For most of my career, search felt like a relatively stable concept. You typed a question into Google, scanned a list of results, clicked a link and began the slow process of forming a view. Entire marketing strategies were built around that behaviour, and for a long time it was a reliable way to think about how buyers discovered suppliers.
What’s changed isn’t that search has stopped working. It’s that the behaviour we still call “search” no longer fits neatly into a single place or moment.
I see this disconnect regularly in conversations with B2B leaders. Search is often still discussed as a channel to optimise, pause or prioritise. Rankings are reviewed. Traffic is analysed. Performance is assessed in isolation. Yet when you look closely at how real buying decisions now form, it’s clear that much of the influence has already happened before anyone actively goes looking for a website.
Search didn’t disappear. It simply outgrew the definition we were used to working with.
When search stopped looking like search
One of the more subtle shifts in buyer behaviour is that people no longer always feel like they are “searching”, even when that’s exactly what they are doing.
A buyer scrolls LinkedIn and reads a thoughtful post from someone they respect. Later, they watch a YouTube video explaining a problem that feels uncomfortably familiar. A few days after that, they ask an AI tool to summarise options, compare approaches or clarify language they keep encountering in meetings. Somewhere in between, they skim a comment thread, notice a brand mentioned more than once, or hear a peer reference a supplier in passing.
None of this looks like the classic search journey, yet every interaction shapes understanding and preference. By the time a website is visited, the buyer is rarely starting from zero. More often, they are confirming something they already believe to be broadly true.
This is where the traditional model of search begins to fall short.
SEO still matters, but it no longer carries the full load
It’s worth being clear about what this shift does and does not mean. Search engines still matter. Websites still matter. Clear, authoritative content remains essential. The foundations of SEO haven’t suddenly become irrelevant.
What has changed is the role those elements play in the wider decision journey.
Search engines are no longer the sole, or even the primary place where understanding is formed. AI tools increasingly provide summaries and recommendations without directing traffic anywhere. Social platforms shape credibility through repeated exposure rather than rankings. Communities and peer networks influence confidence long before a vendor comparison ever takes place.
In that context, being technically findable is only part of the picture. Familiarity is built through consistency across multiple environments, not dominance in one. A brand can rank well and still feel unknown. Another may never hold a top position yet feel present because it appears repeatedly in conversations, explanations and recommendations.
The gap between being found and being chosen is widening.
What AI reveals about modern discovery
AI has accelerated this shift, but it didn’t create it. What it has done is make the mechanics of discovery harder to ignore.
When buyers ask AI tools for guidance, the responses are shaped by what is already visible and reinforced across the ecosystem: content, commentary, documentation, video, discussion and third-party references. Brands with a narrow presence often struggle to appear, not because their offering is weak, but because their visibility has been concentrated in too few places.
For many organisations, this has been an uncomfortable realisation. Not because the technology is hostile, but because it reflects how limited their discoverability actually is once you look beyond a single channel.
This is not a failure of SEO. It’s a sign that search behaviour itself has become more distributed.
Search as behaviour, not destination
Seen through this lens, the more useful questions are no longer about rankings alone. They are about presence.
- Where do buyers encounter you when they are trying to make sense of a problem?
- How often does your perspective appear in the places they trust?
- Is there consistency between what your website claims and what the wider market reinforces?
These are more difficult questions to answer with tidy dashboards, but they align far more closely with how trust is built in practice.
The risk for many B2B brands now isn’t that they are invisible everywhere. It’s that they are visible in one place and absent in many others that quietly shape decisions. That gap rarely shows up in traffic reports, but it shows up in sales conversations, longer buying cycles and prospects who feel more familiar with competitors before a first meeting has even taken place.
A quieter shift, but a consequential one
None of this requires dramatic declarations about the death of search or the end of SEO. Those narratives tend to obscure what’s actually happening. The reality is simpler, and more challenging.
Discovery has become fragmented, fluid and increasingly human again. People notice patterns. They remember what keeps showing up. They trust what feels consistent over time.
Search, in its modern form, reflects that reality. It happens wherever people are trying to understand something, not just where they type a query.
The organisations that adapt aren’t chasing every new platform or tactic. They are the ones who recognise that visibility today is cumulative. It’s built through repeated, credible presence across the places where buyers think, learn and validate.
Search didn’t die. It just stopped fitting neatly into the box we built for it.
Louise Mahrra
Louise Mahrra is a marketing strategist and channel expert.
She is the founder of The Marketing Human, a blog exploring how real human connection powers better marketing, especially in the IT and channel space.
