How GEO is shaking up the shopper journey

How GEO is shaking up the shopper journey

For two decades, marketers have designed customer journeys like architects, moving through awareness and consideration to conversion. We built funnels, mapped touchpoints, optimised keywords and created landing pages designed to move people neatly from one stage to the next. But shoppers don’t behave like that anymore.

Generative AI is changing not just where people discover products, but how they make decisions in the first place. A shopper might start with a vague idea in ChatGPT, find visual inspiration on Pinterest, watch a YouTube review, browse Instagram, compare options with Gemini, and finally visit a retailer’s website to buy. The journey isn't linear, and increasingly, it doesn’t appear to be controlled by brands.

Where does influence happen now?

Generative AI is becoming part of the decision-making process itself. Instead of simply helping someone find a page, AI can help them work out what they want, understand unfamiliar concepts, compare alternatives and narrow down their choices. In doing this, influence starts to happen long before a shopper reaches a brand's product page.

AI assistants now support shoppers when they’re answering questions about a particular material, or finding a product that suits a certain style. They’re helping shoppers to decide which brands are worth considering in the first place. This is particularly significant in categories where shoppers need help defining their needs, such as furniture, interiors, fashion and beauty.

AI-referred traffic is already showing a 54 per cent higher conversion rate than non-AI traffic, while just 10.6 per cent of consumers rely on a single source when making a purchase decision, and while it’s not replacing search or social, it is becoming another layer in the shopper journey.

The new battleground: being understood

This is where GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) comes in. It's tempting to think of GEO as simply the next version of SEO: optimise your content, get mentioned by AI, drive traffic, but the opportunity is far bigger than that.

AI systems need to understand what your brand sells, what makes it distinctive, who its products are for and how they relate to the questions shoppers are asking. That puts a premium on something that has always been important to good digital experiences: useful, structured and authoritative information.

true’s research into the retail homewares sector illustrates the challenge. Adobe's data from May 2026 gives 'Furniture and Home' an AI readability score of just 47 per cent, making it the lowest of any retail category measured. If AI struggles to understand a category's products and content, how confidently can it recommend them? For years, marketers have obsessed over keywords - the words shoppers already use when they search, but Generative AI introduces different opportunities, and the brands that embrace these earliest have the best chance of standing out.

Get going to get ahead

For brands, influencing the shopper journey now needs to include mastering the use of the right vocabulary for conversational search, creating ownable product descriptions and coherent information architecture. The brands that win will be the ones that make themselves easier to understand, trust and recommend.

There’s an incredible opportunity to do that now, but the window won’t stay open forever. Our new whitepaper explores what the rise of generative AI means for the shopper journey, with a particular focus on retail and homewares. It examines how shoppers are moving between inspiration, AI, social, search and commerce; why vocabulary could become as important as keywords, what makes products more discoverable and recommendable by AI and the strategic steps brands can take immediately to build visibility.

You can download your copy here and start using your brand's power of persuasion.