How AI has changed customer journeys (and why most brands can't see it)

Traditional analytics can't show you most of the customer journey

Customer journeys are being reshaped in ways most brands are struggling to measure—let alone understand.

Across industries, customers are increasingly turning to AI-powered tools to research, compare, and decide. They’re asking questions, narrowing options, and forming preferences before they ever reach a brand’s website.

Yet for many teams, this growing portion of the journey remains invisible.

Traditional analytics still tell a familiar story: traffic sources, sessions, conversions. But they miss the broader reality of how decisions are actually made today—across markets, competitors, platforms, and emerging AI-driven channels.

In this article, we’ll explore how AI is changing customer journeys at a market level and why most organizations can’t see what’s happening. We’ll use travel and hospitality as a real-world example these trends that appear across industries, and demonstrate how journey intelligence reveals the signals that traditional analytics miss in a short video.

The quiet shift in how customers discover brands

AI has moved from novelty to utility. Customers use tools like ChatGPT to:

• Get recommendations

• Compare options

• Understand trade-offs

• Make faster, more confident decisions

This isn’t limited to one sector. It’s happening from financial services to retail and ecommerce, SaaS and B2B platforms, travel and hospitality, and more.

What’s changed isn’t just where discovery happens—but when decisions are made. Increasingly, by the time a customer arrives at a brand’s site, the most important parts of the journey are already over.

GEO is the key to brand discovery with AI tools

As AI-driven discovery becomes mainstream, a new challenge is emerging for brands: visibility inside generative systems themselves. This shift is often described as generative engine optimization (GEO)—not as a replacement for SEO, but as a response to how generative tools influence what customers see, consider, and trust.

When customers ask AI tools for recommendations, comparisons, or guidance, the answers they receive are shaped by signals that extend far beyond keywords or rankings. Understanding how and where your brand appears in those answers now depends on seeing the full market context that feeds them.

Why most customer journeys are still invisible

Despite this shift, most measurement frameworks haven’t evolved. Traditional analytics tools are built around a simple assumption: the journey starts when a customer interacts with your brand.

But modern journeys don’t begin on your site—and they don’t stay there. Before arriving, customers may:

• Explore multiple competitors

• Consult AI tools or third-party platforms

• Read reviews, forums, or comparison content

• Eliminate options entirely

After leaving, they may continue evaluating elsewhere. None of this shows up clearly in web analytics, attribution models, campaign reports, or CRM funnels.

As a result, brands optimize based on partial visibility, often mistaking correlation for causation and missing the real drivers of behavior.

A market-level view reveals a different reality

To understand what’s really happening, you need to zoom out—from brand-level activity to market-level journeys.

This is where Journey Insight fundamentally changes the picture. Instead of analyzing only what happens on your owned channels, Alterian's journey intelligence platform reveals:

• How customers move across an entire market

• Which brands influence decisions at each stage

• How discovery, evaluation, and conversion actually unfold

• Where customers go before and after interacting with you

This broader lens is essential for understanding AI-driven behavior—because those interactions rarely happen within a single domain.

What AI-driven traffic looks like

To illustrate this shift, let’s look at what happens in travel and hospitality—an industry where AI-driven discovery is already clearly visible.

When customers arrive at travel brands from AI-powered sources like ChatGPT, their behavior looks very different from traditional traffic.

AI referrals are more engaged, less exploratory

Journey-level analysis of US Travel & Leisure - OTA and Major Hotel Brands shows that AI-referred visitors are more likely to stay engaged, visit fewer pages, and move faster toward decisions. They aren’t browsing casually; they arrive with intent.

This pattern reflects a broader trend across markets: AI compresses the journey. Research and comparison happen earlier and elsewhere, leaving brand touchpoints to handle confirmation and action.

Marketplaces gain an early advantage

When customers ask AI tools for recommendations, those tools tend to favor brands and platforms that appear consistently across the broader journey: research, comparison, booking, and support. Here, we see that marketplaces like Airbnb, Expedia, and Booking.com tend to benefit more than direct brands.

This isn’t unique to travel. In many industries, AI favors aggregators, platforms with broad coverage, and brands that represent multiple options or outcomes.

The takeaway isn’t that direct brands are losing, but that competitive dynamics are shifting earlier in the journey, often before brands realize it. For direct brands, this highlights a core GEO challenge: appearing in GenAI results isn’t just about publishing better content, but about being present and influential throughout the market journeys those systems observe.

Why onsite metrics can be misleading

AI-driven traffic might look "worse" viewed through the lens of traditional analytics—fewer pages viewed, shorter sessions, faster exits—while actually reflecting more decisive behavior.

Without market-level context, teams risk:

• Misinterpreting high-intent journeys as low engagement

• Over-optimizing for exploration instead of decision support

• Missing early indicators of channel and behavior change

Optimizing purely for onsite engagement can unintentionally work against GEO, encouraging exploration when customers are looking for confirmation. Without understanding how AI shapes pre-site decision-making, teams risk optimizing for the wrong signals entirely.

From data to insight: Connecting the dots faster

Seeing these patterns at scale requires more than dashboards. In Journey Insight, Insight Copilot enables teams to explore market-wide journeys using natural language.

Instead of manually stitching together reports, users can:

• Ask how AI-driven visitors behave compared to other channels

• Compare brand performance across the full market

• Identify emerging shifts before they impact KPIs

• Explore “why” questions (not just “what happened”)

This accelerates understanding and makes journey intelligence accessible across roles—from digital marketers, to CX strategists, to customer success teams.

Customer behavior has changed across all industries

Travel & leisure is just one market, but the same dynamics are emerging wherever options are abundant and customers seek confidence before committing to a purchase decision. AI-driven discovery changes how trust is built, where influence happens, and which brands are considered at all.

Organizations that rely only on first-party data will always be reacting—because they’re only seeing the end of the story.

Brands that understand market-wide journeys can:

• Detect change earlier

• Learn from competitors faster

• Allocate investment more confidently

• Adapt strategy before disruption becomes obvious

Market-level visibility has become essential

AI isn’t just another channel—it’s a structural shift in how journeys form. You can’t optimize what you can’t see, and today, most of the journey happens outside your walls.

Ultimately, generative engine optimization is not a content problem or a channel problem—it’s a visibility problem. GenAI systems are shaped by how customers move across markets, not just how they interact with individual brands.

Without understanding those market-wide journeys, efforts to adapt marketing and customer experience are based on assumptions rather than evidence. Seeing beyond your brand is what allows GEO to move from guesswork to strategy.

Journey Insight reveals the signals, shifts, and opportunities hidden across the full market so you can act with confidence and prioritize the most impactful initiatives for your brand.