Why Your Next Customers Won’t Find You On Google
The most profound shifts in technology don’t just change how people find things. They change who starts the search.
This expert opinion by Darpan Munjal, CEO and founder of Atom, was originally published on Inc.com.
For decades, search engines have acted as the first stop in the journey of intent. A founder wants to name their startup? They Google domain ideas. A student wants to apply to college? They search for rankings and deadlines. A couple plans a vacation? They type in destination ideas. In every case, the journey starts with a question, and that question usually starts with a search.
However, that starting point is shifting in a big way. Not from Google to TikTok or from desktop to mobile. Instead, the shift is from humans to agents. The journey of intent will increasingly begin not with humans, but with AI.
Whether it’s ChatGPT, a custom GPT trained on our business, or a personalized workspace assistant, the way you ask for help is changing. It’s no longer a keyword. Instead, you now have conversations. Increasingly, you are not searching in public engines. You’re talking inside embedded flows and within tools, documents, apps, and interfaces you already use. This has massive implications for the future of discovery.
When The First Step Moves, The Whole Journey Changes
To understand the shift, here is a simple example. Imagine a founder starting a new company in climate tech. They want a name. In the past, they’d open a browser, maybe search “cool climate startup names,” check a few domain marketplaces, and cross-reference trademarks. Each step was fragmented. Each insight lived on a different platform. Crucially, the founder was the one driving the process. Manually typing, clicking, and stitching together tools.
Now imagine the same founder starts by chatting with a GPT trained on naming conventions, industry context, and legal filters. They describe their startup, get name suggestions in real time, see instant trademark checks, check domain availability, and get relevant comps, all in one flow. That GPT might even go further, by generating logos, writing taglines, and suggesting social handles.
The difference isn’t just efficiency. The entire structure of discovery has shifted. What used to be a multi-tab hunt is now an embedded loop of iteration. Naming is no longer a linear checklist. It’s a creative conversation.
Agents Change The Architecture Of The Internet
This change doesn’t affect just naming. It affects everything. If AI agents become the new front door to knowledge, tools, and decision-making, then the way businesses surface their products must change. You’re no longer optimizing for Google. You’re optimizing for the agent.
Unlike Google, agents don’t return 10 blue links. They return one distilled answer. This introduces a new kind of bottleneck: If you’re not part of the agent’s answer, you may never be discovered. If your product isn’t structured to integrate into these conversational flows, you’re invisible. This is the equivalent of what SEO was in the 2000s, but deeper. Now you’re not just trying to rank higher in a list. Instead, you’re trying to be the only thing the agent says.
It’s a winner-takes-all interface.
Domain Discovery Is One Use Case, But It Shows The Pattern
At my company, Atom.com, we’ve been thinking about this shift deeply. Our domain discovery tools used to rely on a traditional search model. You typed a keyword, browsed results, filtered by industry or length, and so on. However, we’ve seen more founders want something different. They want to describe their startup in natural language and get back names that feel aligned with their vision. They want to chat, iterate, and ask follow-ups.
We first started by building a Semantic Search, which allowed founders to find great domain names using natural language. However, we didn’t want to confine the experience to the boundaries of our platform. That’s why we built our Model Context Protocol (MCP), a way to let other tools and agents plug into our domain discovery engine. It’s not a product you log into. It’s infrastructure and a foundation.
So when a founder is naming their startup inside a pitch-deck generator, a workflow assistant, or a mobile note-taking app, they can still access our domains, our logic, and our search. We’re not trying to pull people into our marketplace. We’re embedding discovery into the places people already are.
The New Discovery Loop Is Inside The Flow
That’s the broader shift. In the past, discovery happened on the outside. You’d go out to the internet to find things. You’d type your query into a general-purpose platform and hope to narrow it down. Now, discovery is moving inward—into workflows, agents, and creation itself.
A designer working in Figma doesn’t want to leave the tool to find icon packs. A writer drafting a newsletter in Notion doesn’t want to search five websites for relevant GIFs. A developer working on an AI tool doesn’t want to search for API providers one by one. They want the right answers to show up inside the thing they’re already doing. That’s what agents can enable, and what discovery tools must adapt to.
The New Middle Layer: From Marketplace To Protocol
To make this happen, it’s important to rethink what “marketplace” means. It’s no longer a destination, but a layer. A good marketplace in the future isn’t just a website. It’s a protocol, a set of APIs, and a structured knowledge layer that other tools can call. It’s a fluent participant in AI conversations. In other words, it’s not where people go to discover. It’s what helps agents surface the right thing at the right time.
This is where marketplaces and AI tools converge. The best naming agents of the future won’t just suggest clever names. They’ll check domain availability, trademark risks, social handles, linguistic issues, and more. That works only if the infrastructure behind discovery is built for this kind of integration. That’s what we’re building.
Naming Is Just The Start
While our work is focused on naming and domain discovery, the pattern applies across the board. The future of discovery is:
- Embedded: inside the tools people use
- Iterative: driven by real-time interaction
- AI-native: conversational, contextual, agent-powered
It’s not about replacing human creativity. It’s about enhancing it. By removing friction and surfacing better options, faster. The most profound shifts in technology don’t just change how people find things. They change who starts the search. The world is shifting from humans initiating discovery to agents mediating it. That’s not just a product shift. It’s a cultural and philosophical one, and it’s already here.
