Why 30 Million US Consumers No Longer Search.

For nearly three decades, the internet rewarded people who knew how to find information fast. The pros learned to turn questions into a few notable keywords and cherry-pick through pages of results until they found what they needed. Search became a reflex. Searchers gathered data, compared and decided. The reward was convenient access to terabytes of information.

That era is ending.

People no longer want to search for information. They want outcomes. Information that’s curated, relevant, contextual and decision-ready. That shift, powered by what I call the Prompt Economy, is changing how people think, learn, shop, buy.

And decide.

In the Prompt Economy, no one wants to sift through endless links. The value now lies in how precisely we can describe a problem and the milliseconds it takes to get a smart response. A good prompt delivers intelligence, not just lots of information. And once people experience that difference, the old way feels slow, friction-laden and unnecessary.

As we have witnessed many iterations of new ways to pay, shop, learn and do just about everything in the digital world over the years, new habits don’t form because technology just shows up.  They form when a better outcome makes change effortless. And makes the outcome worth making the switch.

The Prompt Economy isn’t where those new habits are showing up. It’s where they’re being formed.

The Power of Habit, Inverted

One of my favorite books on human behavior is Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit. In it he explains how habits form through a three-part loop: cue, routine and reward. Every habit, from brushing our teeth to checking our phone, follows that pattern. Habits stick when the reward reliably follows the routine. The cue, the trigger, kicks off that loop. Over time, that habit loop becomes automatic, a series of things we do without even thinking about it.

For decades, our search habits looked like this:

Cue: I need information.
Routine: Type keywords into Google.
Reward: Get a list of links to explore.

We learned to strip away context so machines could understand us: “best laptop under 1,000 dollars,” “direct flights to LA,” “symptoms RSV.”

Search engines got smarter and faster, but the habit loop didn’t change. The “reward” was still a list of links. The cue was the same. The routine was still clicking, comparing and analyzing before deciding. The real outcome came long after the traditional search habit loop ended.

In the Prompt Economy, the cue has changed. It’s no longer, “I need information.” It’s, “I need to make a decision.” Efficiency comes from the conversational context that happens at the prompt.

Instead of typing “best laptop under $1,000,” someone might say, “I’m a financial analyst who travels a lot, needs at least 128GB of RAM, prefers Mac but could consider Windows if performance is better. My budget’s around a thousand dollars, maybe twelve hundred if the battery lasts longer. What should I buy and why?”

That’s not a search. That’s a conversation in search of a better outcome. A more informed decision. The response isn’t a pile of links. It’s a personalized, curated answer that connects performance, pricing and use case into a recommendation.

Once people have had a taste of that efficiency, they can’t unlearn it. So they stick with it.

That’s the real shift in the Prompt Economy. It’s not just that consumers are using a new search tool. They get a more valuable reward when using it.

The 11% Who Are Rewriting the Rules

According to new PYMNTS Intelligence research, about 11% of U.S. consumers — roughly thirty million people— are already what we call Prompt Economy Pros. These power users haven’t just tried the tools. They’ve replaced their old routines with them. Across shopping, finance, health, travel and learning, they’ve built new habit loops where AI is the default path to a better, smarter outcome.

They’re not dabbling. They’re performing an average of twenty-five different things each month with GenAI, out of the fifty-four activities PYMNTS Intelligence is tracking and benchmarking as part of this research.

These aren’t fluffy tasks like asking about the weather. These Prompt Economy Pros are using AI for serious stuff. On average, they’re tackling nearly six complex, high-stakes tasks like demystifying medical bills, comparing financial products, or creating and balancing household budgets. They’re also using AI for about six moderately complex tasks like planning trips or researching products before buying. The rest are simpler, everyday uses like writing emails or making grocery lists.

These power users also treat GenAI like what it is. Their virtual assistant. They depend on it not just for ideas but to make smarter, faster decisions.

Note: The consumer GenAI framework considers 54 different activities that can be performed using GenAI across nine activity groups; from shopping, finances, health, education, travel and others. Each individual activity is assigned a weight based on the sophistication needed by the model for reasoning and accuracy, the risk inherent in the activity for the consumer and personal information sensitivity involved.

The people leading this shift aren’t who you might expect.

They’re mostly Bridge Millennials, the generational cohort born between 1980 and 1989. The generation with the highest spending power and the most complicated lives. About 21% of them, one in five, are already Prompt Economy Pros.

They’re juggling mortgages, childcare, healthcare, education planning, retirement savings and careers. All at once. Their cognitive workload is huge, their time limited and their tolerance for inefficiency pretty limited.

These Prompt Economy pioneers don’t need more information. They want curated understanding and better outcomes. The intelligence that brings multiple variables together to deliver a confident and comprehensive next step.

That’s exactly what the Prompt Economy gives them.

Replacement, Not Complement

This is where things get interesting. These Pros aren’t adding these AI platforms to their information toolkit. They’re entirely replacing what was once their tried-and-true.

More than half (54%) have fully or mostly replaced their old ways of finding what to buy. That’s stunning. Instead of going right to a retailer or a marketplace, they start with a prompt on an AI platform. Fifty-two percent say the same about research and learning. Across all activities, 56% report having swapped their old habits for AI-first routines on those platforms.

Compare that to light users, where 65% still use AI as a complement to their old methods. Or mainstream users, where about 40% do.

These Prompt Economy Pros have crossed the line. They’re not keeping one foot in old habits and one in new ones. They’ve moved on because the reward is better and the outcome faster and more complete.

That’s why the Prompt Economy isn’t really about technology. It’s about human behavior. We’ve learned to expect intelligence as an outcome. That expectation rewires how we interact with every product, service, and piece of content.

The ripple effects are already showing up. Among those who’ve replaced their old methods with GenAI, 41% report using search engines less. More than a third visit retail sites less often. Nearly a third, 31%, say they now rely primarily on these AI platforms to guide their purchases.

Power users aren’t just switching up their digital front doors.  They’ve formed new habits.

Think about what that looks like in real life. A power user who needs a new laptop, a mortgage refinance or a healthcare plan doesn’t start with Google anymore. They don’t open ten browser tabs or spend hours comparing specs. They don’t piece together advice from forums or reviews.

They open ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude. They describe their situation, add context about needs, constraints, budget and timing. They ask questions. They refine. They get back contextual, synthesized, personalized intelligence.

What used to take hours now takes minutes.

And then they decide.

Where Power Users Are Going

This shift should make every business that depends on being found through search a little nervous. The intelligence layer has moved upstream. The curation, the real value, now happens before the consumer or business buyer ever reaches your website.

A business that is not part of that synthesis is invisible.

Power users are already showing us where this is heading. More than a quarter (28%) of users who have replaced their old search and discovery methods say they’d use AI agents for big, complex purchases where getting it right really matters. These aren’t impulse buys. They’re high-stakes, highly-considered decisions that used to take hours of research before making a commitment.

Nearly a quarter (23%) of Prompt Economy power users say they’d trust a GenAI platform to make those purchasing decisions for them. That’s about the same number, 25%, who would trust a digital wallet to enable the transaction.

When consumers start trusting AI-powered transacting on those platforms as much as they trust a wallet to move their money when buying on them, we’ve crossed the Rubicon.

Why This Matters for Markets

Some might see that 11% adoption figure of these Prompt Economy Pros and think it’s small. It’s actually enormous. Thirty million people aren’t a test market. They represent a critical mass of people who have moved past traditional discovery platforms and are not looking back.

As I have written previously, GenAI adoption has moved faster than any major digital behavior shift before it, reaching 54% penetration in just two years. E-commerce took more than a decade to reach that level of penetration. Mobile banking took almost as long.

That’s what happens when the new reward is simply better. People don’t need marketing campaigns or forced mandates to change habits when the outcome is the reward.

But here’s what makes this particularly important for businesses. Power users are their best customers. The Bridge Millennials earning over $100,000 a year. People in their prime spending years managing complex lives and making high-value decisions.

Nearly one in five (17%) of consumers earning more than $100,000 are Prompt Economy power users. These are the people with the highest lifetime value, the most complex needs and the most purchasing power.

And they’re starting to build new habit loops without businesses that are still sitting on the sidelines waiting to see if all of this is real.

The Retail Cautionary Tale

Retail is the clearest example of what happens when an industry ignores a new habit loop forming right in front of its eyes.

Two decades ago, brick-and-mortar retailers had every advantage. They had loyal customers, physical stores, trusted brands. They could have led online shopping. Instead, they waited. They protected existing channels, obsessed over margins, and convinced themselves that people still needed to touch and feel before they bought. And that online sales would never amount to much.

We know how this turned out.

Amazon didn’t wait. It built a new consumer shopping habit around speed, certainty and convenience. A shopping habit that became almost impossible to break.

The cue became: “I need to buy something.”
The routine became: “go to Amazon.”
The reward was: “found it fast, got it faster, and it shipped free.”

Today, that loop is being rewritten again. But this time, retailers risk losing not just sales, but relevance. Even the biggest retailers in the world.

These power users, thirty million of them and counting, are skipping the search phase entirely. The cue “I need to buy something” now triggers “ask AI.” The reward isn’t “found a few good options.” It’s “got a curated response, options explained, decision made.”

Retailers that are not part of that curation are not part of the decision.

Retailers are standing in the same spot they stood in 1999, telling themselves that all this will plateau, not amount to much. But habits don’t plateau once they’ve shifted. They intensify. When a new cue-routine-reward loop becomes the new norm, the old one disappears.

Retail’s mistake twenty-five years ago was believing the channel mattered more than behavior. Its mistake today would be believing their brand matters more than a consumer or a business in search of better outcomes.

Beyond Retail: The Prompt Economy Is Everywhere

What’s happening here isn’t limited to shopping. The Prompt Economy is quietly reshaping how value is created across every industry built on information.

For thirty years, the internet powered the information economy. Its magic was discoverability. Every model — search, content, advertising — was built around people who needed information and were willing to hunt for it.  And businesses willing to buy up keywords and ads to boost visibility and conversion.

But the explosion of data created a new kind of value: curation. We don’t lack access to information anymore. We lack the time and the willingness to filter, edit and personalize at scale.

The Prompt Economy solves that problem. It delivers the editing and the curation people used to have to do themselves over days, weeks or months.

Every sector that trades in information is coming to grips with the same thing: people no longer want to collect information. They want intelligence that closes the gap between what I need to know and what I need to do.

The problem is that many businesses are still built for an audience that doesn’t exist anymore. Their systems, incentives and success metrics assume people want to find, compare and decide. But in the Prompt Economy, people want to understand, contextualize and act faster than ever before.

The question isn’t if this transition will happen. It’s how fast, and how many of today’s winners can adapt before the old rewards simply aren’t good enough anymore.

The Next Two Years

We’re still early in this new era, but the data already shows how quickly habits form when the reward improves. Eleven percent of consumers, about thirty million Americans, have already made the leap. Among Bridge Millennials, it’s 21%. These aren’t early adopters chasing the latest shiny new object. They’re realists chasing efficiency.

History tells us what happens next. Small percentages always look insignificant until they’re unstoppable. E-commerce at 5% looked niche. Mobile payments at 7% looked experimental. Both transformed their industries within a few years.

The Prompt Economy is moving faster because it doesn’t need new hardware or new behavior. It only needs a new mindset. Once someone experiences the difference between information and intelligence, inertia collapses.

That’s why the next two years matter. This isn’t the beginning of the traditional adoption curve since GenAI isn’t following one.

And every day, more people are discovering what thirty million already know: information isn’t enough. Smarter outcomes are the new baseline expectation that delivers a richer reward.

The people learning that first are the ones who matter most, the consumers making complex decisions with the most spending power and the highest lifetime value.

The question isn’t whether this shift will happen. It’s whether you’ll still be part of the conversation when it does.

Until NEXT time.

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