The rise of AI product discovery

If you’ve spent years refining your website copy, improving your product descriptions, writing keyword-rich blogs and monitoring your Google rankings, you’re not alone. SEO has long been the slow, steady foundation of organic growth for product-based businesses. It’s time-consuming, often frustrating, and rarely delivers instant gratification. But when done well, it works. It still matters. But the ways people discover products are changing, and that deserves our attention.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t a call to debate the ethics of AI, its environmental impact or the societal consequences of large-scale automation. Those conversations are valid (and completely necessary), but this article is about something more immediate: the fact that these tools are already live, already influencing consumer behaviour and already reshaping where attention goes.

Google has quietly rolled out AI Overviews (formerly known as the Search Generative Experience), and they’re rapidly becoming a standard feature across search results. These AI-generated summaries appear right at the top of the page (above organic results) offering users a condensed, auto-generated answer to their query by synthesising information from websites like yours.

AI-generated search answers can change whether someone clicks through to a website. The impact varies by query and audience, so I would be wary of treating any single study as a forecast for your own business.

What interests me more is the shift in behaviour. Someone can ask a conversational tool for a product that fits an occasion, a budget or a particular need, then use the answer to narrow their options. For brands, the question is whether the information available makes their offer clear enough to understand and compare.

Conversational search tools, including ChatGPT, can help people discover and compare products. How a product is presented can vary by query, context and the information available.

Here are four practical steps you can take this week:

Check your website’s crawl settings

Ask your web developer to check that important pages are accessible and linked from your site. For ChatGPT search, OpenAI identifies OAI-SearchBot as its search crawler. GPTBot relates to potential model-training use, and the controls are independent. Allowing a training crawler is not a requirement for appearing in search; allowing search access does not guarantee a recommendation.

Audit your visibility in AI tools

Test your brand in ChatGPT. Search your category. Are you appearing? Is your brand described correctly? If not, start rewriting your key pages with clarity, context and structure in mind. You can also submit your business here.

Adapt your SEO strategy

Traditional SEO still matters—but it’s no longer the full picture. Make sure your product copy is structured semantically (using proper headings, metadata, and meaningful language) so that AI models can understand and relay your value clearly.

Treat Instagram captions like searchable content

Use captions to explain what you are sharing, who it is for and why it matters. Clear language is useful to people searching within a platform as well as those already following you. It should still sound like your brand.

AI-driven product discovery is still in its infancy, and most brands haven’t caught up. The useful response is to keep the brand clear, the product information accurate and the website helpful.

This isn’t about losing your voice or stuffing your site with robotic SEO jargon. It’s about showing up with clarity and purpose, meeting your customers where they’re already searching and doing it in a way that feels unmistakably you.