Asked AI to recommend appliances for newlyweds, and only rival products came up... Executives’ meeting thrown into turmoil

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An unexpected commotion broke out at an executive meeting of a domestic home appliance company. During the meeting, the company president asked artificial intelligence (AI) to “recommend home appliances suitable for newlyweds,” but products from rival companies appeared one after another. The company’s own products did not even make the recommendation list. The mood in the meeting room reportedly turned cold in an instant.

According to sources in the home appliance industry and elsewhere on the 16th, as more consumers turn to generative AI such as ChatGPT for product recommendations instead of using portal searches like Naver, changes to companies’ marketing strategies have become inevitable. Whereas it was once important to have a company’s products appear at the top of portal search results, whether they make it onto AI recommendation lists is now emerging as a new competitive factor.

The shift in the search market is also borne out by statistics. According to OPENSURVEY INCORPORATED’s “AI Search Trends Report 2026,” the rate of ChatGPT search use among South Korean consumers in their teens to 50s rose from 39.6% in March last year to 54.5% in December. Over the same period, usage of Google Gemini also surged, from 9.5% to 28.9%. By contrast, Naver’s rate fell from 85.3% to 81.6%.

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AI recommendations are also influencing actual purchases. A survey published last August by Prain Global and the Korean Public Relations Association found that 49.9% of 1,000 generative AI users said they had purchased a product or service recommended by AI within the past three months. However, portal search remained the channel consumers turned to first when shopping for products (54.2%), while the figure for generative AI was 14.0%.

Companies are facing growing concerns, too. When a consumer asks, “Recommend appliances for newlyweds,” AI introduces products after weighing factors such as price, performance and user reviews. Increasing search advertising spending as before does not necessarily get a product onto recommendation lists. That is why providing AI with accurate product information and reliable reviews it can consult has become important.

As a result, “generative AI search optimization (GEO),” which aims to get a company’s products to appear in AI responses, is emerging as a new challenge for corporate marketing, going beyond search engine optimization (SEO).

An insider in the home appliance industry said, “In the past, what mattered was how high up our products appeared in portal search results; now the key is whether AI recommends our products,” adding, “As demand grows for companies to analyze AI search results and increase the visibility of their products, firms that specialize in providing this support are also emerging.”

This article has been translated by GripLabs Mingo AI.