What is AI search?

"AI search" is the umbrella name for something you probably already do without calling it that: asking Google and reading a summary before the links, or asking ChatGPT which sneakers to buy and getting an answer with its sources. Each company calls it something different, but the mechanism is the same: a language model searches, reads and writes. For a store, what changes is what competes. In a list of results, your whole page competes for a position; in a written answer, pieces of pages compete for a spot among the sources, and the shopper can decide without having visited any of them.

How it works

Almost every AI search system does three things in a row.

1. They retrieve pages. Google explains it for its AI features: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which it also calls grounding, uses its usual ranking systems to bring relevant, up-to-date pages from its index, and then the system reviews the specific information on those pages to respond.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search}
2. They expand the question. With query fan-out, the model generates several related queries at once to request more information and fetch more results. Google gives an example: for "how to fix a lawn that's full of weeds," it may also run "best herbicides for lawns" or "how to prevent weeds in lawn."⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search}
3. They compose and cite. With what was retrieved, the system writes an answer and shows prominent links to the pages that support it.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search} Microsoft describes it from Bing: assistants such as Copilot break content into smaller pieces, evaluate them for authority and relevance and assemble them into a single answer, often from several sources at once. That is why, it says, in AI search it matters less to rank whole pages and more which fragments earn a place in the final answer.⁠^{[2]Microsoft Advertising (Krishna Madhavan, October 8, 2025). Optimizing Your Content for Inclusion in AI Search Answers}

Who offers it and where the pages come from

Google has no separate crawler for AI: the robots.txt directives for Googlebot are the control, because AI is built into Search.⁠^{[6]Google Search Central. AI features and your website} ChatGPT, by contrast, has separate search and training agents, and you can allow one and block the other.⁠^{[3]OpenAI. Overview of OpenAI Crawlers} The entry on GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) has the full table of agents.

What changes for a store

Google's answers can include product listings, product information and local business data, and Google says Google Merchant Center feeds help make your products visible in AI answers as well as in the rest of Search.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search} The same guide insists you do not need to write for AI: these systems understand synonyms and the general sense of what someone is looking for, so you do not have to cover every variant of a query with a page.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search}

In a store

The path a question takes to a product page, in a fictitious example. Someone asks: "which stainless steel electric kettle shuts off by itself when it runs out of water?"

Step 3 is where the most product pages are lost without anyone seeing it. Microsoft warns that AI systems may not read content hidden in tabs or dropdown menus, and that a key fact inside an image or a PDF is understood less well than in HTML.⁠^{[2]Microsoft Advertising (Krishna Madhavan, October 8, 2025). Optimizing Your Content for Inclusion in AI Search Answers}

How to check it

1. Ask your customer's question in four places: Google (see whether an AI Overview appears), AI Mode, ChatGPT with search and Perplexity. Note the sources each one cites, with the date.
2. Open your robots.txt and check that you let the search agents in: Googlebot, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot.⁠^{[6]Google Search Central. AI features and your website}⁠^{[3]OpenAI. Overview of OpenAI Crawlers}⁠^{[4]Perplexity. Perplexity Crawlers}
3. Check Search Console's generative AI performance report for Google's features, knowing it only appears if your site gets enough impressions.⁠^{[7]Search Console Help. Generative AI performance report (Search)}
4. Check AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools: the cited pages and the queries the AI used to find them.⁠^{[5]Microsoft, Webmaster Tools blog. Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools Public Preview}
5. Look for hidden facts on your product pages: answers in tabs, images or PDFs that an assistant may not read.⁠^{[2]Microsoft Advertising (Krishna Madhavan, October 8, 2025). Optimizing Your Content for Inclusion in AI Search Answers}

Related concept: semantic search

Semantic search is the part that finds pages by meaning rather than by exact word match. Google says its systems understand a page's relevance even when it does not match the query literally.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search} It is one piece of AI search, the retrieving one, but not all of AI search: semantic search finds, AI search also writes and cites. A search engine can be semantic and still return a list of links.

To keep going, the AI search reading path puts the rest of the terms in order, and the guide to what an AI crawler sees in your store goes into the detail of each agent.