The Answer Economy: Marketing’s Next AI Adventure

Not long ago, the journey to knowledge began with the search bar. Type a query into Google or YouTube, find an answer on anything from what pair of shoes to buy to how to build a marketing funnel. And marketers believed that if you could win search, you could win the customer.

But around the end of 2024, something big changed: over 50% of Google searches ended without a click.

The discovery journey now starts at the prompt chat. AI overviews and ChatGPT links are becoming the main way users answer questions, find resources, and engage with brands.

Instead of the “search economy,” I call this the “answer economy.” And as marketers, this epic shift in the market needs to be met by an epic shift in our marketing strategy.

Keywords dethroned by prompts

The old way to market your brand is well-known: Study the arcane art of SEO, get the right keywords on your pages, and rise in the search result rankings so customers will find you.

When AI tools like ChatGPT arrived, though, we were already seeing cracks in this strategy. Keyword-stuffed listicles and scroll-heavy pages made it harder and harder for customers to find actually useful information online, and they were frustrated.

AI gave them a way to sidestep those issues—Future found that a third of US respondents prefer AI tools over search engines, and that number is growing. As customers move to AI for quicker, clearer answers, our marketing efforts need to also.

However, the customers we’ll find there aren’t the same. AI tools have changed their behavior in two drastic ways:

• Higher bar for quality: Salesforce found that 65% of customers expect brands to deliver relevant, real-time responses, and AI makes it easy for them to find the brands and content that do—or keep looking if they don’t.
• Chaotic journeys: AI tools can drop customers into a traditional funnel mid-stream or bounce them around in ways you don’t expect. This is even more of a challenge when 79% of customers expect consistent interactions on their journey.

For marketers to succeed in the answer economy, we need to do more than just make our content surfaceable on a new platform—we also need to make it work for a new type of customer.

Quality content: The once and future king

As it turns out, surfacing and quality considerations go hand in hand. AI answers rely more on engagement than traditional search does. By focusing on quality of content, marketers can meet their customers’ higher bar and boost their visibility.

Really, this shouldn’t be a new focus for you. Expert SEO consultants like Eli Schwartz note that AI isn’t killing SEO—it’s pushing it to become more sophisticated and user-focused. Google’s SEO guidelines begin and end with E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness).

What the answer economy has done is turn the focus on quality into a virtuous cycle. When answer-driven customers have an easier time engaging with your content, AI engines take notice and surface it more often. And as more answer-driven customers find and engage with it, AI boosts it more.

So rather than tinkering with keyword density, your marketing strategy should prioritize content that’s genuinely helpful to customers. Make it clear, make it credible, and make it easy to find answers fast.

Braving the chaotic customer journey

The other challenge of the answer economy: forget the polished funnel slide from your last board deck. AI answers let users be much more particular with their journeys—and since users are unpredictable, emotional, and all over the place, so are their new journeys.

As marketers, our job is no longer to dictate our customers’ path. Instead, we have to make sure that wherever their journey starts, customers can guide themselves along the personalized, consistent experiences they need to convert. To do that:

• Personalization: Marketing teams need tools to collect and maintain customer data that doesn’t follow linear funnels, and systems to activate that data no matter where a user engages.
• Consistency: Inventory, refresh, and keep your scope of content tight. If a customer pops into a three-year-old landing page, they should have the same quality experience they would on last week’s campaign launch.
• Conversion: Customers can now engage at any point with your brand, so any point could be a conversion point. Make sure your guideposts and CTAs are always accessible—and that you identify what converts well in each potential situation.

Amplitude: The hero’s tool to get your answers

Along with exercising your AI muscles, the best way for marketers to win in the answer economy is with a first-in-class digital analytics platform like Amplitude. Its capabilities help you understand and meet your users wherever they are on their journey:

• Quality: With analytics that go way beyond basic web metrics, you can deeply understand what your customers consider helpful, quality content so you can make more of it.
• Personalization: Amplitude lets you knit together customer profiles from wherever a user interacts with your brand, and then act on that data through experimentation and customizable experiences.
• Consistency: Self-serve access lets all teams have the same view of your customers, while built-in anomaly detection helps you flag issues quickly to stay on top of your cohesive user experience.
• Conversion: See the full journey that any customer takes to convert, regardless of where they begin or end, so you can better understand what’s moving the needle and what’s blocking it.

And because the answer economy expects immediate answers, Amplitude lets you do all of that fast.

Answering the call

The shift to the answer economy may be an unexpected journey for some of us marketers, but it’s clear to me that we need to rise to the occasion. When our audience moves, we move too—and doing that quickly is the best way to succeed.

The strategies to use: focus on quality content, while anticipating and understanding novel customer journeys. These will help surface your content on AI platforms while meeting the needs of a transforming customer base.

To put these strategies into practice, a digital analytics platform like Amplitude is invaluable. You need analytics that can adapt to changing customer wants and journeys. Amplitude takes you from insights to action wherever your customers are.

Although the field of play is new, the strategies to win are still the fundamentals of marketing. So let’s be heroes and answer the call of the answer economy!