Retail Search and AI Visibility in Single View of Demand

There's money sitting in your Amazon and Walmart accounts you've never claimed. We built a free connector so you can just ask your AI where it is, or anything else about your store.

AI commerce is starting to expose a very boring problem... Who actually owns the experience when the customer starts shopping through a machine? And what about when that machine is in fully automated and deciding what to buy on your behalf? Amazon buying ads inside ChatGPT for #PrimeDay is worth watching for that reason. Most will be tempted to read it as a media story, and that tracks, right? New channel with a new ad format, and a new way to capture intent. I see it as more of a control-system story. Amazon is willing to show up inside the AI conversation, but the click still routes back to Amazon. That means the product detail page, pricing, inventory promise, reviews, checkout, fulfillment, returns, loyalty, and attribution all stay inside a system Amazon owns and can govern. The next phase of commerce is all about the cleanest product data, the most trusted fulfillment promise, the strongest operating model, and the least broken handoff between discovery and delivery. AI may change where shopping starts for a lot of us, but it doesn't remove the hard part for retail. Someone still has to make sure the item exists, the price is right, the promise is accurate, the customer trusts the recommendation, and the experience doesn't collapse after the click. That's what we need to watch... the handoff. Do you use LLMs for shopping yet? If so, do you trust the results? Image: Modern Retail #AgenticCommerce #RetailTechnology #OmnichannelRetail #ExperienceSystemsInnovation #RetailAI

In April, ten companies that compete on almost everything sat down on the same council to govern one open standard for how AI agents buy from stores, Google and Amazon and Shopify and Stripe among them. It's worth asking why that standard needs to exist at all. ChatGPT and Gemini don't own the stores they sell from, which makes them outsiders, and an outsider needs an agreed way to get into a store it doesn't run and actually complete a sale there. That agreed way is the whole job of the protocol. Amazon is the exception that explains the rest, because its assistant and its store are the same company, so there's no boundary to cross and no agreement it needs with anyone. Everyone else is outside the store and needs the protocol to get in, while Amazon is already inside. Which is why the fight underneath AI shopping isn't really about who keeps the customer. It's about whether commerce moves onto open standards that any assistant can reach, or stays inside closed stacks like Amazon's, where the assistant and the store belong to the same company. You can see who's betting which way by what each of them is building. Link in comments.

AI agents are starting to do the shopping. ChatGPT, Gemini, Amazon's "Buy for Me" — customers are letting them discover, compare, and check out. Convenient for shoppers...risky for retailers. When the agent owns the transaction, you risk losing the customer data, loyalty, and control that come with the direct relationship. The retailers who win won't just sell through agents. They'll make their digital presence AI-readable, trust-rich, and transaction-ready — and still give customers a reason to come back direct. Sharp piece from my AlixPartners colleagues on what's at stake, and where to start. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/e8zjBvuY #Retail #AICommerce #AlixPartners

Fortune dropped a piece yesterday from Brainstorm Tech: "AI shopping agents are coming. No one is ready." ChatGPT only recommends specific products 9% of the time. OpenAI pulled back Instant Checkout. Walmart walked away from the relationship. I hope all these major models focus on perfecting the discovery and conversation part first before rushing to transactions. I'd love to see full AI-powered checkout within the year but I just can't see it happening. The shopping part isn't solved yet and we're already trying to build the buying part.

Everyone keeps asking which AI will win shopping. Wrong question. I sell on Amazon every day, and here’s what the holiday data actually showed. Rufus-assisted sessions were about 40% of Black Friday traffic but drove roughly two thirds of purchases. People who used it converted at 3.5x the rate of people who didn’t. That gap isn’t because Rufus is a smarter model than ChatGPT or Perplexity. It probably isn’t. It’s because of what it’s standing on. When Rufus recommends a product, it isn’t pulling an answer out of thin air. It’s sitting on a decade of reviews, verified ratings, return policies, Prime, and your own order history. The recommendation shows up already carrying trust the shopper has in the marketplace. A standalone AI can give you the same answer. It just can’t hand you the receipts. That’s the part most people miss. The race was never about who has the best model. Models get commoditized. The moat is the trust layer underneath the answer, and that takes years or decades to build. You can’t prompt it into existence. Amazon didn’t win AI shopping. It won shopping a long time ago. Rufus just collects the interest.

I was wrong about where the buying decision actually happens. I thought the funnel still started on your website or in a Google search. Get the click, win the deal. Then this stat stopped me: → Amazon conversion rate jumps from 7.1% to 9.4% when shoppers use ChatGPT 30 minutes before buying → ChatGPT usage among Amazon shoppers grew 5x in a single year By the time your "potential customer" lands on your page, AI may have already made the decision for them. The new funnel doesn't start with a search. It starts with a prompt. Is your brand even part of that conversation? ♻️ Share this if you think your audience needs to see it.

On the newest episode of Human in the Loop, Alasdair and Cameron sit with an interesting question Amazon will need to answer: as consumers start asking ChatGPT and Claude for product advice, can a shopping agent owned by the world's largest retailer ever feel unbiased? A few of the threads we pulled on: → Why the Rufus → Alexa for Shopping move is a branding consolidation, not a retreat — Rufus reportedly drove 300M+ transactions in 2025. → The emerging split between convenience AI (Alexa, fast reorders) and trust AI (ChatGPT, Claude, real research). → What an LLM-first shopping behavior shift would do to Amazon's $50B+ ad business. → Why Prime's delivery moat still feels untouchable — and why that might be enough. Watch & listen now: YouTube: https://hubs.ly/Q04hwhsj0 Spotify: https://hubs.ly/Q04hwwY_0 🎧 Out now on Spotify & YouTube. #AgenticCommerce #AI #Amazon #Ecommerce #RetailMedia

Amazon is buying ads on ChatGPT. That might sound small, but the signal is bigger than the ad itself. Amazon has been resisting AI shopping aggregation. It does not want ChatGPT or other AI agents becoming the layer that controls product discovery, comparison, and purchase decisions. At the same time, Amazon is still willing to buy attention inside that environment. That tells us something important: Retailers may fight AI intermediaries, but they will still use them as paid acquisition channels. The real battle is not just about ads. It is about who owns the shopper journey. Amazon wants the traffic, but not the dependency. And for brands, this is another reminder that product discovery is moving beyond traditional search. If your growth system still only thinks in Amazon search results, you are already behind. #AmazonAds #ChatGPT #OpenAI #AmazonMarketing #AIShopping #RetailMedia #EcommerceStrategy #AmazonSellers #AmazonFBA #MarketplaceStrategy #DigitalAdvertising #EcommerceGrowth #Spectrum #SpectrumBPO #AmazonGrowth #amazonupdate

As companies race to incorporate more proprietary data into their AI models and products, Walmart is turning to a unique asset it hopes will give its Sparky AI agent an edge over rivals like Amazon and Google—its more than 3,500 U.S. superstores. Gathering more in-store information has been a focus for the company since Sparky launched about a year ago, Hari Vasudev, Walmart’s U.S. chief technology officer told me in a recent interview, part of a range of upgrades to Sparky that are rolling out. Other upgrades, like the ability to send photos or voice prompts to Sparky, are slated for later this year. Read more from my interview with Hari in my piece for The Information: https://lnkd.in/eBxPX49m