Agentic search is now the front door to your funnel

Somewhere in your building, a team is still fighting for position on page one of Google. Be kind to them. The work is real and the ground moved underneath it.

Salesforce put a number on the shift in its latest State of Commerce report, drawn from the behaviour of 1.5 billion shoppers: use of agentic search as the first step in a purchase journey grew 200% year over year. Over the same period, discovery through brand-owned properties fell 7%, and traditional search fell 15%.

The shopper now arrives pre-briefed. Something told them what to consider, what to skip, and roughly what to pay, before your site ever loaded. Your landing page is no longer the first argument — it is the second, and it is arguing against a summary you never saw.

That reframes a lot of standard practice:

• —Rank tracking measures a surface that a growing share of buyers never touch
• —Your best-performing page can be invisible if the model does not cite it
• —Competitors you never benchmarked against can be named ahead of you in an answer

Only 28% of commerce organisations use agentic AI today. That sounds like a reason to relax. It is the opposite. The gap is not between you and your competitors' technology — it is between your funnel and your customers' behaviour, and consumers moved first.

If you are not part of that first conversation, you are invisible before the journey even begins.

None of this requires a platform migration. It requires knowing something you almost certainly do not know today.

• —Ask the assistants directly. Run the five questions a real buyer asks before shortlisting in your category, in both ChatGPT and Gemini. Note whether you appear, how you are described, and who is named ahead of you.
• —Treat the answer as a content brief. Where the model is wrong about you, that is a gap in your public material, not a mystery.
• —Measure it over months, not weeks. AI answers are non-deterministic and personalised — the trend matters, the daily reading does not.
• —Give it an owner. This sits awkwardly between SEO, content and product marketing, which is exactly how it ends up belonging to nobody.

The honest summary: nobody has this solved, the measurement tooling is young, and anyone selling you certainty is selling something. But the behaviour change is real and already at scale, and the cheapest move available is to go and read what the assistants say about you.

Most marketing teams have never done that once.