---
title: "AI Search: Empowering Users to Ask Bigger Questions"
url: https://adtech.lol/articles/95c7b238-a3be-4b1b-85e4-3c5d4f4bc56a
source_url: https://searchengineland.com/ai-search-people-ask-bigger-questions-brand-ready-494857/
source_site: searchengineland
author: "Becky Simms"
published: 2023-10-10T00:00:00+00:00
tags: ["AI", "Search", "Consumer Behavior", "Marketing Strategy", "Personalization"]
publisher: AdTech Radar
---

# AI Search: Empowering Users to Ask Bigger Questions

> AI search is transforming user queries from keywords to complex and personalized questions, allowing brands to understand their customers more deeply and tailor their offerings accordingly.

## Introduction

AI search is changing how people express their needs, allowing them to ask more complex, specific, and personal questions. For brands, this creates an opportunity to understand customers more deeply and become the right answer for their individual circumstances.

## From keywords to more human questions

Search used to require us to make our lives fit the search box. We learned to compress large, complex, and often highly individual requirements into a handful of words that a search engine could understand. It might be hard to remember now, but we actually had to learn how to do this.

Before Google, if we had a complicated question, we might ask friends or family, visit a library, or speak to someone with expertise. If we were planning a vacation, for example, we might sit down with a travel agent and explain what we were really looking for.

Then search came along, and we learned to translate all of that complexity into something like “best family hotel Tenerife.” Think about how much information is missing from those four words.

Today, I could ask an AI assistant: “Where should I stay in Tenerife? We’re two adults with two young children. I want a hotel room with a separate sleeping area for the children, but within the same overall room. Good food is important. We’re going to rent a car, we want swimming pools, and the kids’ pool definitely needs to be heated.”

That’s an incredibly specific brief. Previously, I might have given that level of detail to a travel agent, either in person or over the phone. And even then, they might have struggled to answer every part of it because some of the information simply wasn’t readily available.

AI search hasn’t made our needs more complicated. It’s given us permission to express the complexity that was already there. And perhaps, after decades of training ourselves to speak the language of search engines, we’re beginning to untrain ourselves and ask questions like humans again. What I’d like to explore is whether brands are able to do that, too.

## Bigger questions reveal what people actually care about

Marketers have talked about one-to-one personalization for years. We’ve wanted to understand the individual well enough to deliver the right message, product, or experience to them.

AI search is bringing us much closer to that reality.

People can explain not only _what_ they want, but _why_ they want it. Their circumstances, anxieties, motivations, previous experiences, priorities, and trade-offs can all become part of the conversation. This is where things become particularly interesting from a behavioral science perspective.

A keyword can indicate intent. A fuller conversation can start to expose the drivers and barriers behind that intent.

Historically, some of that richer understanding might not have emerged until much further down the customer journey, perhaps during a conversation with a salesperson. Now it can be part of the discovery process itself.

That has implications for our content. If people are searching with this level of specificity, brands need to consider whether their content contains the depth and nuance needed to answer those questions. We can’t simply understand the broad category somebody is interested in. We need to understand the situations that sit underneath it.

Traditional search became very good at understanding what we were looking for. AI search has the potential to understand what we’re actually trying to achieve.

## The biggest shift might be what we don’t have to ask

But there’s another layer to this that I think is even more significant. The prompt itself isn’t necessarily the complete expression of intent anymore.

As people settle on one or two AI tools that become part of their everyday lives, those tools can build context about them from previous conversations. They might understand your habits, preferences, decision-making tendencies, things you’ve liked or disliked previously, and the historical context you’ve shared with them.

Imagine two people asking the same AI assistant exactly the same question about which running shoes they should buy. Let’s say that one of those people has previously spent time discussing a knee injury with their AI assistant while the other hasn’t. The words they use in their individual prompts might be identical, but that additional context the AI has on the user’s injury could make for two different recommendations.

The knee injury doesn’t have to appear in the prompt to be relevant to the answer.

Memory and personalization capabilities vary between platforms and depend on individual settings and permissions, so this won’t apply to every AI search experience. But the direction is important. It’s one of the reasons the word “assistant” feels appropriate.

Think about a brilliant human assistant you’ve worked with for years. You don’t start every conversation by explaining who you are, what you care about, and everything that has happened previously. They already know. It seems likely that as AI continues to mature, it, too, will know.

## Search doesn’t have to start from zero

As this develops, our interactions with AI could become shorthand. Imagine being able to just say to an AI assistant: “You know that hotel we stayed at in Mexico that I loved? Find me the Tenerife version.”

From a traditional SEO perspective, that’s an almost useless search query. What does “the Tenerife version” mean? The words themselves tell a brand virtually nothing. But the AI may have the context required to interpret it. Perhaps it knows which hotel you stayed at. It knows what you particularly liked about it because you talked about the trip afterward. It knows your normal budget, who you’re traveling with, and the things that tend to matter to you.

The meaning exists outside the prompt. And that creates an interesting challenge for the way the search industry is approaching prompt tracking.

## Are we turning prompts into the new keywords?

There’s understandably a huge amount of interest in prompt tracking. After all, we tracked keywords for years. Rankings became a fundamental part of SEO reporting, then marketing reporting, and, in some businesses, even board reporting. So it makes sense that our instinct is to recreate something similar for AI search.

We ask questions like:

- What does ChatGPT say when somebody asks this question?
- Does our brand appear?
- Which competitors are mentioned?
- How frequently are we recommended?

I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t track these things. There’s absolutely value in doing so. **But we need to be careful about what we believe that data tells us.**

If two people can ask the same question and legitimately receive different answers because of the context surrounding them, a standardized prompt can only ever show us one version of the possible experience.

We need to pay attention to both what’s being said and what’s _not_ being said.

That means looking more broadly than prompt tracking alone. Our own site data can provide clues, too.

- Which pages are people arriving on from AI platforms?
- What increasingly specific content is attracting visits?
- What does that tell us about the questions people might have been asking and the particular situations in which our brand is being surfaced?

[Prompt tracking](https://searchengineland.com/make-prompt-tracking-more-accurate-479708) isn’t pointless. We just need to change our expectations of what it can tell us.

## Relevance is becoming situational

Take the running shoe example again. “Best running shoes” creates one kind of competition. But what if the AI knows you’re training for your first marathon, you’ve previously injured your knee, comfort matters more to you than speed, you prefer a particular fit, and you’re willing to spend up to $150?

“Best” suddenly means something entirely different. There’s no longer necessarily one _best_ answer to one query. There’s an answer that makes sense for this individual, in this situation, with these priorities.

**That creates a significant opportunity for brands that really understand their audiences.**

Focusing on niches becomes incredibly powerful. So does creating content for specific needs and circumstances rather than simply chasing the highest-volume topic. The same applies beyond your own website: niche influencers, specialist publications, and communities can all help establish why your product or service is particularly relevant in a certain context.

The aim is to give AI enough reason and evidence to understand when you might be the best choice for somebody.

## A business strategy opportunity disguised as a search problem

The immediate search marketing reaction to all of this is understandably: “How do we get AI to recommend our brand?” But I think there are much more valuable questions businesses should be asking, such as:

- Who are we genuinely brilliant for?
- Under what circumstances are we the right choice?
- Why do people pick us that we might not even realize?
- What matters to those people that competitors don’t deliver as well?
- What evidence exists to prove it?
- Are there unmet needs we’re now able to see that could change the proposition itself?

This is where AI search becomes much bigger than a search optimization exercise — it becomes a business strategy opportunity.

Search marketers have always had access to an extraordinary source of customer insight: the questions people ask. But as those questions become bigger, more specific, and more human, that insight becomes richer, too.

That gives search marketers license to take what they’re learning further upstream into the business. Rather than simply asking how we optimize an existing proposition so machines can understand and recommend it, search insight can potentially help influence what that proposition should become.

Maybe we discover an audience we’re unexpectedly brilliant for. Perhaps we realize that something customers value enormously is buried three clicks deep on our website. Or maybe we identify a specific combination of needs that nobody in the category is properly serving.

Those aren’t SEO problems. They’re business opportunities.

## From keywords to prompts to people

The search industry has spent a lot of time moving its attention from keywords to prompts. But perhaps prompts aren’t the destination either. Maybe the answer is as simple as recognizing that people are what’s important in search.

At my agency, we call our approach behavior-led search because however sophisticated the technology becomes, our biggest opportunity comes from understanding the human on the other side of it.

What are they trying to achieve? What motivates them? What worries them? What are their barriers? What will they compromise on, and what won’t they?

And some of the richest insight might not come from a search tool at all. It could come from the humans already inside your business.

The salespeople who speak to prospects every day. The customer service teams who hear the oddly specific questions that aren’t answered on the website. The people working in stores, hotels, showrooms, or branches who see firsthand why somebody chooses one thing over another.

That knowledge needs to find its way back into search and marketing. Because as AI becomes better at understanding individuals, brands need to become better at understanding them, too.

For years, we trained people to squeeze their complicated lives into a search box, and then optimized around the words they chose. Now they can ask the question they actually wanted to ask. Their AI assistant may understand some of the context they haven’t explicitly shared in that conversation.

The opportunity for brands isn’t simply to appear for more prompts. It’s to understand people deeply enough to be the right answer when it matters.

Source: [https://searchengineland.com/ai-search-people-ask-bigger-questions-brand-ready-494857/](https://searchengineland.com/ai-search-people-ask-bigger-questions-brand-ready-494857/)