Search has split into three channels, and most SA websites are only built for one

Ask a South African business owner what “search” means for their marketing, and most will say Google rankings. That answer used to be complete. It isn’t anymore, and the gap between what most websites are built for and how people actually search has quietly become one of the more important shifts in digital marketing this year.

Start with the scale of what’s changed. ChatGPT had reached roughly 900 million weekly active users by February 2026. Google’s own Gemini passed 1 billion monthly users by August 2026. These are not niche tools anymore, they are search behaviour for a meaningful share of the population, sitting alongside, not replacing, Google itself. Google has responded by building AI directly into its own results: AI Overviews, the AI-generated summaries that now appear above the traditional list of links, launched in May 2024 and have kept expanding since. Roughly half of Google searches now surface one of these overviews, and around half of consumers say they use AI-powered search in some form.

Then there’s the third channel, easy to underestimate if you’re not in the demographic using it. Two in five Americans now use TikTok as a search engine, and nearly one in ten Gen Z users prefer it to Google outright, according to Adobe’s research. For a business targeting a younger or more digitally native customer, that is not a future consideration. It’s already happening.

Three systems, three sets of rules

Put these three together and the picture is clear: search has split into at least three distinct behaviours. Someone deciding whether to trust your business might type a query into Google and read an AI summary without clicking through to any website at all. They might ask ChatGPT or Gemini directly and get an answer that either mentions you or doesn’t. Or they might search TikTok for real people’s experiences before they search anything else. Three different systems, three different sets of rules for whether your business shows up.

This matters practically because the two disciplines work differently. Traditional SEO gets your page ranked in a list of links a person then has to click. The newer discipline, sometimes called answer engine optimisation, is about getting your brand mentioned or cited directly inside an AI-generated answer, before anyone clicks anything. Ranking well in the old sense doesn’t guarantee you show up in the new one. A page can rank on page one of Google and still be invisible to someone who only reads the AI Overview above it, or asks ChatGPT the same question directly.

What we would do about it

Start now rather than waiting for it to matter more. First, pick the handful of search queries that matter most to your business, the ones a real customer would type when they’re close to deciding, and check whether they trigger an AI-generated summary, and whether your business is cited in it. Second, track linked citations and unlinked brand mentions separately, because AI answers vary between sessions and a single check won’t tell you the full picture. Third, and this is the part most websites still get wrong, restructure your most important pages so they answer a real question directly and clearly near the top, backed by information a machine can verify, rather than burying the answer under marketing language it has to wade through first.

None of this replaces good SEO, TikTok presence, or a well-run Google Business Profile. It sits alongside all three, because customers are no longer choosing one channel to search on, they’re moving between all of them depending on the moment. The businesses that get found consistently over the next few years will be the ones that treated this as three separate, deliberate strategies early, not the ones that noticed only once their competitors were already showing up in the answers and they weren’t.

Sources: HubSpot, AEO checker tools that measure answer engine visibility, and HubSpot’s 2026 Social Media Trends report; Adobe consumer search survey.