The landscape of search and discovery is changing. As consumers turn to new discovery mediums, it’s time for brands to take a fresh look at digital discovery, says Firney co-founder, Marc Firth.

For years, digital commerce has been built around the assumption that customers know exactly what they want. Search bars, filters, and navigation menus were designed for people who want to research, compare, and refine their choices step by step.

That worked when online behaviour was driven by desktop browsing and Google keywords. But today’s customers, particularly younger audiences, are behaving very differently online. Discovery increasingly happens through TikTok videos, AI tools, social content and conversational prompts rather than carefully typed search terms.

People are no longer searching with keywords: they are asking questions.

Why Traditional Search Journeys Are Falling Short

Instead of typing "black blazer menswear", a shopper might ask: "What should I wear to a smart-casual job interview?" A customer planning a holiday is less likely to search route by route and more likely to ask for "the easiest ferry crossing with a dog and a campervan". The expectation is no longer just to find products: it is to receive guidance.

Many brands still have a digital experience based on outdated behaviour patterns. A traditional search bar only works well when someone knows the exact product name. It’s far less effective when a customer is exploring options, comparing styles or trying to describe what they need in natural language.

This drives consumers to turn to LLMs, such as ChatGPT or Gemini, or Social Influencers for product discovery. When a shopper arrives on site, they already know what they need. They’re looking to validate their findings and checkout.

Brands must streamline the path to purchase for LLM-referred traffic, and offer a rich, immersive experience that exceeds LLM’s capabilities. This involves prioritising elements such as price, ratings, and reviews for easy checkout and allowing shoppers to use natural language to ask questions, and surface related products in real-time.

Retailers are already feeling the fall out. Industry data shows that younger consumers increasingly favour visual and conversational forms of discovery over traditionalsearch behaviour. The rise of AI assistants is accelerating that change further, particularly as shoppers become more comfortable asking full questions rather than entering isolated keywords.

For brands, the challenge is rethinking what the website is there to do.

From Product Catalogue to Digital Shop Assistant

The conversational commerce market reached £8.55 billion ($11.26 billion) in 2025 and it's still growing. The most effective digital experiences are starting to behave less like product catalogues and more like knowledgeable shop assistants. They guide. They interpret intent. They help customers narrow choices and build confidence in decisions.

Firney worked with Direct Ferries to simplify the customer journey when they saw this same pattern. Their website was handling more than 4.5 million customer queries in a single month as travellers sought clarity on routes, vehicles, pets and passenger options.

We developed a conversational booking assistant that helps customers to plan and book journeys using natural-language questions rather than navigating multiple pages and filters. The assistant is designed to support more than 300 common travel queries, covering passenger types, group sizes, vehicles, pets, travel dates and routepreferences across more than 4,000 ferry routes.

‘Stop thinking chatbot and start thinking of it as a new commerce layer. Customers are telling you what they want through conversation’ - learn more through watching

Firney’s podcast.

In retail, conversational search tools are helping customers move naturally from road questions to relevant recommendations without having to navigate rigid product structures.

There is also a competitive angle. Increasingly, discovery begins before a customer even reaches a brand's website. Public AI tools are already influencing recommendations, product visibility and purchase journeys. If brands fail to build more intelligent discovery experiences themselves, they risk losing control of that interaction altogether.

The brands that succeed over the next few years will be the ones that understand intent fastest. Customers are telling businesses exactly what they want through questions, conversations and behaviour. The challenge is whether brands are set up to listen properly.

Catch Marc at MAD//Fest London or find out more at firney.com