How AI Will Reshape Search and Online Shopping

The Unhealthy State of Online Commerce

• ⚠️ The worldwide web is unhealthy due to a flood of SEO-optimized content designed to capture affiliate revenue rather than help readers.
• 🧠 While young people experiment with AI for product discovery, many AI recommendations can hallucinate or surface outdated items, sending users back to traditional search.
• 🎯 Google still dominates monetized purchase intent queries, but informational queries are increasingly moving towards Large Language Models (LLMs).

Challenges with Attribution and Incentives

• 💸 Attribution is a stubbornly practical problem, with last-click models and tools like coupon widgets often claiming rewards for the final step, effectively acting as attribution theft.
• ⚡ If purchase journeys begin inside AI agent experiences, the traditional advertising tax that platforms extract could significantly shift.

Diverse Purchase Types and AI's Role

• 🛍️ Impulse buys and high-ticket items are inherently difficult for AI to fully agentify or replace the human experience, often requiring in-person validation.
• 💡 The richest opportunity for AI lies in mid-value products that benefit from curated research, price comparison, and automated purchasing.
• ✅ Products with UPCs are straightforward for automated price hunting, whereas custom products are much harder for agents to resolve end-to-end.

Lessons from Aggregators and Trust

• 🚀 Aggregators like Amazon and Shopify succeeded by solving distribution, payments, and logistics at scale.
• 🔑 Trust and curation are paramount, exemplified by Costco's membership model aligning incentives and specialized tools like CamelCamelCamel winning consumers who value money over time.

New Business Opportunities in AI Commerce

• 🌱 Two main vectors for new businesses include consumer-facing models that fine-tune recommendations and offer deep conversational discovery.
• 🛠️ The second vector is merchant-side infrastructure that prepares sites for AI agents, handling payments, cashback, and attribution securely.
• 📈 The market will ultimately reward curation, verified reviews, and systems that effectively marry trust with automation, rather than turning