I am a Search Intelligence Engineer and the founder of Hendricks. The job is to find out where a brand is losing consideration before anyone clicks, and to change the conditions that cause it.
Here is the cause as I see it. Search used to be measured in clicks, and the click was a good unit of measurement because it was where discovery ended and the visit began. That unit is disappearing. An AI answer, an AI Overview, or a results page now decides which brands a buyer ever sees, and it decides before a click, before a visit, before analytics records anyone. Most of the industry is still reporting the thing it can count instead of the thing that happened. That gap is the AI Selection Problem: brands are losing control over the path between being discovered and being chosen. Search Intelligence Engineering is the discipline I practice to close it. It measures demand, reads whether a brand enters consideration, engineers the conditions that shape selection, and proves the business impact.
