The Search Orientation Framework: How Consumers Start, Switch, and Stop in AI-Mediated Search

Consumer search has fragmented across an ecosystem of platforms that include not only search engines, but also e-commerce sites, discussion forums, social and video platforms, and now large language models. Different frameworks have captured elements of this complexity. Classic sequential search models focus on alternatives as the unit of analysis, determining which options are evaluated and when search terminates. Information foraging models focus on information sources as the unit of analysis and capture switching across sources. The unit of analysis for query intent taxonomies is a single query, classified by intent, while that of the customer journey model is the purchase journey, capturing channels chosen for stage-specific benefits and costs. However, none of these models individually connects the goal of a search episode to the language of its queries, movement across platforms, and the decision to ultimately stop searching. Drawing from work in marketing, economics, information science, cognitive psychology, and human-computer interaction, we propose the Search Orientation Framework and suggest that understanding search in today’s information environment requires a new unit of analysis: the search episode. We propose that a consumer search episode has a search orientation that shapes both a 1) linguistic signature of query composition, (specificity, intent, and form), and 2) behavioral signature of movement across platforms (start, switch, and stop). In this paper, we ground the elements of this framework in prior theory and explain why AI-mediated search can produce felt sufficiency even when objective information quality might be unchanged and propose an agenda of future research.