There is a behaviour shift compounding across Southeast Asia that some marketing teams have not yet built a response to. Consumers are opening ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude, typing in what they need, and receiving a curated answer that names brands and ranks options before a single website is visited.
The search engine held that role for two decades. Today, it is no longer the only door to commerce.
The numbers put the pace of change into perspective. Per Adobe data, traffic to US retail sites from generative AI sources surged 4,700 percent year-on-year as of mid-2025. That growth curve is hitting SEA at a particular moment. Consumers across Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore have already been conditioned by Shopee’s algorithm, TikTok Shop’s feed, and Lazada’s personalised listings to expect recommendations as a default. AI assistants are extending that behaviour beyond the platform walls.
The shortlist forms before your site is ever visited
What makes this commercially significant is not the traffic channel itself. It is that brand consideration now gets settled upstream. By the time a consumer clicks through, an AI has already decided whether your brand belongs in the conversation. If it did not make the cut, everything spent further down the funnel is working against a shrinking window.
Getting recommended by AI plays by different rules than search rankings ever did. Large language models favour content with genuine credibility — think editorial reviews, creator recommendations, and affiliate content from publishers audiences already trust.
This is reshaping how partnership investment is being allocated: a recent report from impact.com shows that content and review partners are projected to see a net growth of 11 percentage points in brand collaborations over the next year, one of the fastest-growing partner types tracked. Most brands driving that shift have not yet connected it to AI visibility. Yet, the mechanism is already working for them.
The generational math accelerates the urgency
In SEA, the creator commerce ecosystem is one of the most active in the world and it happens to be exactly the infrastructure AI recommendations draw from. Influencer marketing now drives up to $46 billion in annual ecommerce sales across the region, with 83 percent of SEA consumers having already made a purchase through an affiliate link. In Thailand alone, nine of the top ten TikTok creators by revenue are now Key Opinion Sellers — conversion-first creators who blur the line between content and commerce. Brands with deep relationships across this ecosystem are sitting on an asset that just became considerably more valuable.
By the time a consumer clicks through, an AI has already decided whether your brand belongs in the conversation. If it did not make the cut, everything spent further down the funnel is working against a shrinking window.
The urgency is real when you look at who is actually buying. Across Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, consumers aged 35 and under dominate digital commerce. Brands that are not leveraging creator commerce risk losing their audience to competitors, as they become less visible in AI-driven discovery — and that is a hard deficit to recover from.
This is also an opening, if you move now
For years, search optimization rewarded the biggest players. Global brands with deep content libraries and large ad budgets had a structural head start that regional challengers could rarely close. AI does not hand that same advantage to incumbents. A regional brand that has built genuine credibility in its category, through trusted publishers, active creators, and authentic content, can show up in AI recommendations ahead of a global competitor.
That window is open right now. It will not stay that way as more brands catch on, but the conditions today favour those who move with intent rather than wait for the playbook to mature.
A regional brand that has built genuine credibility in its category, through trusted publishers, active creators, and authentic content, can show up in AI recommendations ahead of a global competitor.
The measurement side is still catching up, but the tools are emerging. Several platforms now offer AI visibility tracking, giving brands a window into which sources and partners are influencing recommendations in their category. What differentiates the more advanced platforms is the ability to go beyond the insight and act on it by identifying exactly which publishers and creators AI is citing and setting up partnerships with them.
The affiliate publisher you are measuring on last-click conversions today may also be the source an AI cites tomorrow when a consumer in Manila or Kuala Lumpur asks what to buy. In an AI-mediated world, those two things are no longer separate jobs.
The brands that figure this out first will pull ahead fast. The third-party voices AI cites most consistently are the ones people already trusted before AI existed. Build genuine relationships with those voices, and you will win in this new Answer Era.
Ayaan is Regional Vice President, Marketing – APJ at impact.com.
