• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, Yesterday

Brands and companies have poured major investments into artificial intelligence as marketers realize the technology can process data faster to identify major behavioral differences in the way consumers act.

Tech-spend projections have exceeded $320 billion for 2025, including investments from Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft. Goldman Sachs analysts estimated these companies could spend more than $1 trillion on AI during the next five years based on investments in data centers and platforms.

Behavioral differences identified in AI queries across Google AI Overviews vs. ChatGPT tell the story of how consumers shop, but the types of recommendations those platforms return for each shopping question tells even more about the future of these platforms and how they will respond, according to research from BrightEdge AI Catalyst.

While ChatGPT surfaces more than 10 brands in 43.9% of shopping responses, Google's AI Overviews do this in only 4.7% of the time. The difference is driven by shopping intent patterns. It's not clear if this type of behavior could turn into a sponsored ad unit, but it's an interesting thought. 

AI Overview queries such as "where to buy" identify brands in 39.3%, whereas queries related to coupons and deals only connect the consumer with brands 12.2% of the time.

ChatGPT remains consistent in how it identifies and connects consumers with brands across all queries. 

Adding the words “buy online” to the query gives AI Overviews a more than 33.9 percentage point boost or possibility of including a brand’s name. The data shows that identifying direct purchase intent completely changes AI behavior.

ChatGPT and AI Overviews average between seven and eight brands when mentioned. The former creates "brand marketplaces" in responses while the latter’s ecosystem spreads shopping across multiple search engine results page (SERP) features.

This means when answers mention brands in AI Overviews, they tend to have between seven and eight, compared with ChatGPT's approximately 10 or more mentions.

The difference in multi-brand responses reveals fundamentally different AI approaches to helping shoppers and creates distinct opportunities for brands to optimize for visibility.

BrightEdge recommends adopting AI-based content strategies that mean building educational shopping guides and prioritize helpful, informative content that naturally incorporates brand mentions rather than promotional messaging.

Successful content combines shopping guidance with detailed product information, addressing multiple stages of the customer journey within single pieces.

Brands must track visibility across both AI systems, as performance patterns vary significantly between platforms.

Through the data it is easy to see how agentic technology and traditional search indexes are changing how and where consumers, bots, and agents discover brands.

Enterprises with large budgets historically have dominated the visibility of brands in search, but today data and speed matter more. Search is being reinvented and rebuilt.