Firon Marketing is a GEO and AI visibility consultancy. This article is written for marketing leaders at DTC brands, Shopify Plus operators, and services businesses who need to ground their AI visibility investment in usage data, not speculation. Knowing which AI assistants your specific target audience uses for brand and product discovery is the most important variable in determining where to concentrate your GEO budget and effort in 2025.
The AI assistant landscape is growing faster than comparable technology adoption curves. What makes it strategically complex is that usage patterns are not uniform across demographics, categories, or purchase contexts. The AI assistant that your 28-year-old DTC customer uses to discover new skincare brands is not the same platform that your 45-year-old B2B buyer uses to shortlist software vendors. Treating AI assistant adoption as a monolithic trend produces misallocated investment.
This article synthesizes available usage research, behavioral data, and platform-specific signals to give you the most accurate picture currently available of how consumers and professionals are using AI assistants for brand and product discovery -- and what that means for your GEO program.
The scale of AI assistant usage for brand and product discovery is large enough to warrant strategic attention but not yet large enough to displace traditional search as a primary acquisition channel for most brands. The nuance matters because it determines the investment sequencing.
OpenAI reported in late 2024 that ChatGPT has over 300 million weekly active users globally. Google has stated that AI Overviews appear on more than one billion searches per week. Perplexity reported over 100 million monthly active users as of Q4 2024 (Perplexity investor materials). These are not niche audiences -- they represent a material and fast-growing share of the population your brand needs to be visible to.
SparkToro's 2024 research on zero-click search behavior found that AI-generated answers were responsible for a growing share of zero-click search sessions, meaning users who received an answer from an AI-powered surface and did not click through to any website. For brands whose customer acquisition depends heavily on organic click-through traffic, this zero-click behavior represents a direct revenue risk that GEO investment is designed to address.
The growth rate is arguably more important than the current absolute numbers. Google Trends data for queries related to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI search show consistent month-over-month growth through 2024. Adoption curves for AI assistants are tracking ahead of mobile search adoption curves from 2010 to 2013 -- a period after which brands that had not optimized for mobile paid a significant and durable competitive penalty.
ChatGPT is the highest-awareness and highest-volume AI assistant for consumer use cases globally. Among younger demographics (18 to 34 year olds), ChatGPT is the AI tool with the highest reported usage for research, product discovery, and purchase decision support, according to Morning Consult data from 2024. For DTC brands whose customer base skews toward this demographic, ChatGPT is the primary AI visibility priority.
The distinction between ChatGPT's base model and ChatGPT Search is critically important for understanding its role in brand discovery. A user asking ChatGPT 'what is a good brand for X?' without web search enabled is receiving an answer based entirely on training data -- which has a knowledge cutoff and may not accurately reflect a brand's current positioning, products, or reputation. A user with ChatGPT Search enabled receives an answer synthesized from current web content.
The implication is that ChatGPT brand discovery has two distinct dimensions: being known in the base model (a long-cycle investment) and appearing in ChatGPT Search results (a shorter-cycle, content-and-indexing problem). For brands new to GEO, prioritizing ChatGPT Search visibility -- by ensuring current, high-quality content is indexed by Bing, which powers ChatGPT Search -- delivers faster measurable returns than focusing on base model training influence.
Perplexity has developed a usage profile that is distinct from ChatGPT and highly valuable for specific brand categories. Its user base skews toward professionals, researchers, and high-income knowledge workers who use it as a research and analysis tool rather than a general-purpose assistant. For B2B brands, premium DTC products, financial services, and any category where the buyer is educated and research-oriented, Perplexity's audience quality is exceptional.
Perplexity's citation-first design -- every answer includes linked sources -- creates a discovery behavior that is closer to traditional research than to AI conversation. Users who receive a brand recommendation in Perplexity are likely to click the citation link and visit the brand's site directly. This makes Perplexity one of the few AI surfaces that generates measurable, attributable referral traffic to cited brands, which is a significant advantage for GEO measurement and attribution.
Perplexity usage for vendor shortlisting in B2B contexts is growing rapidly. Multiple independent reports from marketing and technology communities indicate that buyers are using Perplexity to generate initial vendor lists before engaging with sales teams. For any brand selling a considered service or B2B product, not appearing in Perplexity responses to vendor-selection queries represents a direct pipeline risk.
Google AI Overviews reach the largest and most demographically diverse audience of any AI discovery surface, because they appear inside the Google Search experience that billions of users already rely on. The key characteristic of AI Overview-driven discovery is that it is passive: users are not choosing to use an AI assistant -- they are using Google and encountering AI-generated answers as part of the standard results page.
This passive exposure model means that Google AI Overviews drive discovery among the full range of your potential customer base, not just the subset that has adopted AI assistants intentionally. An AI Overview appearance for a relevant research query reaches the 65-year-old who would never use ChatGPT as well as the 25-year-old who uses it daily. For mass-market DTC brands, this broad reach makes AI Overview visibility arguably the highest-priority single AI surface to optimize for.
Gemini as a standalone product (separate from AI Overviews) has a smaller but growing user base with a professional orientation. Gemini's deep integration with Google Workspace -- Docs, Gmail, Meet, Drive -- is driving adoption among corporate knowledge workers in a way that makes it relevant for B2B brand discovery in enterprise-adjacent categories.
Microsoft Copilot is the most underrated AI discovery surface in most brand's GEO strategies. Because it lacks the consumer awareness of ChatGPT or the media coverage of Perplexity, it rarely appears in GEO investment discussions. But Copilot is embedded in every Microsoft 365 subscription, which means it has a baseline distribution of hundreds of millions of enterprise knowledge workers globally.
For B2B brands, the significance of this distribution is difficult to overstate. A professional using Microsoft Word or Outlook asking Copilot to help them research vendors, summarize options, or draft a comparison of available services is conducting exactly the type of high-intent brand discovery that GEO is designed to capture. Copilot's Bing-powered web retrieval means that Bing indexing quality and Bing-specific SEO are direct variables for Copilot brand visibility.
The GEO investment implication for B2B brands is clear: treat Bing SEO as a first-class priority alongside Google SEO. Brands that have neglected Bing -- which a significant share of the SEO industry has done historically -- are creating a Copilot visibility gap that their competitors may not yet be aware of.
Meta AI's distribution is categorically different from standalone AI platforms. It is not a destination that users choose to visit -- it is embedded in the interfaces where users already spend time: WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger. For consumer brands with social-media-active target audiences, Meta AI represents a discovery surface inside the attention environment where consideration and inspiration already happen.
The behavioral model for Meta AI discovery is closer to social inspiration than to research-driven search. A user who asks Meta AI on Instagram for a product recommendation in a category they are already engaging with on the platform is expressing high-intent discovery behavior in a low-friction context. For DTC brands with visually strong products, strong social presence, or an audience that skews toward Meta platforms, Meta AI visibility is growing in strategic importance.
Apple Intelligence, Amazon Rufus, and voice-based AI (including Alexa+ and Siri) represent additional embedded discovery surfaces with distinct behavioral profiles. Voice-based AI discovery is particularly important for local services, where queries like 'find a [service] near me' are increasingly handled by AI-powered voice responses rather than traditional map listings.
The usage data above supports a tiered prioritization model. For consumer DTC brands with a 25-to-40-year-old customer base: ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews are tier-one priorities, followed by Meta AI and Perplexity. For premium DTC brands targeting high-income professional buyers: Perplexity and Claude are elevated in priority relative to Meta AI. For B2B brands and professional services: Copilot, Perplexity, and Gemini constitute the tier-one investment set.
The universal foundation that supports visibility across all of these surfaces is the same: entity clarity, technical crawlability, structured data quality, and a content profile that demonstrates genuine category expertise. This is why Firon's GEO programs are structured around the Four Engines rather than platform-specific tactics -- the foundation compounds across all discovery surfaces simultaneously.
What changes between audience segments is the sequencing of platform-specific investments after the foundation is established. A DTC skincare brand and a B2B SaaS company may both need the same Code Surgery and Scale Engine work, but the Gasoline Engine -- distribution and amplification -- should target different publications, platforms, and citation surfaces depending on where each brand's specific audience conducts its AI-assisted research.
For more on the technical architecture behind how these platforms retrieve and cite sources, see How LLMs Retrieve and Cite Sources (Base Model vs Web Retrieval). For the specific optimization approach for Google AI Overviews, see AI Overviews, SGE, and AIO: What Every Marketer Needs to Know.
ChatGPT has the highest consumer awareness and user volume globally for general AI assistance, including product discovery. However, 'most used' varies significantly by demographic and purchase category. Among research-oriented professionals and B2B buyers, Perplexity is growing rapidly and may deliver higher-quality discovery than ChatGPT for considered purchases. For searches conducted inside Google -- which still represents the majority of web search globally -- AI Overviews reach the broadest and most demographically diverse discovery audience of any AI surface.
Yes, and the differences are material for brand strategy. Younger consumers (18 to 34) show higher ChatGPT and TikTok AI tool adoption for product discovery. Older professional demographics show higher Copilot and Gemini adoption due to enterprise technology distribution. High-income professionals across age groups show strong Perplexity adoption. Understanding the demographic profile of your specific buyer -- not the overall AI market -- is the correct starting point for AI assistant prioritization. Firon's GEO audit process maps brand audience profiles to AI platform usage data as a standard diagnostic step.
Attribution for AI assistant-driven traffic is currently partial and improving. Perplexity citations generate direct referral traffic that is attributable in standard analytics platforms. ChatGPT Search referrals appear in analytics with a ChatGPT referral source. AI Overviews do not consistently generate attributable referral clicks, making their traffic contribution harder to isolate. Firon uses a combination of referral traffic monitoring, UTM-tagged content, and direct API-layer querying to build a more complete AI visibility attribution picture than standard analytics tools currently provide.
For most brands, the correct answer is both simultaneously, because the foundations overlap significantly. Strong technical SEO, high-quality content, and structured data implementation all contribute to both traditional search rankings and AI assistant visibility. The GEO-specific investments that go beyond traditional SEO -- entity clarity, FAQ schema, direct-answer content structure, and citation profile building across AI-relevant publications -- are additive to an existing SEO program. Brands that treat GEO as a separate program from SEO miss the compounding returns that come from building a single integrated authority architecture.
AI assistant usage for discovery is growing faster than any comparable technology adoption curve in recent years, tracking ahead of mobile search adoption from 2010 to 2013. Whether and when it will become the dominant discovery channel depends on how quickly AI assistants demonstrate consistently useful recommendations and how search engine interfaces continue to evolve. Firon's position is that brands should begin building AI visibility infrastructure now -- not because AI search will dominate tomorrow, but because authority builds slowly and the brands that start in 2025 will have a compounding advantage over those that start in 2026 or 2027.
Book your GEO visibility audit at fironmarketing.com/audit.
Firon Marketing is a strategic consultancy. All technical implementations should be reviewed by your engineering team to ensure compatibility with your specific tech stack.
