Search Marketing: What It Means Now That Search Happens in Four Places

Think about the last new customer who came to you. Before calling, they searched. The question that matters is where.

They may have asked ChatGPT who solves their problem. They may have opened Maps to see who is nearby. They may have watched a YouTube video to understand how the service works. And they may have typed your name into Google, just to check that you really exist.

Four searches, in four places, before a single phone call.

Now think about the last search marketing proposal that landed on your desk. If it followed the industry’s most common definition, it talked about one place only: Google’s results page. And about two things inside it, the paid ad and the organic result.

The definition stayed frozen on one screen. The customer kept moving.

This piece updates the definition, with a source on every line and each platform described in its own words. Where search happens today, how each place chooses who shows up, and what money can and cannot buy. At the end comes a twenty-minute test: one of your customers’ questions, asked in four places.

The definition you will find

In English, the term has a birth certificate. In November 2001, Danny Sullivan published a column in ClickZ with a proposal. The name he preferred for the trade was search engine marketing. ¹

His reasoning fit in a list. Optimizing for crawlers, managing paid listings, submitting to directories. All of that, he wrote, was marketing on search engines. ¹

Notice how wide the original idea was. The term was born broad, to cover the search venues that existed and the work done in each one.

Twenty-five years later, the definition in circulation has shrunk. In Brazil, where we are based, Shopify’s Portuguese-language blog calls search marketing the tactic that uses paid ads on search engines. ² English-language Wikipedia describes it as promoting websites in results pages, primarily through paid advertising. ³

We also read the pages that top Google in Brazil for the Portuguese term, “marketing de busca.” There, the definition swings between two versions. One says it means paid ads. The other adds ads and organic results together. A few already mention AI, under another name, GEO. ⁴

The results page for the term contradicts the very definition it lists. When we measured it on September 14, 2026, the screen opened with an AI-written summary. It also carried a carousel of YouTube videos and a block of related questions. ⁴ Anyone researching the concept already gets machine-written text and video on the same screen.

Where search happens today

Picture someone who just moved and needs an electrician. He asks the neighbor next door, who recommends whoever works in the area. He asks his brother-in-law, who recommends someone he has seen on the job. He asks the coworker who reads about everything, and she sums up what she knows. Three advisers, three criteria, three lists of names that barely overlap.

Search works like that today. Every place where someone asks and gets back a list, a map, a video, or a ready answer has its own rules. I call each of these places a search surface. These are the four covered here, each one described by its owner.

Google’s results page

This is the surface everyone knows, and it has changed. The list of blue links is still there, now surrounded by ads, AI summaries, maps, and answer boxes. The piece on what it means to be on the first page of Google describes each of those elements, with sources.

Before reaching that screen, a page goes through crawling, indexing, ranking, and presentation. The four stages are laid out in the piece on how to get your site on Google. It also shows how to find the stage where your site stopped.

One line from the documentation is worth keeping for the rest of this piece. Google writes that it does not accept payment to rank a site higher. ⁵

Maps

Google Business Profile Help spells out the scene. When a customer searches for a business or place near them, they find local results on Google Maps and in Search. ⁶

The same page says local results are based mainly on three things. Relevance, distance, and how well known the business is. ⁶ Look closely at distance. It depends on where the customer is at the moment of the search, and nothing you write changes that.

And the page closes a door that many proposals try to open. There is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google. ⁶ What you can influence on the map is the subject of the local SEO section.

YouTube

YouTube publishes how its own search works. The system prioritizes three elements: relevance, engagement, and quality. The weight of each one may vary with the type of search. ⁷

Relevance checks whether the title, tags, description, and video content match the query. Engagement looks at signals such as how long people watch a video for that query. Quality looks for signs that the channel shows expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness on the topic. ⁷

Two lines on that same page should change your planning. YouTube does not accept payment for better placement in organic search results. And it may consider a person’s search and watch history, which is why one screen differs from another. ⁷

Inside AI tools

Inside Google itself, AI Overviews and AI Mode follow the rules of search. To appear as a supporting link, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet. ⁸

Google writes that these features have no additional requirements and call for no special optimization. It adds that SEO best practices remain relevant for them. ⁸ If you already do search well, you are already working on this surface.

Outside Google, take ChatGPT as an example. In October 2024, OpenAI launched search inside it, with answers that link to their sources. ⁹ The company writes that any website can choose to appear there. It adds that this search relies on third-party search providers and on content supplied directly by partners. ⁹

The way in has a technical name. The crawler that feeds this search is called OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI’s documentation says sites that opt out of this crawler will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. ¹⁰

One line in your site’s robots.txt file decides that. The rest of the subject, including how to measure citations, is in the SEO for AI section.

People ask in more than one place

Two recent national surveys looked at this behavior. Both come from Brazil, one of the world’s largest internet markets, where I work. One of them comes from an interested party, and I will flag it before the number.

The Super Panorama, from Mobile Time with Opinion Box, surveyed 4,138 Brazilian smartphone owners between March 4 and 24, 2026. The margin of error is 1.5 points. ¹¹

Almost 40% use only search engines, such as Google and Bing. One in four uses search engines and AI about equally. Only 2.2% rely on chatbots alone to search. ¹² Among AI platforms, ChatGPT leads, at 79.7%. ¹²

State of Search Brasil 6, from Hedgehog Digital, ran 4,157 online interviews. Hedgehog is an SEO agency, so it has a stake in the subject it measures. ¹³

In its sample, 84% say they will stick with Google for everyday searches. And 82% say they intend to explore AI tools. ¹³ The same survey says searches happen mostly on phones, led by social networks, Google, company websites, and marketplaces. ¹³

The two snapshots show the same pattern, which is coexistence. My book SEO de Entidade, published in Portuguese, describes the path that comes out of it. A question about your service can start on Google, pass through the AI summary, and end in a conversation with ChatGPT. ¹⁴

Each place picks in its own way

Go back to the electrician’s three advisers. Being the neighbor’s pick does not put you on the brother-in-law’s list.

A study led by researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology measured this in search. They ran 11,500 queries and compared the sources of three systems. Traditional Google Search, the AI Overview that appears alongside it, and Gemini. ¹⁵

The source lists barely overlapped. Average overlap stayed below 0.2, on a scale where 1 is the same list and 0 is no source in common. ¹⁵

The kind of source also changed from one system to the next. Traditional search pulled more from popular or institutional sites, in government and education. The generative systems pulled more content owned by Google itself. ¹⁵

Two limits come with that number. The queries come from public datasets, all in English, so the result says nothing about other languages. And it is a single study, accepted at SIGIR 2026, an academic conference on information retrieval. ¹⁵

The surfaces also feed each other. Ahrefs, which sells an AI visibility tool, analyzed 4 million links cited in Google’s AI Overviews. ¹⁶

In the study, published in March 2026, YouTube videos made up 5.6% of all cited links. Among cited pages that did not rank in Google’s top 100 for the same search, 18.2% were from YouTube. ¹⁶ A video can be picked by AI without sitting among the top hundred results for that search.

I record the consequence as my own reading. Anyone who measures search marketing only by Google position is looking at one column out of four.

What money buys, and what it cannot

Ads are still part of the work, and they have left the results page too. Google Ads Help says a search ad can appear on Google Search, Google Images, and the Shopping tab. ¹⁷

The list goes on with Google Maps and the Maps app. On search partner sites, the ad can even show up in YouTube search results. ¹⁷

Around AI Overviews, an ad can appear above or below the summary in every market where the summary exists. Inside the summary, ads are for now available only in English, in twelve countries that include the United States. ¹⁸

Now the other half. Three surface owners write the same refusal, each on its own page. Google does not accept payment to rank a site higher. ⁵ On the map, there is no way to request or pay for a better position. ⁶ YouTube does not accept payment for better placement in organic search. ⁷

The ad buys a space labeled as sponsored. On those three surfaces, the organic pick is not for sale. Serious search work takes care of both halves, and tells the client which is which.

The definition that holds today

The book has a pocket version of this change. The game is still about showing up in front of whoever is searching. What changed is where that happens, and the yardstick for whether it happened. ¹⁴

Put the pieces together. The customer asks in several places. Each place has its own collection, its own criteria, and a part that can be bought. Being present in all of them, with the paid part and the earned part, is a single job.

This is called search marketing. The updated definition fits in one sentence: being found and chosen everywhere your customer asks. On Google, on Maps, on YouTube, and inside AI tools.

Found means getting into each place’s collection. An indexed page, a verified business profile, a published video, a search crawler allowed in. ^{5 6 10} Chosen means passing each place’s criteria, which the owner itself publishes. ^{6 7 8}

The question used to be what position you hold. Now it is in which places you get chosen.

One thread runs through all four columns, and here I declare that the extension is mine. The book shows that before citing anyone, AI needs to know who they are and what they are about. ¹⁴ In my reading, the same requirement holds for the other three surfaces.

That recognition is the subject of the semantic SEO section. It starts with understanding how Google records companies, people, and places.

The four-column test

Your first snapshot comes today, from your phone, in twenty minutes. Get a sheet of paper and a pen.

1. Write down the question you hear most often, worded the way a customer would type it in a text message.
2. Draw four columns on the sheet: Google, Maps, YouTube, and AI.
3. Ask the question on Google, from the city where you serve customers. Note whether you appear, and in which part of the screen.
4. Open Maps and search for the service, without your company’s name. Note whether you appear among the first results.
5. Run the same search on YouTube. Note the channels behind the top videos, and check whether any of them is yours.
6. Ask ChatGPT the question and tell it to search the web. Note the sources it cites, and check whether your site is among them.

Now read the sheet. A blank column means that there, you were either not found or not chosen.

If the ChatGPT column came up empty, ask whoever runs your site to check the robots.txt file. It needs to allow OAI-SearchBot. ¹⁰ If the Maps column came up empty, start with your business profile, complete and verified. ⁶

A note on method, which the book applies to itself. One question asked in four places gives you a snapshot, and only a snapshot. ¹⁴ The screen also changes with the location, device, and history of the person searching. ^{5 7}

The question you hand back

From today on, when someone offers you search marketing, you have two questions to hand back. On which surfaces does the work happen? And on each one, what is paid and what is earned?

Anyone who answers by talking only about Google’s results page is delivering one column out of four. The other three are still there, with your customers asking questions on them.

Grab the sheet now and draw the four columns. Ask the first question before the day ends, and keep the sheet with the date on it.