AI IN COMMERCE CONSUMER RESEARCH REPORT
How to stay visible in the AI-driven buyer's journey
Your 6-point checklist for adapting to AI-driven discovery.
Add a discovery question to your post-purchase survey.
Ask one question on your post-purchase or order-confirmation survey: “How did you first hear about us?” with “AI assistant/chatbot” as an answer option.
Show up where AI builds its answers.
Audit where your product currently appears—or doesn't—across the five sources AI models most often draw from: comparison and “best of” articles, retailer review sections, Reddit/forum threads, YouTube reviews, and category round-ups from trusted publishers. If you can't answer “are we cited on the three sites that rank for our top category term” today, that's where to start.
Keep product data clean and accessible.
Pull your product feed and check it against what agents actually match on: structured specs (not just marketing copy), review counts and scores exposed in machine-readable fields (not buried in images), and consistent categorization across every retailer/marketplace listing. Structured data an agent can parse is the new product page.
Question who your AI strategy assumes it's reaching.
Pull your own customer age distribution and compare it against this report's generational breakdown before you set next quarter's AI visibility budget. If your buyers skew Gen Z or Millennial, standard search optimization is already the wrong primary bet—redirect budget toward the platforms and publishers this report shows they actually use first.
Establish your organic AI presence before paid placements arrive.
Identify the 3–5 highest-intent queries in your category today, and check who's being cited in the AI answer for each. If it's not you, that's the specific gap to close before paid AI placements launch and the cost of entry rises.
Treat your partners and publishers as the place where consumers verify before they buy.
Consumers still leave AI to confirm before they buy, and the AI answer is what routes them to wherever that happens. Audit which of your active partners' properties are the ones AI is actually citing and routing consumers toward, then prioritize recruitment and content investment there specifically, rather than treating partner content and AI-citability as different initiatives.
“The moat in 2026 and beyond is the speed of iteration. Marketers have been running digital tests for decades, and that is already built into their systems. If they can continue that cycle of experimentation, the benefits are going to compound.”
Allie K Miller
CEO of Open Machine and AI advisor
Discovery has moved—now visibility needs to move with it.
Right now, consumers will hand AI the search, but not yet the sale. That gap between what they'll delegate and what they'll still verify themselves is
For now, it's the size of the opportunity still open to brands willing to be found in the answer that starts the journey, and the site that closes it.
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