How AI search is changing the way customers find your products
AI Overviews and chat assistants now answer buying questions directly. Here is what that means for your store, and how to stay in the answer.
Patrick Dhital
4 June 2026| 6 min read
Summarise with AI
Last year a customer found you by typing "best merino base layer" into Google and clicking the third result. This year a good chunk of them never see that list. They ask ChatGPT, or they read Google's AI Overview, get a short answer that names two or three brands, and decide from there. If your brand is not in that answer, you are not in the running, no matter where you sit in the blue links underneath.
What actually changed
Search used to send people to your site so they could make up their own mind. AI search tries to make up their mind for them, then sends a smaller and warmer group through. Your total clicks can fall while your conversion rate climbs. That trade is fine if you are one of the brands being named. It is a real problem if you are not, because the drop is invisible until you go looking for it.
Where AI answers get their information
AI Overviews and chat assistants do not invent recommendations. They assemble them from pages they can read and have reason to trust. That includes your product and category pages, comparison articles, review platforms, forum threads, and the structured data on your site. If those sources describe you clearly and consistently, you get pulled in. If they are thin, contradictory or missing, you get skipped.
| Source | Why it gets used | What you control |
|---|---|---|
| Your product pages | Clear specs and descriptions are easy to quote | Write real descriptions, not one line of marketing |
| Review sites | Third party signals of quality | Claim profiles, ask happy customers, reply to reviews |
| Comparison content | Models love a clean side by side | Earn mentions, or publish honest comparisons yourself |
| Structured data | Machine readable facts about your products | Add product, review and FAQ schema |
How to stay in the answer
The work is less exotic than the headlines suggest. The same things that make you rank also make you quotable. Describe your products properly. Get real reviews and keep them current. Answer the questions buyers actually ask, in plain language, on pages a machine can read without guessing.
- Rewrite your best selling product pages so the description answers the obvious buying questions.
- Add FAQ and product schema so the facts are machine readable.
- Build up reviews on the platforms your category trusts.
- Publish at least one honest comparison or buying guide for your main category.
If you want to see what the assistants currently say about your brand, ask one. Type your category and "best brands in Australia" into ChatGPT and see whether you appear. It is a blunt test, and a useful one.
AI search is not the end of SEO. It is SEO with a stricter reader. Brands that already publish clear, well-reviewed, well-structured pages tend to do fine. Brands that have been getting by on thin content are the ones feeling the floor move.
Written by
Patrick Dhital
SEO & Growth, Remarkable Digital
Patrick Dhital leads SEO and growth at Remarkable Digital, where he works with Australian eCommerce and retail brands on organic search, GEO and the kind of growth that shows up in revenue rather than a rankings screenshot. His day to day is a mix of technical audits, category and content strategy, and helping founders work out which SEO work is actually worth paying for. He is most useful on stores that have plateaued: traffic that stopped climbing, category pages that never ranked, or a replatform that quietly wiped out a year of progress. Patrick writes about what is working in eCommerce SEO right now, with a bias toward the practical over the theoretical.