Search Fatigue and the New Curiosity Economy

The $20,000 Wake-Up Call: Building for Yesterday's Behaviors

About a year ago, I started noticing the signals. Now the data confirms what many of us sensed but couldn’t yet prove: the way humans seek and discover information is undergoing its most significant shift in over two decades. For the first time since the early 2000s, Google’s global searches are on the decline; Safari and other browsers are looking to GPT platforms to power users’ searches instead of the incumbent. The headlines only tell part of the story though, the deeper shift is happening at a human behavioral level.

The moment it crystallized for me came on a drive through Napa Valley. A friend suggested we Google the best wineries to visit, and I demonstrated for her the GPT experience with Perplexity. Within seconds, we had a curated list of recommendations with recent reviews and context, no ads or useless websites that had mastered the SEO term. Side by side, the difference was stark. The endless scroll of Google’s sponsored results suddenly felt dated. What we needed was real information, not algorithmic noise – and it was Perplexity that delivered.

At radical, we often talk about Hemingway’s Law of Motion; how things happen gradually, then suddenly. That’s exactly what is playing out with the architecture of discovery itself. The gradual part has been years of search fatigue, the subtle drift of younger generations to TikTok, Reddit, and YouTube, combined with the creeping rise of conversational AI assistants. Then, suddenly, it feels like the center has shifted. One in three now treat ChatGPT as their primary search assistant, and for Gen Z, TikTok already outranks Google. These are not fringe behaviors anymore, they are mainstream patterns that collapse old assumptions about how customers find businesses.

I was reminded of this at an MIT entrepreneurship event I joined Pascal at. At the luncheon, a founder was describing her new website and proudly talking about her launch strategy. When we asked how her target audience would discover her, she leaned heavily on Google. As the conversation turned to the decline of traditional search and the rise of AI agents as the buyer, her expression shifted from curiosity to alarm. She had just spent $20,000 building an online store around dated behaviors. When she heard the possibility that AI agents, not humans, may soon become the buyers, she realized her checkout flow was designed for the wrong user altogether. That is the “suddenly” moment Hemingway described - the realization that change is no longer theoretical, it’s already here.

For leaders, the implications are both urgent and liberating. The old playbook of SEO and Google Ads is becoming insufficient, not because search is dead, but because discovery is distributed. People are exploring, evaluating, and deciding within platforms that feel human, contextual, and trusted. Customers, and increasingly their AI proxies, are moving fluidly from awareness to decision without touching the carefully optimized landing pages.

Here’s my contrarian take: this isn’t disruption, it’s correction. For twenty years, we’ve accepted a fundamentally broken paradigm where ‘search’ meant parsing through algorithmic noise to find intelligence. Google succeeded not because it solved search, but because it temporarily organized chaos better than anyone else did. So what we are witnessing, is search finally becoming what it was always supposed to be: a conversation with intelligence rather than a query to a database.

The leaders who navigate this transition successfully won’t be those who just change up their marketing strategy (although that’s needed too!), it will be those who fundamentally rewire how they think about customer discovery and connection.

It means abandoning the idea of neat funnels, and instead, recognizing that businesses now live inside chaordic ecosystems of conversation that can be influenced but never owned. This requires a mindset shift from thinking of your brand as a destination, to seeing it as a voice. One that is helpful first, promotional later. In a world where AI agents are making choices and discovery is fluid, the advantage goes to those who adapt quickly, not those who perfect slowly.

In this new curiosity economy, your role isn’t to intercept people searching for solutions, it’s to genuinely contribute to the intelligence layer that serves human inquiry – or the agents operating for them. The lesson of Hemingway’s Law is clear: disruption always feels gradual until the day it is suddenly undeniable. By the time GPTs are recommending your competition, it’s already too late.

@Kacee