Marketers shift from persuading people to informing AI shopping agents

In short: More marketers are changing how they sell products because AI assistants are starting to choose what shoppers see.

What's going on

AI assistants and shopping agents (software that can browse and compare products for you) are becoming a new gatekeeper between brands and buyers. Instead of reading a long list of search results, a shopper may get a short list of recommendations from an assistant. That gives brands fewer chances to be noticed.

This shift favors clear facts over classic ad tactics. The article describes marketers focusing on details that machines can quickly read and compare, like price, availability, compatibility, and product specifications. It is like putting items on shelves with big, neat labels so a fast-moving shopper can scan them.

Marketers are also trying to make sure product information matches everywhere it appears. If a brand says one thing on its own site and something slightly different on a retailer page, an assistant may treat it as less reliable. Digiday has also reported that different assistants can produce different results, meaning a product might show up in one assistant and be missing in another.

There are early signs of money at stake. A Digiday report cited a Dentsu Creative survey where 59% of 1,950 senior marketers said they were optimizing content for AI-enabled search, and half said they were investing in “agentic commerce” (shopping handled by an AI agent). Digiday also cited Adobe data suggesting AI-referred shoppers produced more revenue per visit in July, although that does not prove AI optimization caused the increase.

What to watch

Brands will likely spend more time on structured product data (information formatted so computers can read it) and on customer experience signals like reviews, delivery reliability, and returns. For shoppers, the big question is whether AI recommendations become easier to trust, or whether they mainly reflect what the assistant can easily find.

Source: NYTimes