The Internet Is Getting a New Front Door: Why AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Shopping and Search

In my recent interview with Bloomberg, I shared insights on one of the most significant shifts in consumer behavior we've witnessed since the dawn of the internet: the rise of AI as the gateway to commerce, information, and everything in between.

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If you've been paying attention to how consumers—especially younger ones—are discovering products, researching purchases, and making buying decisions, you've probably noticed something profound happening. The traditional search-to-purchase journey that defined e-commerce for two decades is being fundamentally reimagined. And it's happening faster than most brands realize.

I recently sat down with Bloomberg to discuss this transformation, the emergence of Generation Alpha as the AI-native consumer cohort, and what it all means for businesses trying to stay relevant in an increasingly AI-mediated world. The conversation touched on everything from Google's declining dominance in traditional search to the explosive growth of live shopping, and the insights point to a future that's already arriving.

The Data That Should Wake Up Every Brand

Let's start with the numbers, because they tell a story that's impossible to ignore.

Google reported a 9% year-over-year decline in classic link search in Q3 of 2025. That's not a blip or an anomaly—it's a tectonic shift in how people are finding information online. At the same time, ChatGPT has surged to 1.8 billion weekly queries as of October 2025, with over 40% of those queries being search-like in nature. Consumers aren't just chatting with AI for fun; they're using it to research products, compare options, find recommendations, and make purchasing decisions.

This isn't a prediction about some distant future. This is happening right now. Consumers are voting with their fingers, as I told Bloomberg, and they're increasingly choosing AI interfaces over traditional search engines as their starting point for discovering and buying products.

Now, to be clear, Google isn't going anywhere anytime soon. They've developed their own powerful large language model called Gemini, which just released an impressive version called Gemini 3. But the paradigm of typing keywords into a search bar and clicking through a list of blue links? That model is showing its age. The internet is getting a new front door, and it's powered by conversational AI.

Generation Alpha: The First True AI-Native Consumers

I've spent my career tracking generational shifts in consumer behavior. When I started in this industry back in 2000, the conversation was all about millennials—the first generation to grow up with the internet in their homes. A decade later, the focus shifted to Gen Z, the social media and iPhone generation who never knew a world without Instagram and always-connected smartphones.

Now, a new generation is emerging that will redefine consumer expectations yet again: Generation Alpha.

Currently aged 0 to 15, Gen Alpha is growing up in a world where AI isn't a novelty or a disruption—it's simply part of the fabric of everyday life. They will never know a world without technology that you can interact with the same way you interact with other people. For them, talking to an AI assistant to get information, find products, or solve problems will be as natural as breathing.

Here's what's crucial for brands to understand: Gen Alpha may one day look at traditional search engines the way we look at rotary phones. Not with hostility, but with genuine confusion about why anyone would do things that way. Going to ChatGPT or a similar AI platform to research a purchase won't be a conscious choice for them—it will simply be the default behavior, as automatic and unconsidered as reaching for a smartphone.

This has massive implications for how brands need to think about discovery, marketing, and the entire customer journey. The playbooks that worked for reaching millennials and even Gen Z are going to need significant revision.

From SEO to GEO: The New Battleground for Brand Visibility

For the past two decades, brands have invested billions in search engine optimization—the art and science of making your website appear at the top of Google results when someone searches for relevant keywords. Entire industries and career paths have been built around understanding Google's algorithm and gaming it effectively.

Now there's a new acronym keeping CMOs up at night: GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization.

The core question has shifted from "How do I rank first on Google?" to "How do I become the brand that ChatGPT recommends?" When someone asks an AI assistant for a luxury handbag recommendation under $300 for a teenage girl, every brand in that category wants to be the first one mentioned. But unlike traditional SEO, where we have decades of accumulated knowledge about ranking factors and optimization strategies, GEO is still largely a black box.

We know that these large language models are trained on vast amounts of internet data, which means brand reputation, customer reviews, expert recommendations, and media coverage all likely play a role. But the exact mechanisms by which an AI decides to recommend Brand A over Brand B? That's still a mystery that brands are racing to solve.

What we do know is that companies that figure this out early will find themselves in an enormously advantageous position. And companies that don't will watch competitors seemingly come out of nowhere to capture market share. AI-mediated commerce is going to create new winners and new losers very quickly—and many established brands are completely unprepared for this shift.

The Rise of Live Shopping and Creator Commerce

While AI is transforming how consumers search for products, another revolution is happening in how they actually buy them: the explosive growth of live shopping and creator-led commerce.

Here's a statistic that should reframe how every consumer brand thinks about their target audience: In 2025, for the first time ever, the average age of a first-time mother in the United States is Gen Z. This means the person who's now making household purchasing decisions—choosing the laundry detergent, the paper towels, the breakfast cereals—grew up with a phone in their hand, consuming content from creators and influencers rather than traditional media networks.

This generational shift has enormous implications for commerce. When Gen Z and increasingly Gen Alpha consumers want to buy something, they're not necessarily going to a brand's website or even Amazon. They're watching their favorite creators on TikTok or emerging platforms like Whatnot, where they can see products demonstrated in real-time, ask questions, and purchase without ever leaving the stream.

It's essentially QVC for the smartphone generation—but with personalities they actually trust and content formats they actually enjoy.

For years, creators were primarily monetizing through awareness and impressions—brand deals that paid them for views and engagement. Now they're moving further down the funnel, using their credibility and authentic connection with audiences to actually sell products. Some are earning commissions as affiliates; others have launched their own product lines. Either way, the creator is increasingly becoming a distribution channel in their own right.

The Collapsing Funnel: When Discovery and Purchase Become One

Perhaps the most profound change happening in consumer behavior is the compression of the traditional marketing funnel.

Think about how shopping has worked for the past decade or so: You might hear about a product through TV advertising, then see it mentioned on social media, then go to Google to research it, then read reviews on various sites, then finally make your way to Amazon or the brand's website to purchase. Each step represented a different platform, a different interaction, a different opportunity for the brand to lose you along the way.

Gen Alpha consumers—and increasingly Gen Z—are skipping this multi-step journey entirely. They're discovering, researching, and purchasing on a single platform. They see a creator they trust demonstrating a product on TikTok, they ask questions in the live chat, and they check out without ever leaving the app. Or they ask ChatGPT for recommendations, get a curated list of options with explanations, and click through to buy.

This funnel compression means brands need to rethink their entire customer journey mapping. The idea of "awareness" as a distinct phase from "consideration" from "purchase" is becoming increasingly obsolete. Everything is happening at once, mediated by AI and creators, on platforms that control the entire experience.

The "alpha buyer," as I described them in the Bloomberg interview, is defined by this behavior: skipping the funnel, following social video, trusting creators, and expecting instant checkout with zero friction. Any brand that introduces unnecessary steps or barriers into this process will simply be bypassed.

The Platform Power Question: Who Wins in This New World?

There's a risk embedded in all of this that we need to acknowledge: the potential for even greater platform consolidation.

When consumers can discover, research, and purchase all on one platform—whether that's TikTok, ChatGPT, or something else—the companies that control those platforms gain enormous power. We've already seen how the Magnificent Seven tech giants have come to dominate markets. This shift toward AI-mediated and creator-led commerce could accelerate that concentration.

OpenAI is emerging as a significant new player, and they're clearly building out commerce functionality to capture the purchase intent flowing through ChatGPT. Perplexity and Claude (from Anthropic) are also competing for this space. But make no mistake: the major tech platforms are all racing to integrate these capabilities and capture the end-to-end consumer journey.

One of the most interesting questions I was asked in the Bloomberg interview was about Amazon: "If you can buy over ChatGPT, where it has all your context, what happens to Amazon?" It's a profound question without an easy answer. Amazon has built its dominance on being the default destination for online shopping. But if AI becomes the new front door to commerce—understanding your preferences, making personalized recommendations, and enabling frictionless checkout—Amazon's role in the ecosystem could be fundamentally challenged.

What This Means for Brands Right Now

So where does this leave brands trying to navigate this rapidly shifting landscape? Here are the key imperatives I see:

First, take GEO seriously. Start investing in understanding how AI models perceive and recommend your brand. This means monitoring what ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI assistants say about you when consumers ask for recommendations in your category. It means ensuring your brand's positive attributes, reviews, and differentiators are well-represented in the data these models are trained on. The companies that crack the code on GEO first will have a significant first-mover advantage.

Second, embrace creator partnerships at a deeper level. It's no longer enough to pay influencers for sponsored posts. Brands need to build genuine relationships with creators who can sell their products through live shopping and social commerce. This might mean giving creators equity stakes, co-developing products, or building long-term ambassador relationships rather than one-off campaigns.

Third, eliminate friction everywhere. The alpha buyer has zero tolerance for unnecessary steps in the purchase process. Every click, every form field, every page load is an opportunity for them to abandon and go elsewhere. Brands need to audit their entire purchase journey and ruthlessly eliminate anything that doesn't add value.

Fourth, start planning for Gen Alpha now. These consumers may only be 15 and under today, but they'll be entering the workforce and gaining purchasing power faster than you think. Their expectations are being formed right now by their interactions with AI, and brands that wait until they're "relevant" to start adapting will find themselves playing catch-up.

Finally, prepare for continuous disruption. One of the challenges I highlighted in the Bloomberg interview is how rapidly this space is evolving. We're seeing significant new large language model releases on a weekly basis. The landscape that exists today will look dramatically different in six months, and even more different in a year. Brands need to build organizational agility and the capacity to experiment and adapt quickly, rather than betting everything on any single platform or strategy.

The Bottom Line: A Moment of Transformation

One of the Bloomberg hosts compared AI to electricity in its potential impact—an analogy that resonates deeply with me. We're not just talking about a new marketing channel or a new platform to optimize for. We're talking about a fundamental rewiring of how consumers interact with information, make decisions, and transact with businesses.

The companies that recognized the internet's potential early—that built their strategies around search, e-commerce, and digital engagement—were rewarded with decades of growth. The companies that dismissed it as a fad or moved too slowly found themselves disrupted out of existence.

We're at a similar inflection point today. The brands that understand how AI is reshaping consumer behavior—that invest in GEO, embrace creator commerce, eliminate friction, and prepare for Gen Alpha—will position themselves for success in the next era of business. Those that don't will be left wondering why their traditional playbooks stopped working.

The internet is getting a new front door. The question every brand needs to answer: Will you be ready when consumers walk through it?

Watch the full Bloomberg interview and explore more insights on how AI is transforming consumer behavior in my book, Generation AI: Why Generation Alpha and the Age of AI Will Change Everything.