For 20 years, buyers had to speak to search engines in a kind of pidgin. A finance director with a ten-person team, a tight budget, and a workflow nobody else shared would flatten all of it into “best customer relationship management (CRM) software” and hope for the best. Sebastian Pinzon Duran, Co-Founder of AIVO, says an entire industry mistook that pidgin for how people think. “Buyers stopped typing keywords,” he says. “They started asking full questions, in complete sentences, to a machine that answers back.”
Duran spent more than 15 years across OMG, Publicis, and WPP before founding AIVO to measure how brands appear in AI engines, and he is direct about what changed. The buyer did not become more sophisticated. The buyer was always this specific. The search box was simply too narrow to hear it, and now that it isn’t, most brands are still answering a question nobody is asking anymore.
The Question Contains Everything the Keyword Discarded
Nobody types “best CRM software” and works through ten blue links. They ask which CRM suits a ten-person sales team on a tight budget, and one answer comes back. Longer, sharper, unmistakably human. Every detail in that question was in the buyer’s head all along. Team size, budget, constraint, ambition. The search bar just had no room for any of it. Duran’s conclusion follows without much ceremony. Speak to the whole question, because the fragment was only ever a compression artifact, and brands have spent two decades optimizing for the artifact.
The Answer Replaced the List
Search used to deal options and let the buyer pick. Ranking eighth still bought a brand a seat at the table, however far down. The machine now picks first and delivers a verdict, naming two or three brands and quietly discarding everyone else. Duran is unsentimental about what that costs. “If your brand isn’t in that answer, you’re not losing the click,” he says. “You’re losing the consideration before it ever starts.”
That distinction should keep marketers up at night. A lost click is a conversion problem, visible in a dashboard and fixable next quarter. A lost mention means the brand never entered the buyer’s shortlist at all, and nothing in the analytics stack will ever tell you it happened.
Being Helpful Finally Became the Same Thing as Being Found
AI engines pull from sources that answer plainly, which rewards expertise, specificity, and the unglamorous work of actually being useful. For as long as search has existed, ranking well and helping someone were adjacent activities rather than identical ones. Plenty of content climbed to the top of a results page while helping nobody at all. A system reading for substance closes that gap. The brands getting named are the ones teaching, which leaves the most sophisticated optimization strategy available looking suspiciously like good writing.
Follow Sebastian Pinzon Duran on LinkedIn or visit AIVO for more on how buyer behavior is changing, and to explore how the shift from keywords to real questions is reshaping the way brands are discovered, evaluated, and ultimately chosen.
