Retail Brand Positioning in the Age of AI

Skating to where the puck is going has always been tough for brands & retailers. Humans are messy & we change our minds often.  Now, with the surge of AI tools like ChatGPT & Perplexity, building a consumer-obsessed business has become more challenging. In 2025, nearly 40% of consumers (and the majority of #GenZ) let AI agents decide what products they see and buy, flipping the script on traditional brand-owned shopping channels. Are you ready for the age when your customer belongs to the agent, not your website? We’ve entered the era of infinite channels and the always-on shopper. Commerce is being driven by a moshpit of AI agents that mediate many customer journeys—from product search to purchase—largely outside brands’ direct control. Most retailers are still building for the past, optimizing search tools that only matter when shoppers find their way to your digital properties (.com, app, etc.). But that traffic is evaporating. The old model is dying fast, replaced by a new reality where AI agents decide what customers see, buy, and from whom. This is your wake-up call. AI is rapidly rewriting the rules of commerce. Traditional traffic pipelines have dried up. “Traffic” today is made up of both humans and agents, flowing through an infinite number of channels. If your products aren’t ready to be discovered, chosen, and purchased by AI agents—are you even trying? 😁 For Brands and Retailers: ➡️ Owning the customer journey is tougher than ever. Your fight for site clicks is obsolete. Products must now be surfaced in AI-powered results and agentic checkout experiences on 3rd-party platforms. ➡️ SEO is losing relevance. Optimize for AI discovery: create solution-focused and rich product data (not just keywords) optimized for AI agents, not just search engines. ➡️ Personalization is table stakes. AI agents understand customer context and needs better than ever, offering hyper-targeted product suggestions and streamlining the shopping experience more effectively than traditional tools. Brands that adapt to AI-driven shopping will see higher conversion rates & be positioned to capture this increase in sales volume. Data Points: 1️⃣ 39% of shoppers (and over 50% of #GenZ) already use AI agents (like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Amazon’s Buy for Me, Google AI Mode) for product discovery. (🙏🏼 Salesforce)  2️⃣ Nearly 3 in 5 consumers have replaced traditional search engines with gen AI for product recommendations, led by Millennials & Gen Z. (🙏🏼 Capgemini) The race is on to build the future! I’m thrilled to see Cimulate AI led by my buddy John Andrews, Profound led by my future buddies Dylan Babbs & James Cadwallader, & Scot Wingo led by ReFiBuy.ai tackling this head on. For my brand & retailer community, talk to me: Are your products ready to be chosen by the customer of the future - a moshpit of AI agents?

AI is already making buying decisions about your brand, and many companies don't realize this is happening. Simple Google searches show that AI isn't waiting for people to become better prompters - it's forming opinions RIGHT NOW from basic, everyday questions. When someone searches "What's the best project management software?"... no fancy prompting, just a basic question millions ask daily, Google's AI Overview confidently positions certain brands as winners and completely ignores others. Asana gets "for small businesses." Monday(dot)com gets "visual and easy-to-use." ClickUp becomes the "all-in-one solution." Meanwhile, Smartsheet with ~$1B revenue, ~11M users, and Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader status doesn't exist in AI's answer. See screenshots of the actual search results below that anyone can replicate today. This isn't happening in ChatGPT with prompt-engineering experts. This is regular Google. The same search box your customers have used for decades, but now AI is making decisions about which brands to consider. Here's what these searches show: ➡︎ Visibility - Who shows up vs. who doesn't WordPress (40%+ market share) is completely invisible in website builder results. Smartsheet, an enterprise leader, is missing from project management entirely. Major platforms are absent while smaller ones get featured. ➡︎ Sentiment - How AI talks about your brand HubSpot gets premium language like "highly-regarded" and "top all-in-one option." Wix gets the endorsement as "excellent all-around option for most users." Others get basic descriptions like "user-friendly and affordable." ➡︎ Positioning - Your rank in the decision framework Some brands get prime real estate with first mention and broad appeal. Others own specific niches like Shopify being "the top choice for e-commerce." The rest get lumped together as afterthoughts worth "also considering." AI search visitors convert 4.4x better than organic traffic because they arrive educated and ready to buy. But AI forms these opinions from basic prompts requiring zero skill. If your positioning is vague or inconsistent, AI fills in the blanks from whatever signals it finds online. Companies that understand this will build massive competitive advantages. Those that don't may be invisible and recommended for the wrong situations to mainstream searchers. AI is already influencing buying decisions through the simplest searches. The question is whether you're controlling that narrative. Test it yourself. Type basic questions about your category into Google. See how AI positions your brand. If you find gaps in how AI talks about your brand, I share actionable ways to improve AI visibility, sentiment, and recommendations in my newsletters. Links in comments below. If you find the newsletters helpful, feel free to share with others and subscribe so that you get them straight in your inbox every two weeks.

It will happen slowly, then all of a sudden. Your customers will shift how they search for information about your products. They will use: 1) Decision engines like Google, designed to help them compare products, confirm product details and make purchases. 2) Information engines like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews that feel more like a conversation with a trusted expert or knowledgable friend. Traditional search engines hand you a research project — many pages to sift through to find the information you seek. Generative AI search engines give you direct answers — with a chance of hallucination and inaccuracies. Here's what marketers need to understand: 🔹 Acknowledge the shift: Your customers are learning how/when to use two different types of search engines. There's the traditional "decision engine" like Google, and the "information engine" like chatGPT. 🔹 Accept that humans are lazy: Humans will choose the most convenient option. It’s human nature. Your customers prefer speed and convenience over absolute precision. 🔹 Information queries are moving to AI: When your customers want to learn about their problems, they’ll have conversations with AI instead of reading your blog posts. If your brand isn't appearing in these AI responses, you're becoming invisible to a growing audience. 🔹 Prepare for reduced website traffic: Expect fewer visits from basic informational queries as AI handles these directly. However, the traffic you do receive will be higher-intent visitors, closer to making a decisions, that should convert better. 🔹 Update your content strategy: Create different content for different search engines — intent-targeted informational content for generative AI search, and conversion-focused content for traditional search. 🔹 Build content AI can't summarize: Create interactive content, like calculators and data-driven content that requires user input. This ensures your brand stays visible even as AI handles informational queries. 🔹 Focus on intent, not keywords: The old approach of targeting high-volume keywords is outdated. Instead, understand and align with your customers' search intentions. The key takeaway? Humans are lazy. Your customers will consistently choose the convenience of direct answers from generative AI, even if those answers are sometimes inaccurate. They want to avoid sifting through pages of search results. As marketers, we need to adapt to this new reality. We must create content that caters to both types of searches: (1) content that helps your brand appear in generative AI responses for informational queries and (2) content that attracts and converts for decision searches on traditional search engines. How are you starting to search differently with generative AI?

Pinterest just completely switched its strategy. “We’ve effectively become an AI-enabled shopping assistant.” - Bill Ready (Pinterest CEO) And its not alone.. In the last few weeks, the biggest commerce players made it explicit: - Walmart: Consolidating dozens of tools into four AI “super agents” (for customers, associates, suppliers, developers), a unified agent layer as the core interface. - eBay: Rolling out a conversational shopping companion to personalize browsing and advice. - Amazon: Besides Rufus, its now piloting “Buy for Me,” an agent that purchases across third-party sites from inside the Amazon app. Why the momentum? Consumers don’t want to sift; they expect to be guided. The winning pattern we see across leaders: 1️⃣ Autonomous shopping—agents progress from suggestions to executing tasks (even transactions). 2️⃣ Unified agent ecosystems—one coherent agent layer beats a sprawl of scripts and chatbots. This isn’t a tech trend - it’s a strategic reset. For brands, this is your make or break moment - waiting is not an option. Here is a very simple actionable plan, that we have made work across 100s of retailers. You can use it to ship a guided selling agent on a narrow SKU set (recommended). - Pick 2–3 revenue‑critical journeys (e.g., “find the right shade/size,” “bundle the look”). - Plug in trusted data + tools (catalog, inventory, orders, policies) with policy guardrails. - Ship in one channel (site chat, app, social etc), throttle to 5–10% traffic. - Measure assisted-checkout revenue, AOV lift, cart→checkout ratio - If it clears targets, expand to other channels and agent-to-human handoff. What’s your AI agent strategy for Q4? Build, integrate, or partner, but don’t sit on the sidelines. Your customers are already engaging with an agent. The only question is which one..