From Houston to MIT Sloan: Dr. Pettiette's Award-Winning Research on the Future of Search

The Marilyn Davies College of Business is proud to congratulate Dr. Michael Pettiette on the publication of his co-authored article, "Can Customers Find Your Brand? Marketing Strategies for AI-Driven Search", in the prestigious MIT Sloan Management Review. Written with co-author Dr. Kimberly A. Whitler, the Frank M. Sands Senior Professor of Business at UVA's Darden School of Business, the article has already earned national recognition — receiving the
American Marketing Association's 2026 Outstanding Faculty Paper Award.

The research arrives at a pivotal moment. Consumers are rapidly abandoning traditional search engines in favor of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini — and most businesses have not caught up. Dr. Pettiette and Dr. Whitler give marketing leaders both thevocabulary and the strategic framework to respond.

“The core problem is visibility in AI-driven search. If customers cannot find your brand when they use tools like ChatGPT or other generative search platforms, your brand may never even enter the consideration set.”

Drawing on interviews with ten marketing executives and consumer survey data, the authors introduce the concept of Information Search Marketing (ISM) — an umbrella framework that brings coherent language to an industry struggling to describe what is happening around it. ISM encompasses four distinct disciplines that marketers must now manage simultaneously:

What is the Zero-Click Revolution

One of the most urgent shifts the article addresses is the rise of zero-click search — a behavior in which consumers receive a direct answer from an AI platform without ever clicking through to a website. For brands built on cost-per-click advertising, the implications are significant.

"Zero-click search means the consumer gets an answer directly from the platform without needing to click through to a list of websites. That is a major shift because brands now have fewer chances to win attention after the search begins."

The article illustrates this disruption with a striking example close to home: a large national fitness brand was shocked to discover that a small, single-location Houston gym appeared more prominently in AI search results — in part because fitness enthusiasts frequently discuss it on Reddit, a platform that ChatGPT disproportionately favors as a source.

The Five A’s of Search Success

To help organizations adapt, the article outlines five foundational areas that companies must address across both traditional and AI-driven search environments:

Opportunity in the Disruption

The article's message is not one of alarm alone. Dr. Pettiette and Dr. Whitler are clear that this moment represents a genuine leveling of the playing field — particularly for smaller, agile brands willing to adapt quickly.

"This shift creates opportunity because AI-driven search may reward relevance, clarity, and authority in ways that are different from traditional search. If you are a smaller firm that competes with larger firms, you have a serious opportunity here."

For marketing students entering the industry, Dr. Pettiette's advice centers on developing durable judgment alongside technical fluency: learn the new tools, but invest even more in the critical thinking that turns acceptable AI output into genuinely strong marketing strategy —precisely what a Marilyn Davies education is designed to cultivate.

Bringing the Research into the Classroom

The MIT Sloan article is only one dimension of Dr. Pettiette's research agenda on this topic. At the American Marketing Association Conference, Dr. Pettiette presented a companion paper co-authored with Dr. Sarah Fischbach of Pepperdine University: "From Search to Self: Building Marketing Student Self-Efficacy in the Age of Generative AI." Where the MIT Sloan piece speaks to practitioners, this paper turns the lens inward — asking a pointed question: are
marketing students actually prepared for the GEO-driven world that industry is already navigating?

The answer, based on survey data from 1,045 undergraduate marketing students across fourU.S. universities, is a clear no — at least not yet.

Metric	Result
Students Surveyed across 4 universities	1,045
Average SEOSelf-Efficacy Score	3.00
Average GEOSelf-Efficacy Score	2.42
Trust in Google	3.60
Trust in ChatGPT	3.19

"Students report higher Self-Efficacy for SEO than GEO, indicating a readiness gap for generative-engine contexts. This is a warning signal for marketing education: the challenge is not only teaching new techniques, but calibrating student confidence and agency in AI-influenced visibility work."

Reflective AI Confidence Framework

To address this gap, Dr. Pettiette and Dr. Fischbach introduce the Reflective AI Confidence Framework — a teachable approach that connects three drivers to student readiness: teaching effectiveness, calibrated AI trust, and what they call an "extended-self orientation" — the degree to which students see AI tools as part of their own professional identity rather than external utilities.

The framework's target outcome is not generic confidence but "grounded confidence": self-efficacy anchored in metacognition, critical thinking, and disciplined practice. In practical terms, that means educators should pair hands-on SEO/GEO labs with structured reflection, bias-surfacing activities, and prompt-to-proof workflows that require students to evaluate, refine, and take responsibility for AI-assisted outputs.

Qualitative responses from the student survey reinforce a functional distinction that marketers will increasingly need to navigate: students already view Google Search as the tool for retrieval and validation, while ChatGPT and similar tools are valued for co-creation, editing, and synthesis. Teaching students to move fluidly between these modes — and to apply judgment at every step — is the core pedagogical challenge the framework addresses.

"If discovery is becoming co-authored by machines, our graduates must be prepared to act as co-editors — able to interrogate outputs, verify claims, and improve how content is surfaced and trusted."

What This Means for Marilyn Davies Students

Taken together, Dr. Pettiette's two research contributions form a coherent and urgent message. The MIT Sloan article maps the new terrain of AI-driven search marketing and arms practitioners with the language and strategy to compete. The AMA conference paper demonstrates that today's marketing students — the practitioners of tomorrow — are entering a world they are not yet fully equipped to navigate.

That gap is also an opportunity. The Marilyn Davies College of Business is well-positioned to lead on this front, developing curriculum and classroom experiences that close the SEO-to-GEO confidence divide and produce graduates who can think critically, act strategically, and exercise genuine judgment in an AI-augmented marketing environment.

The MIT Sloan article is available now at sloanreview.mit.edu. We encourage students, alumni, and faculty to engage with Dr. Pettiette's research as it shapes the next chapter of both marketing practice and marketing education.