The customer who buys from you in 2027 may never have seen your webshop. He asks an AI assistant which jacket stays dry on the bike, sees a review from a vlogger on TikTok, compares prices on Bol and checks out inside the assistant itself. One purchase, four platforms, not a single visit to your site. Which route someone takes is no longer up to you.
Seven out of ten product questions in ChatGPT now return a row of products. On Bol, the largest Dutch marketplace, almost 40% of referral traffic comes from AI chatbots. Do you have a clear picture of your customer’s journey, and can you back it up with data? These are the three changes in search behaviour to account for in 2027.
From one persona to thousands of routes
A strategy used to start with the target audience. You decided who your customer was, what he was looking for and what he was willing to spend, and translated that into a handful of channels: ads on the most commercial keywords, a ranking on the category terms, some display on relevant sites and a newsletter in the season when the product sells.
That same customer can take thousands of routes today. He can start with an AI assistant and end up on Amazon. He can see a video, put the product to ChatGPT afterwards and check out in the Google checkout. He can start in Google, where the AI Overview already gives the answer, and buy on a marketplace. The persona has not changed. The route has, and it is no longer fixed.
Change 1: searching is now asking
Ten search engines appeared in the space of eighteen months. The answer now comes before the click, and more and more often an agent makes the purchase as well. That changes who you have to convince: not only the visitor, but also the system advising that visitor.
This is not a new audience. Of all ChatGPT users, 95% also use Google. Winning in AI is not about reaching new people, but about being chosen at a new moment. Your product pages therefore have to be readable for an agent. Of the pages ChatGPT cites, 71% contain structured data, and a fully completed product schema is cited 3.1 times more often.
Change 2: social is now searching and buying
Your customer increasingly starts his search not in Google’s search bar, but in the one on TikTok, YouTube or Pinterest. In the United States, 65% of Gen Z use TikTok as a search engine. Google reflects that shift itself: 40% of the results page is video and 55% of the citations in AI Overviews come from YouTube. Social sets the question. The rest answers it.
That calls for a different way of working, because making content based on search data is something other than organic social. Same channel, completely different approach. Since 15 June 2026 the customer can also check out on that channel: TikTok Shop went live in the Netherlands, along with Belgium, Austria and Poland. That this is no longer an experiment is clear from the United Kingdom, where TikTok Shop is now the second largest beauty retailer and a beauty product is sold every second.
Change 3: marketplaces are a starting point too
Of all European e-commerce revenue, 60.8% now goes through marketplaces, while the share of brands’ own webshops is falling to 39.2%. A marketplace like that has become a search channel and a brand stage at the same time: at Bol, 60% of revenue comes from partners.
The most interesting question is how people get there. The biggest referrer to Bol is now AI: almost 40% of referral traffic comes from ChatGPT and other chatbots, over four times as much as price comparison sites. More than half of the social traffic comes from YouTube. The three changes are not separate from each other. AI and video send people to the shelf, and that is where the purchase happens.
Visibility is no longer a position, but a place in the answer
Visibility is no longer a position in a list, but the question of whether you are included in the answer an AI gives, in the feed where someone is orienting and on the shelf where the purchase happens.
The problem is that hardly any organisation can see in its own data that it is the same customer every time. AI search sees a prompt. Social sees a view. Video sees a viewer. SEA sees a click. Marketplaces see an order. Retail media sees an impression. Each with its own team, its own budget and its own KPI.
That calls for one overarching strategy with its own optimisation per playing field, and for KPIs that look beyond the click.
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