AI has changed search behavior - What does this mean for the future?

Internet search behavior has changed for good

By Markus Backman

January 8th, 2025

I have to admit it, when browsing the internet, my patience has become low, really low. I demand nothing but accurate, personalized answers, fast. The days of doing cumbersome internet research are coming to an end, and it is changing internet search behavior for good. Why is that? Because of recent developments that AI has contributed. In this article, we'll look into how search behavior is changing due to AI, and what may happen in 2025 and beyond.

First, a little summary of it all:

• AI is reshaping how people search online, prioritizing fast, accurate, and personalized results over traditional methods.

• Search habits have evolved from exact keyword queries in the 1990s to conversational, AI-driven experiences today.

• Chatbots like ChatGPT and AI-powered tools are replacing traditional search engines for many users

• Lowered patience and attention spans are a thing in todays search behavior.

• Users may form form subconscious "relationships" with AI, treating it like a friend.

• The future of search will likely blur the line between AI-generated content and human input, making AI an everyday norm.

How search behavior has changed throughout the years

In recent years, AI chatbots and AI-driven search engines have completely changed how we interact with the web.

1990s: In the early days of the internet, you needed to provide exact queries when visiting websites. The internet was not (by today’s standards) user-friendly at all. It lacked indexing, and the relevance was poor unless you had the exact terms to look for relevant results.

2000s: This was when the internet really became a part of most people's lives. The web became commercialized with rising giants like Google entering the game. Lots of algorithmic improvements were introduced and developed, prioritizing relevance and authority. Simultaneously, the web became a serious tool for research and online shopping, to name a few.

2010s: Gradually, the internet developed through this time with better algorithms, such as local search, rich results, and featured snippets. This was also the era when the internet became mobile. Search queries also became more conversational, and the results more personalized.

Early 2020s: This is the decade when things started to really change, and fast. Personalization began to become AI-driven, and people started to use more natural language to find their answers and results. Slowly, zero-click searches started to grow here.

Mid-2020s: We are now in the middle of a full-size AI revolution, and I like to think that we have entered the wild west era of the internet again. I'll talk about this more comprehensively next.

The AI revolution has changed search behavior immensely

In just a few years, chatbots and AI-driven search engines have transformed search into a completely interactive experience. Search is now very conversational and semantic-based. People search for information using more natural language, asking questions like they would ask their best buddy. The big contrast here is that people are shifting away from traditional search engines like Google to Chat-GPT and Reddit, which are not even traditional search engines at all.

Low patience and a declining attention span follows

AI-driven chatbots like Chat-GPT have really lowered my patience. I have to admit it, use it every day. I may be lying in bed, and a funny question might come to mind. I go straight to Chat-GPT looking for an answer to my question, and I get an instant response. If I use Google or any other traditional search engine, the answer is most likely going to appear at the top of the search results page with either rich results, featured snippets, or an AI-generated answer, such as those provided by Gemini. I don’t need to click on any link since the info I needed appears on the search results page. Is this information accurate? Probably. I don’t think most people care. Are there guarantees that the information is accurate when you just Google stuff? Probably not either.

This has led to my patience becoming lower, while my attention span is shorter while navigating Google the traditional way. Why waste time manually researching the internet when all this snappy AI stuff can do it for me? On top of that, it seems like tradition search engines like Google have become much worse recently, with irrelevant results and lots of advertisements.

A developing relationship with AI

I remember back in 2013 the movie Her, where a middle-aged guy starts to bond with an AI assistant and builds a relationship with it. Back then, I thought such a thing would be something we could experience far into the future. But now, this already seems kind of logical to happen.

Chat-GPT was introduced at the beginning of 2023. I most definitely became very interested in it right away and started to play around with it. I didn’t think much about how it would affect me or how much I would actually use it. However, after a short time, I realized I started to develop a subconscious relationship with it. I started to get frustrated with Chat-GPT on a personal level if I didn’t receive the answers I was looking for. I began to be polite and sometimes show my gratitude by saying “thank you” at the end. Also, I started to think I shouldn’t overwhelm it by being too demanding.

Of course, all of this is still on a kind of subconscious level, but it remains to be seen how things evolve. Will it become normal for all of us to start bonding with AI assistants or chatbots? What’s interesting here is that it remains to be seen how search behavior changes if we start to develop personal relationships with chatbots and search engines that can guide us through the internet.

Will all of this AI stuff make us dumb?

As humans, we evolved to what we are today because we were intelligent enough to figure out the easiest and most effective ways of doing things. Before AI, searching the internet used to require more brainwork and manual effort. Now, it’s different as search is faster, more accurate, and personalized. That’s all fine, as long as we understand the difference between AI and not AI.

Wait, do we even know what is AI and what is not anymore?

I think one of the interesting things is that at the beginning of the AI revolution, AI could be spotted quite easily. Later, efforts were made to label AI content on social media, for instance. Now, I don’t really think this works anymore. AI has become so human-like it is hard to tell it’s AI. Simultaneously, I believe people don’t really care. I think very soon the gap between the AI stuff and real-world stuff will become negligible, making it hard or irrelevant to tell if something is AI or not.

My take on future of search behavior

There’s a very cynical way of looking at AI and its future. You may have seen the movie Idiocracy from 2007 when people in the future became very unintelligent again because of the comforts technological advancements provided humans.

Will something like this happen with our search behavior on the internet? Maybe to an extent, but I don’t think it’s as bad as we like to portray it. AI will most likely remain a tool for people, or a co-pilot that helps them find what they are looking for. We humans always fear new things, and society has seen this many times, from the industrialization era to the beginning of the internet. We thought these things were going to fail and destroy everything, but instead, they brought lots of good things and helped to revamp and develop people and societies.

Yes, search behavior is changing fast due to AI. However, my prediction is that AI-everything will become so normalized that the line between what is AI and what is not will blur. People will probably stop thinking there is a line between AI and humans. This will also change search behavior completely. One day, everything will become so AI-based, we won’t really see things as AI-based anymore. It will become as normalized as cars and electricity, which were once feared and hated, but are now essential parts of everyday life.

I think search behavior will heavily continue to develop this way. AI will take over as the main driver for how we interact with information online. It’s not about replacing human intelligence, but rather about normalizing how we access and process information. This makes search smarter, faster, and more intuitive.