GenAI Mirrors Search Experiences

Because of generative AI (genAI), all search experiences are increasingly conversational, assistive, and agentic. Consequently, distinctions between search experiences disappear. Perplexity and Rufus, Amazon’s shopping assistant, both leverage genAI-integrated search, blurring the line between search engine and site search experiences. Like Rufus, Perplexity’s shopping assistant rapidly summarizes reviews, compares features, and requires only one click to buy.

Similarly, Adobe’s Acrobat AI Assistant, an example of cognitive search, facilitates conversations with PDFs and summarizes documents. This is similar to Leo, an AI assistant developed by private search engine Brave, which analyzes PDFs and Google Docs. Suddenly, search engine and cognitive search experiences look and feel alike.

Examples abound of genAI-induced search convergence. Experiences like ChatGPT Tasks, Quora’s Poe, Reddit Answers, Salesforce’s Agentforce, ThredUp’s Style Chat, Workday Assistant, and more have much in common. Together, they form and reflect powerfully evolving search behavior. Now, users expect back-and-forth interactions with agents that act like personal assistants and, increasingly, act on users’ behalf.

GenAI Minimizes Searchers’ Time To Value

The convenience of genAI-integrated search experiences motivates mass adoption. Already, 37% of consumers use conversational search features whenever they can, according to a recent survey of Forrester’s Market Research Online Community. Such features replace the friction of clicks with the intuition of conversations and demand less effort. For example, when planning a trip, Google’s Gemini can let you know the best time to book flights, advise how to save money on hotels, create a trip planning document, draft a packing list, and check Gmail for confirmation codes. Microsoft’s Copilot can create a meal plan in seconds customized to your age by retrieving information from various sites.

GenAI Demands Holistic Search

As search experiences across engines, sites, and databases converge, silos between search marketing, commerce search, and cognitive search dissolve. Search-related tasks that once occurred in isolation — such as bid management for pay-per-click, log file analysis for search engine optimization, enhancing product metadata for commerce search, and synthesizing customer service answers for cognitive search — can now cross-pollinate in a holistic search strategy.

Holistic search entails incrementality testing to mitigate keyword cannibalization, creating cross-functional testbeds for new search strategies and tactics, and listening more actively to customers’ voices. It means measuring search engine results page saturation, addressing websites’ existential crises, adopting commerce search, and investing in vector search.

Our latest report — GenAI Forever Changes All Forms Of Search — details how to do all that and more. It’s a first-of-its-kind collaboration across Forrester’s B2C marketing, B2B marketing, commerce search, and cognitive search subject-matter experts. We look forward to your feedback and helping marketing, digital, and technology leaders and processes adapt to genAI-integrated search.

As always, feel free to contact us to learn more.