ChatGPT is doing to Search, what Search did to Physical Stores
What the rise of conversational interfaces means for discovery, websites and brand presence.
Co-Founder & Chief Business Officer, Noodle Seed
Imagine being one of the first users of the internet when graphical browsers arrived in the 1990s. Your primary use case would have been email and information discovery. For most people then, the internet was an occasional dial-up utility.
The always-on internet wasn't even comprehensible, and the prevailing imagination couldn't see beyond internet as a source of 'good help'.
They were so wrong. Today, the internet touches every aspect of our lives.
TL;DR
- •The conversational interface (ChatGPT, Gemini) is reshaping how people discover and decide
- •Three eras of presence: Physical → Digital/Search → Conversational
- •Businesses must be "conversationally present" to be discovered in the AI era
- •Two actions: Create a ChatGPT App + Make your website conversational
Ever wondered why this happened? Was it because all the computers became connected? Or was there a deeper shift in how we used the internet?
In my view, the real turning point wasn't just connectivity—it was the rise of the search interface.
Search organized the world's information and made it instantly discoverable. It turned the internet from a passive information pool into an active decision engine in our daily lives. The search interface rewired how we research, shop, learn and consume social media.
Now draw a parallel to the conversational interface that ChatGPT has introduced. It is used by 800 million people every week as a 'personal assistant'. Add Gemini and other LLMs and the number could easily cross a Billion users.
Beyond usage, this is a shift of interface from search-click-browse to prompt-and-response. It is a fundamental evolution of our relationship with the internet.
The Pattern We Keep Repeating
There have been three interface shifts in recent history—physical to digital and now to conversational. Every interface shift redefined how customers discover brands and how businesses must show up.
How Discovery Evolved:
- •Physical spaces trained people to browse with their feet
- •Search engines trained people to think in keywords
- •Conversational systems are training people to express intent in natural language
Do you notice how 'being present to be discovered' has evolved through each shift?
The Presence Evolution:
- •1980s / 90s / 00s → Be physically present to be discovered
- •2000s / 10s / 20s → Be digitally present to be discovered
- •2020s & beyond → Be 'conversationally' present to be discovered
Physical Presence: 'Be on the shelf, or you don't exist'
Until the 2000s, discovery was constrained by geography. Customers found businesses because they walked past them, heard about them locally, or saw nearby ads.
Location was the strategy. Presence was literal: a storefront, a sign, a distribution footprint. Marketing amplified awareness but existence itself was physical.
A great product without physical presence struggled to scale.
Search Presence: 'Have a website, or you don't exist'
The 2010s rewired this logic. Search engines broke the link between physical presence and discovery. Customers no longer needed to walk past a business, they just needed to search for it.
Websites became the new storefronts. Search rankings became the new high streets.
Users learned to compress complex intent into short keyword phrases, click links, and synthesize information themselves. Businesses learned to build websites with search bars and content optimized for crawlers.
Search has been powerful but has a built-in limitation: it guides where information is, not what to do next.
The Conversation Era: The Interface that Talks Back
Conversational AI, popularized by ChatGPT, fundamentally changes the search interface.
Users are learning to prompt. AI assembles responses. A new interface is emerging. Instead of Search–Click–Browse–Repeat, the pattern is becoming Prompt–Response–Repeat.
Instead of typing keywords, users express full intent. Instead of browsing, more decisions happen inside the interaction.
When someone asks, "What's the best option for me right now?", they don't want ten blue links. They're delegating synthesis, judgment, and prioritization to the system.
This is the defining shift: the interface has moved from navigation to contextual reasoning.
The New Competition:
- •In search, businesses compete for traffic
- •In conversation, they compete for citations and mentions
And to be part of the conversation, businesses must become conversational.
When Websites Become Conversational
Many businesses are misreading the moment. Conversational presence is not "add a chatbot to the website." That's a surface-level reaction to a much deeper shift.
Conversational presence means product knowledge is structured, clear, and authoritative. Brand positioning is legible to AI systems. Business understands the context of how customers find and choose them, and have accurately assembled the responses.
One may react: "We already have FAQs on our website".
If you're stuck in static, one-directional interfaces, you're in the camp of those who once thought the internet would only be an occasional source of "good help."
The conversation era demands a brand's digital footprint starts to talk. Not through rigid, tree-based flows like most chat widgets, but through a genuinely conversational interface.
The new unit of presence has moved from a page to a response. Businesses must respond to this shift by transforming old digital interfaces into conversational ones.
This requires two actions.
1. Be Present as a 'ChatGPT App'
Conversation rewards clarity and punishes ambiguity. It requires clear, consistent product and brand knowledge. It demands fewer abstract slogans and more concrete answers that can survive paraphrasing and synthesis.
A ChatGPT App provides the medium to establish this authority. It becomes a structured repository that AI can actually understand. It doesn't need to be pretty or user-friendly in the traditional sense.
ChatGPT Apps are built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which guides AI in the conversation era much like HTTP guided internet browsing in the search era.
Noodle Seed creates a ChatGPT App from your brand website in minutes.
2. Convert Website to be Conversational
Most websites are still designed for an interface users are leaving behind. They have navigation menus, search bars, and a collection of pages users must explore to find what they need. This mirrors the logic of the search era: navigate first, decide later.
Websites need to evolve by replacing the search bar with a conversation box. This is more than a UI tweak.
It's a philosophical shift from "What page are you looking for?" in the search era, to "What are you trying to accomplish?" in the conversation era.
Halo by Noodle Seed answers this need. It is the 'ChatGPT App interface' for your website, capturing user queries that are abandoning search behavior.
By making your website conversational:
- •You align your owned experience with emerging user behavior
- •You reduce friction between curiosity and clarity
- •You future-proof your presence as interfaces continue to shift
Closing Thought
History is instructive.
- •Businesses that delayed physical presence lost local relevance
- •Businesses that delayed digital presence lost discoverability
- •Businesses that delay conversational presence won't vanish overnight, but they will increasingly be absent where decisions are forming
This shift isn't about replacing websites or search. They will remain. But they are no longer the final interface.
Conversations will become the decision layer of the internet. It will redefine what it means to exist online.
The key question for businesses is no longer: "Do customers discover us when they search?"
It is: "Do customers discover us when they are having conversations with AI?"
And having a ChatGPT App, both inside LLM platforms and on their own website, will be how they'll answer with clarity.
Prepare for a Future that is Conversational.
Co-Founder & Chief Business Officer, Noodle Seed