The Search Revolution
AI is rewriting the rules of discovery, trust, and commerce. Kepler’s Camm Rowland and Upstatement’s Mike Swartz and Mike Burns share what to expect.
Instead of typing strategic keywords into search engines, these days we’re speaking naturally to AI assistants that understand context, nuance, and intent. This shift is more than conversational convenience: It’s the emergence of AI as a new kind of customer, one that judges brands with algorithmic precision and shapes purchasing decisions for millions of consumers.
The Objectivity Engine
At growth marketing agency Kepler, CCO Camm Rowland is captivated by how AI platforms evaluate brands and reshape consumer behavior. Kepler’s diagnostic tool, Kip AIR, operates like a digital detective, querying platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity to understand how they perceive and recommend brands to consumers.
What it reveals often upends assumptions. One client confidently believed AI would recognize it as a now dual-gender apparel brand, only to discover through Kip AIR that AI platforms still classified the client as men’s‑only retail. The disconnect stemmed from inconsistent messaging, scattered across digital channels, and presented a previously unseen barrier to reaching their full audience.
“AI assistants are no longer just intermediaries,” Rowland explains. “They are becoming customers in their own right.”
Kip AIR functions like an X‑ray machine for brand perception, revealing the invisible mechanics of AI decision-making. In the course of a weekend, what started as a series of questions scattered across notes became a working proof-of-concept tool: a structured 14-step prompt chain that could deliver comprehensive brand intelligence using a semi-automated process.
Now, further automated, the tool uses the same structured, multi-step diagnostic model to mirror real-world shopping behavior (discovery, comparison, and decision-making) across top LLMs at the push of a button. It uncovers not just whether a brand will get recommended but the precise reasoning behind those recommendations.
Unlike human shoppers swayed by clever advertising or brand nostalgia, AI systems operate with complete objectivity. They prioritize structured data (like product attributes or pricing) over storytelling, authentic reviews over marketing copy. Brand recognition might serve as a tie-breaker, but it’s rarely the deciding factor.
“AI systems are meritocratic,” Rowland says. “They recommend based on tangible proof points and reward brands that provide helpful, verifiable, and machine-optimized content across digital touchpoints.”
A Content Reckoning
This certainly kicks up some big questions when it comes to corporate communication strategies. Mike Swartz, CEO of the strategic digital studio Upstatement, points to MIT’s admissions blog as an unlikely example of AI-ready content.
Instead of producing sanitized marketing materials, Upstatement client MIT has spent over a decade allowing students to write brutally honest posts about campus life (one even lists all the places to cry on campus). The result? When prospective students ask AI assistants practical questions, AI can provide substantive answers because MIT has a knowledge base of authentic content.
“First, you have to close the content gap,” Swartz says. “If a brand is not specific, AI will guess or go somewhere else, and the brand is not going to have a voice in the conversation.”
Companies that produce generic “We have deals this holiday season” messaging aren’t telling AI systems anything useful about competitive differentiation.
“If brands are specific — ‘Here’s how we save customers this much money on this specific thing using this technique’ — that’s what someone will actually search for,” explains Swartz. The difference between vague corporate speak and actionable specificity determines whether brands break through in AI-mediated conversations.
Early Kip AIR deployments have already exposed this content crisis and the perception gap that brands are finding themselves in. “While Kip AIR isn’t designed to deliver immediate performance spikes, it plays a critical role in shaping long-term marketing outcomes,” Rowland says.
Changing Behaviors
Upstatement CTO Mike Burns sees something even more transformative emerging: the collapse of traditional search infrastructure. “People just want to do or know stuff. Websites were designed to help with that,” he says, “And search was designed to help you find those websites.” People often start in discovery mode, but Burns says they’re quickly pivoting to action mode.
Using traditional techniques, a teenager dreaming of serving on the Supreme Court might search “Harvard admissions,” navigate through information fragments, and piece together an application strategy. In an AI-native world, that same student could type, “I want to be a Supreme Court justice,” and receive a comprehensive roadmap: relevant courses, extracurricular activities, college options, internship opportunities, and motivational guidance for the journey ahead.
The shift reflects a fundamental change in how information gets organized and retrieved. “The diversity of the ways that people are accessing information is exploding,” says Swartz.
The next iteration of Kepler’s Kip AIR is anticipating this fragmentation and will expand model coverage and introduce longitudinal tracking, allowing brands to monitor how AI perceptions evolve across platforms over time. The tool is developing predictive diagnostics that prepare for future shifts in what AI shopping assistants might prioritize.
Authenticity for the Win
As AI becomes our primary information filter, source credibility will become even more important. For example, some users add “Reddit” to searches for more authentic results, bypassing corporate messaging in favor of unfiltered community insight.
“Appearing first in Google is actually not great anymore,” Swartz notes. “There are so many anti-trust signals.”
“Brands must evolve their strategies to be understood, trusted, and favored by both human shoppers and their increasingly capable AI counterparts,” Rowland says.
This requires treating every customer interaction as a potential input. AI systems will increasingly retain detailed records of experiences, both good and bad. One poor customer service encounter can influence future recommendations across multiple platforms. Companies must now consider how their decisions will be interpreted not just by customers but by the AI systems increasingly guiding those customers’ choices. The implications extend to content strategy, product descriptions, customer service protocols, and pricing transparency.
Commerce in Conversation
Looking forward, Rowland expects “agentic commerce” — a world where AI agents go beyond recommending products but execute purchases autonomously. The transformation will be dramatic: Instead of browsing websites and comparing options, consumers will have natural conversations with AI assistants that understand their preferences, budget constraints, and decision-making patterns.
This shift extends beyond commerce into professional services. Rowland believes AI evaluation systems will increasingly assess people using the same logic, analyzing digital presence, credentials, reviews, and trust signals.
While Kip AIR currently focuses on brands and products, its approach could extend to people evaluation. “Anyone hoping to be recommended by AI in any capacity will need to manage their digital presence intentionally, just like a brand would,” says Rowland. The diagnostic methodology that reveals how AI platforms weight trust, value, user experience, and sustainability for brands could easily apply to professional reputation management, a reality that’s already emerging as AI assistants begin recommending service providers, consultants, and potential hires.
The Long Game
As we navigate this transition, success won’t automatically flow to companies with the largest marketing budgets or most sophisticated SEO strategies. Small businesses with authentic customer relationships and genuine value propositions may find themselves competing effectively against larger rivals compromised by inconsistent messaging or poor customer experiences. In an AI-mediated world, the most powerful search strategy might simply be telling the truth.