AI Search: The New Frontier of Brand Discovery

More than 60% of searches in North America are now powered by large language models, according to data shared in a recent Financial Narrative virtual event moderated by Chris Andrew, CEO and Co-founder of Scrunch AI. The discussion outlined a profound shift in how consumers find, evaluate, and engage with brands, one where AI agents, not humans, are increasingly the primary visitors to websites.

Andrew explained that users are “outsourcing browsing to AI.” Instead of clicking through results, people are conversing with ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity to get curated answers. That means brand visibility now depends less on how humans experience a site and more on how AI interprets it. Google’s own AI Overviews are accelerating the trend by keeping users within Gemini-powered responses rather than directing them to external pages.

The result: traditional SEO metrics like unique site visitors are losing relevance. In their place, marketers must track new indicators such as AI referral traffic, model citations, and the quality of answers generated about their brands. Andrew noted that AI-sourced visitors are converting three to four times higher than traditional search users, because by the time they click through, they’ve already completed their research.

He urged companies to treat AI agents as a new kind of buyer persona and to audit how these systems are accessing and interpreting their content. Scrunch AI’s audits have shown that AI bots including retrieval, training, and indexing, now represent a meaningful share of website traffic across sectors, including finance.

The conversation underscored a new kind of optimization challenge. Brands must publish conversational, text-rich content that AI models can easily parse, structure their sites for retrieval rather than aesthetic polish, and align PR, SEO, and infrastructure teams to ensure consistent brand representation across third-party sources.

Andrew closed with a simple prompt: “What happens to your business if 90% of your human website visitors go away?”

Scrunch AI is offering complimentary AI search audits to participating marketers to help benchmark visibility and model citations.

Learn How It Works →  https://scrunch.com/blog/agent-traffic-monitoring/
Explore the Insights →  https://scrunch.com/blog/
See Scrunch in Action → https://www.youtube.com/@ScrunchAI