If you work in digital marketing, you’ve probably felt this shift coming. Search habits are changing, attention spans keep shrinking, and AI tools are quietly inserting themselves between brands and buyers. Now we have a clear sign of how fast that shift is happening.
Fresh research from Optimizely shows that 42 per cent of consumers are prepared to trust an AI-generated product summary without ever landing on the site behind it. For Black Friday — a weekend that lives or dies on visibility, speed, and timing — that’s a major warning.
AI platforms are becoming the new discovery layer
Yes, search engines still dominate. Two-thirds of shoppers begin there. Even so, AI is taking a noticeable share. Fourteen per cent now start their journey on ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and similar tools, with younger shoppers driving the trend. Anyone between 18 and 44 is far more likely to use AI daily for product research.
That shift matters because the first touchpoint is no longer a homepage or a product page. It’s a summary written by a model that selects the brands it thinks deserve attention.
A click-less journey means fewer chances to recover
For marketers, this means less control and more pressure. If an AI tool highlights your brand, great. If it leaves you out — or presents outdated or unclear information — there’s no second chance.
Optimizely’s Black Friday figures from last year underline how brutal this can be. Traffic surged by 65 per cent. Sites ran at near-perfect uptime. Response times sped up under load. Thousands of A/B tests ran in the background. When shoppers do arrive, they expect the site to hold up instantly.
A slow page or a vague product description won’t just hurt conversion. It may send the shopper straight back to the AI tool for alternatives.
Many marketers aren’t ready for this shift
The survey also reveals a readiness gap. Only one in ten marketers are using AI for personalisation. Fewer than a third feel prepared to handle buying journeys that begin off-site and end quickly. Nearly half rely on experimentation to push revenue, which is helpful but not enough on its own.
The result is a widening mismatch between where consumers are and where teams are investing their time.
GEO is the new visibility fight
Enter GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation. If SEO was about rankings, GEO is about representation. It’s the practice of making sure AI tools show your brand accurately, clearly, and with enough depth to earn a mention in the first place.
Optimizely’s Tara Corey puts it plainly: Black Friday used to test your site’s load capacity. Now it tests whether you even appear in the shopper’s AI summary.
What marketers should take from this
Black Friday 2025 won’t be won solely on ad spend or discount strategy. It will be won on:
• clear, structured product information
• content that AI tools can summarise cleanly
• fast, reliable site performance
• testing that removes friction instead of adding layers
• a serious approach to GEO, not just old-school SEO
Shoppers trust AI more than most marketers expected. They’re jumping from summary to checkout with fewer stops in between. Brands that adjust to this new shape of discovery will stay in the race. Those that don’t may never see the traffic they’re waiting for.