WHO DECIDES IF YOU’LL REACH THE CONSUMER? AI IS BECOMING THE NEW MARKET GATEKEEPER

Last March I wrote that the market was changing its rules. Gradually, being on Google wouldn’t be enough anymore. Having a well-ranked site or showing up in top search results wouldn’t cut it. The core of that reflection was simple: a new player was stepping in between those who search and those who offer. That player is artificial intelligence.

A few months later, that reasoning deserves another look. The phenomenon is taking clearer shape. AI isn’t just adding a new way to search for information. It’s starting to perform a function we’ve long attributed to other market players: intermediation.

For many years, the Internet did exactly the opposite. It shortened distances. It eliminated middlemen. It let consumers reach companies, products, professionals, and information directly. You opened Google. You typed a few words. You browsed the results. Through successive comparisons, you formed your own opinion.

Today, this path is changing. We can now make much more complex requests and get pre-organized answers. We don’t necessarily need to search for ten hotels and compare them one by one. We can explain what kind of trip we want. What atmosphere we’re looking for. What budget we have. What services we consider essential. We don’t need to identify fifty professionals through fifty different websites. We can describe exactly the problem we need to solve and ask which ones are the best fit.

This is where the most interesting change happens: part of the selection is made before the consumer even enters the market.

AI gathers information. It compares sources. It interprets the query and narrows the field of possibilities. The final decision naturally stays with the person. But the territory within which that decision is made may already be defined. This difference, seemingly subtle, profoundly changes how we must think about competition.

For years, companies and professionals fought to gain visibility. The problem was showing up. Being found. Ranking high enough for someone to click and dig deeper. Now it’s becoming equally important to understand whether you can make it into the selection that precedes that moment.

We could call it a shortlist. That’s a term we know well in the professional world. Before the final choice, there’s a set of options considered plausible, interesting, or relevant. The real news is that this set may increasingly be built with the assistance of AI systems.

This means a company might not lose a customer because its product was judged inferior to a competitor’s. It might lose because it never reached that customer in the first place. These are two completely different situations. In the first case, you compete and lose. In the second, you never even enter the evaluation.

This is precisely where AI takes on the role of new intermediary. Not because it buys on our behalf or definitively decides what we should choose. But because it can influence what we’ll see, what we’ll compare, and even the names we’ll initially consider.

Intermediaries, of course, have always existed. A newspaper selected what it deemed worth reporting. A buyer decided which products to stock in a store. A distributor chose which brands to represent. A consultant proposed some solutions to clients while excluding others. Every intermediary built, through their own expertise and criteria, an initial interpretation of the market.

The difference is that today this role can be performed, at least in part, by systems capable of processing an enormous amount of information and tailoring the response to each individual user’s specific query.

And it’s precisely the quality of the query that represents another element of change. With traditional search engines, we were used to condensing our needs into a few words: “hotel Florence downtown,” “Italian handmade shoes,” “fashion PR agency.” With AI, we can describe the context. Add conditions. Specify tastes and goals. Correct the request and deepen it through dialogue.

The more detailed the query becomes, the more selective the response can be.

We’re not just witnessing the evolution of Google or the birth of new digital tools. We’re observing a broader change in the relationship between supply and demand. A technology we initially used mainly to produce texts, images, or analyses is becoming a tool through which we steer our decisions.

Naturally, this raises a huge question: what criteria will these systems use to determine what’s relevant? From which sources will they draw information? How will they distinguish an authoritative entity from one that’s simply very present online? How much will what a company says about itself matter versus what the rest of the web says about that company?

These are questions we’ll probably keep asking ourselves for a long time. Technologies, models, and search methods are evolving at extraordinary speed. But one thing is already clear enough: the problem is no longer just about being found.

You need to make it into the process through which alternatives are built.

This doesn’t make your website, your communication, your reputation, or years of positioning work useless. On the contrary, everything that helps a company or professional be correctly recognized within their market becomes even more important. But that’s a story I’ve already covered in other articles. It’s not the point I want to develop here.

The point today is different.

For a long time, we asked ourselves how to reach the consumer. We studied advertising, distribution, search engines, social networks, and digital platforms precisely to shorten that distance.

Now we need to start observing the opposite path as well. We need to ask ourselves: through which tools will the consumer reach us?

Because between supply and demand, a new layer of intermediation is forming. It doesn’t necessarily replace the previous ones. It probably won’t do so in every sector. But it’s already significant enough to change how millions of people search for information, compare options, and build their decisions.

The final choice will continue to belong to people. But before the choice, there will always be a selection.

And it’s precisely on that selection that an increasingly important part of the market will be won or lost.