AI Search is changing Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)

Traditional Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) largely assumes the journey starts when someone arrives on your website. AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and other answer engines challenge that assumption. A prospective customer may now encounter your brand, proposition, pricing, reviews and how you compare to your competitors before they ever visit your site. AI powered research is becoming the new comparison engine - for everything. 

This shift creates an opportunity for a more engaging off website start to the conversion funnel and consequently, means CRO is no longer just about improving user journeys on site and converting more of the traffic you receive. It is increasingly about influencing the brand experience people have before they arrive. We encourage brands when thinking about CRO to also connect their SEO/AEO strategy to improve off website CRO.

Consider how technology now displays information about your brand

For years, Conversion Rate Optimisation has had a fairly simple aim: convert more of your website traffic to customers. We analyse the journey, identify friction, design a hypothesis for improvement, test the page, improve the experience and measure the result. Today, AI search is changing where conversion journeys begin. A prospective customer can ask ChatGPT, Google, Gemini, Perplexity or another AI-powered search experience:

"What's the best option for me?"

And before they ever visit your website, they may have already encountered:

• Your brand
• Your competitors
• Your product or service
• Customer reviews
• Pricing information
• Your reputation
• Your perceived strengths and weaknesses

The AI has effectively become part of the customer journey as a new comparison engine.

Perhaps we need to rethink CRO?

The traditional CRO question is:

"What happens when prospects arrive on site?"

The emerging question is:

"What did they learn about us before they arrived?"

That's why AEO — Answer Engine Optimisation — has become much more interesting. It's not simply about appearing in an AI answer. It's about how you can influence the information provided by the answer engine about your brand before they click. By the time someone reaches your website the AI may have already helped form their shortlist, created expectations, coloured their opinion or even helped them make a buying decision. This means the sales funnel has been extended beyond your website.

We used to think about the funnel as:

Search > Website > Conversion

Increasingly, it looks more like:

Question > AI answer > Brand consideration > Website > Conversion

And sometimes:

Question > AI answer >- Decision

with no website visit at all. That creates a new challenge and an opportunity for marketers. Your website might be perfectly optimised, your landing pages might convert brilliantly and your conversion funnel might be highly optimised, but if the AI experience before the click gives the customer the wrong information, fails to mention you, or positions a competitor more favourably, your CRO work may be starting too late.

SEO/AEO and CRO need to come together to fully optimise journeys

It's my contention that in the current digital ecosystem SEO/AEO and CRO need to come together. Where possible SEO/AEO shouldn't be considered separately from CRO, and CRO shouldn’t stop at the website. The two disciplines need to work together, because the same questions we ask about conversion should also be asked about AI visibility:

• What is the customer asking?
• What information are they being given?
• Which brands are being considered?
• What evidence is influencing the decision?
• What objections are being created before the customer reaches us?
• And what happens when they finally arrive?

This is the next evolution of the conversion funnel. CRO used to optimise the way in which the destination website took a visitor through to conversion. Now we need to understand and influence the journey to the website, too.

At Equimedia, we think that means looking at Total Performance Visibility — understanding what happens across paid, organic, AI and owned experiences, rather than treating each channel as a separate piece of the puzzle. In an AI-first search world, the conversion journey has the potential to begin long before the first website visit. 

Please Get in touch if you feel your CRO could do with a review and ask for our digital health check.

In the meantime here are two simple things you might like to try.

1. Ask AI: Ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity to recommend the leading providers in your category - then ask how your brand compares. 
2. Follow the journey backwards: Take a valuable customer journey and identify what the customer is likely to see,read and believe before they reach your website.  

If no-one in your organisation 'owns' those two questions, perhaps your CRO strategy needs to start earlier?