37% of buyers now start with AI: what the hybrid search journey means for your 2026 strategy

A new study has put a number on something a lot of us have felt for months. More than a third of consumers, 37%, now say they begin their search with an AI tool rather than a traditional search engine. The finding comes from Eight Oh Two's 2026 AI and Search Behavior Study, and while the sample leans toward people who already use AI, the direction of travel is hard to argue with.

The instinct, if you run a brand, is to panic about Google traffic. We would push back on that. It also misreads what is happening: a lot of this AI search is Google, because Gemini and AI Overviews are Google’s own answer engines. Google is not losing the first step so much as changing what it looks like. The more useful read is that search has not disappeared, it has split into two steps. AI gives people a fast first answer. Traditional search is where they go to confirm it, compare options and actually buy. If your brand is only strong in one of those steps, you are losing people in the gap between them.

Why people are starting with AI

The study is blunt about the reason, and it is not really about the technology. It is about frustration with what traditional search has become. Asked about their top search frustrations, consumers pointed to clicking through too many links (40%), too many ads and sponsored results (37%), difficulty getting a straight answer (33%) and repetitive, low-quality information (28%).

AI wins because it removes that friction. People described it as faster, clearer and less cluttered. Six in ten (60%) said AI gives better, clearer answers than traditional search, and only 6% said it was worse. For anyone who has watched a results page fill up with ads and AI-written filler, none of this should be a surprise.

Trust is more complicated. Eighty per cent said they feel confident AI gives unbiased information, yet 85% still double-check AI answers somewhere else. That tension is the whole story. People believe the first answer enough to act on it, but not enough to skip the verification step.

The hybrid journey, and where your brand can fall through the cracks

Here is the pattern the data describes. A buyer asks AI a question and gets a short, curated answer, often naming a few brands and quietly leaving others out. Then they head to a traditional search engine to sanity-check what they were told, read reviews and look at pricing. Traditional search is still where people go for product reviews and pricing, news, images and video, and health information.

Two things follow from that for any UK brand. First, if AI does not understand or mention you, you are invisible at the very start of the journey, before the buyer has even formed a shortlist. Nearly half of consumers (47%) said AI influences which brands they trust. We have written before about why your brand might be missing from ChatGPT even when you rank on Google, and this study only sharpens the point. Second, if what AI says about you does not match what people then find in traditional search and on your own site, you lose credibility at the moment they are checking. Consistency across both steps is now a competitive advantage, not a nice-to-have.

This is already shaping purchases, not just idle questions. According to the study, 47% have used AI to help make a purchase decision, 57% to find the best prices, 54% to compare products and 48% to read AI-generated review summaries. Most people still buy on a retailer or brand website rather than inside the AI tool, which is exactly why the handoff between AI and traditional search matters so much.

What to actually do about it

None of this means abandoning SEO. It means widening it. The goal is to be the brand AI reaches for and the brand that holds up when people verify. A few practical moves:

Make your content easy for AI to understand and summarise. Clear answers near the top, plain language, structured headings and proper schema markup all help answer engines lift and attribute your content accurately. If a model cannot quickly work out what you do and who you are for, it will pick a competitor it can. Our guide to building a GEO content brief walks through the nine things an LLM needs in order to quote you.

Build and reinforce your entity. AI recommendations lean on what the wider web consistently says about you. Consistent business information, strong third-party mentions, reviews and a coherent presence across the sites AI draws from all make you easier to recommend with confidence.

Keep traditional SEO strong, because it is the verification layer. When someone cross-checks an AI answer, your organic results, reviews and pricing pages need to confirm the story, not contradict it.

Start measuring AI visibility. Google has begun rolling out generative AI performance reports in Search Console, including for UK site owners, so you can finally see whether you appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode. It is a sensible first step toward treating AI visibility as something you track, not something you guess at.

The bottom line

Consumers expect to lean on AI more, not less. In the same study, 63% expect to use AI more this year and 59% think it will become their main way of finding information. But they are not abandoning Google, they are using both, in sequence. The brands that win in 2026 will be the ones that show up clearly in the AI answer and stand up to scrutiny in the search that follows. If you are not sure which of those two steps you are weak in, that is the question worth answering first. If you want a straight answer, talk to us about a GEO visibility audit and we will show you whether your brand appears when buyers ask AI.

A quick note on the data: the Eight Oh Two study surveyed 500 consumers who already actively use AI tools, with responses collected in November 2025. That makes it a useful signal of where AI-forward buyers are heading rather than a representative snapshot of every consumer, so treat the percentages as a direction of travel.

Sources: 37% of consumers start searches with AI instead of Google (Search Engine Land) and the 2026 AI and Search Behavior Study (Eight Oh Two).