Search Is Fading. Social Is Slowing. GPTs Are Where Customers Are Headed: As the founder of a media holding company operating across advertising, digital technology, publishing, and loyalty, I’ve navigated every shift in the attention economy. From the banner ad boom to the SEO gold rush to the social media explosion, each era created new rules for capturing customer attention.
But today, the twin pillars of digital marketing—search and social—are cracking. The pipelines that fueled growth for 20 years are springing leaks. Search is becoming obsolete, organic social reach is collapsing, and a new paradigm is emerging: GPT-style conversational AI is where customers are headed.
Social Media’s Decline: From Discovery Engine to Walled Garden
There was a time when social platforms promised organic reach and authentic connection. Brands invested heavily in building communities on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Now, that promise has evaporated.
- Organic reach is near zero. A Hootsuite study found the average organic reach on Facebook hovers between 2% and 5% of a page’s followers. You must now pay to reach the audience you worked to build.
- Algorithmic volatility. Every tweak to TikTok, Instagram Reels, or X changes the rules, forcing brands into endless, exhausting cycles of adaptation.
- Pay-to-play economics. Ad costs are rising. CPMs across Meta platforms increased by over 20% year-over-year in 2024, while engagement rates flatline.
- Declining trust. Edelman’s 2025 Trust Barometer found less than 30% of global consumers trust information on social media, as misinformation erodes credibility.
Social media remains a cultural force, but for brands, it has devolved from a community square into a broadcast channel—a costly one at that.
Where Customers Are Really Going: GPTs and Conversational AI
The good news is that customers haven’t disappeared—they’ve simply migrated. They are finding answers, inspiration, and purchase recommendations in AI chat platforms like GPTs, Perplexity, Claude, and brand-specific conversational bots.
This shift is happening for compelling reasons:
- Frictionless Answers. Instead of sifting through 10 links and 3 ads, users get a single, synthesized, contextual answer.
- Dynamic Personalization. GPTs remember context and refine results in real-time, something static search cannot do.
- Built-in Trust and Curation. AI agents filter noise and synthesize what matters from authoritative sources.
- Seamless Commerce Integration. We’re rapidly moving toward a world where search, discovery, and checkout all happen inside one conversational thread.
This migration echoes the social media boom of a decade ago—but at lightning speed. The critical difference: AI agents don’t just host the conversation; they are becoming the primary gatekeepers of discovery.
Why Brands Must Own the Conversation
If AI intermediaries are the new gatekeepers, the solution isn’t to double down on a broken playbook. The solution is to own the conversation in channels you control.
That means:
- Email and SMS. These remain the highest-ROI retention tools, delivering a staggering $36 return for every $1 spent (DMA, 2024).
- Apps and Websites. Foster direct relationships, free from the whims of third-party algorithms or AI summaries.
- Loyalty Programs. Our data shows loyalty members spend 25–40% more than non-members. It’s a powerhouse that is consistently underfunded compared to acquisition.
- Conversational Bots. Embedding GPT-powered experiences directly into your brand’s ecosystem ensures you are guiding the AI journey, not being summarized by it.
The Math Has Changed—Budgets Must Too
The collapse of search and social as reliable growth engines forces a painful but necessary truth: retention is the only sustainable growth strategy.
Bain & Company famously found that a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by 25% to 95%. Yet, most marketing budgets still wildly over-prioritize acquisition.
The math is clear, but the allocation is not. We are advising our clients to fundamentally realign their investments:
- 30% on Owned Channels: Build and monetize your email list, app, and loyalty program.
- 30% on Conversational AI: Develop agent-optimized content (structured FAQs, knowledge graphs) and embed chat interfaces into your customer journey.
- 40% on Hybrid Paid Media: Use paid search and social not as an end, but as a targeted funnel to drive traffic into your owned ecosystems.
The Future: Conversation as the New SEO
Search is no longer the front door. Social is no longer the community square. The new front door is the AI-powered conversation.
Brands that thrive in this next era will be those that stop obsessing over Google rankings and Instagram algorithms and start asking: How do we keep the customers we already have engaged, informed, and loyal inside the channels we control?
As we tell our clients: in a world where discovery happens in an AI chat, SEO is no longer your growth engine—conversation is.
