Piloting Chat GPT Assisted Sales

When IKEA slipped its AI Assistant into OpenAI’s GPT Store on 5 February 2024, there was no splashy campaign or meatball-scented hype. Three months later, the numbers were in:

About 1 ,500 people a month chatted with the bot.
One in five clicked through to IKEA’s website, mainly to browse outdoor furniture and sofas.
One in twenty of those site visits ended with a sale.

For Chief Data & Analytics Officer Francesco Marzoni, those metrics weren’t the headline. He called the project a “humble and responsible” experiment, proof that shoppers now treat a GPT window like an advanced search bar. Every query revealed how people actually phrase their furnishing dilemmas, and every click mapped a new shortcut between question and purchase.

The assistant wasn’t built to replace classic SEO or paid ads; it was a live laboratory. IKEA wanted to know:

Will customers accept AI guidance on big-ticket items?
Which categories light up first?
Can conversational search shrink the path from curiosity to cart?

Early answers look promising. Outdoor chairs and sofas (the ranges most often surfaced by the bot) saw the biggest lift in assisted sessions. The conversion rate rivalled IKEA’s paid-search traffic, only without the media bill. More valuable still, every prompt now feeds a database of real customer language that will refine IKEA’s on-site search, mobile app, and even in-store kiosks.

Industry watchers noticed. Fast Company listed IKEA among its “Most Innovative Retailers 2025,” citing the AI experiment as proof the flat-pack giant can still surprise. Digital Commerce 360 summed it up in one punchy line: “IKEA just bypassed the search box.”

Take-home for other brands

A modest user base can generate outsized insight if you log every question.
Clicks matter, but context is priceless. Treat each chat as R&D.
You don’t need a global rollout; a contained pilot can validate the shift from keyword SEO to AI-first discovery.

If the world’s largest furniture retailer can learn this much from 1,500 monthly chats, imagine what a focused DTC brand could uncover with the same playbook.

Final Word

Tech rewards early adoption and AI search is at an inflection point where brands stand to benefit. Right now, it sounds complicated because it’s new. But with a few simple tweaks and a learning mindset, you can get ahead of shifting consumer search patterns.

Check out my past work.

Glossary

AI Overview (AIO): Google’s AI summary box above results.
Answer-Engine Optimisation (AEO): Earning citations inside AI answers.
E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust (Google’s trust test).
NLWeb / MCP: Microsoft’s protocol for streaming structured data straight to models (no crawling).
OpenAI Operator: Early-access pipeline for feeding catalogues into ChatGPT.
Vector index: An AI-searchable copy of your product text that finds matches by meaning, not just keywords.

Source List

Title & Publisher	Date	Link
OpenAI’s weekly active users surpass 400 million – Reuters	20 Feb 2025	Link
ChatGPT Statistics 2025 – DemandSage	Mar 2025	Link
One Year After Google AI Overviews Launched – BrightEdge (PDF)	May 2025	Link
Ultimate Guide to AI Overviews – BrightEdge	Mar 2025	Link
OpenAI rolls out new shopping features with ChatGPT search update – Reuters	28 Apr 2025	Link
Visa partners with AI giants to streamline online shopping – Reuters	30 Apr 2025	Link
Microsoft’s plan to fix the web: letting every website run AI search for cheap – The Verge	19 May 2025	Link
Perplexity’s CEO on fighting Google and the coming AI browser war – The Verge	29 Apr 2025	Link
IKEA launched an AI assistant earlier this year. Has it actually driven sales? – Digiday	21 May 2024	Link
BrightEdge Generative Parser™ identifies patterns in new AI Search – BrightEdge Press Release	12 Feb 2024	Link
Fast Company Innovation by Design Awards: Most Innovative Retailers 2025 – Fast Company	Mar 2025	Link

AI-Search Playbook: May 2025 edition