AI search services like ChatGPT have already gotten so good at helping consumers find products it has displaced the brands that make them, according to research published by Bloomreach.
Based in Mountainview, Calif., where it provides software to assist with AI-powered personalization, Bloomreach surveyed more than 4,000 consumers across the U.S. and the U.K. to produce its report, titled Is AI Usurping Your Brand?
Bloomreach’s data shows AI shopping is skyrocketing, with nearly 88 per cent of consumers saying they use such services for shopping every week. This is up markedly from the nearly 70 per cent of those who said the same thing when the company fielded the research a year ago.
AI shopping has also met or exceeded expectations according to 80 per cent of consumers, and more than half plan to increase their usage of the technology over the next year.
The biggest AI shopping use case was comparing pricing, cited by nearly half (48 per cent) of those surveyed. They clearly value the answers they get back, given that 61 per cent said AI makes them more confident in their shopping decisions.
“As consumers increase their reliance on AI tools for shopping, their behavior becomes even less predictable, which means brands can no longer rely on channel-centric strategies to reach them,” the report’s authors wrote. “Brands that want to capture customer loyalty will need to focus on being there for shoppers in real time, at the exact moment they need it, whether it’s a nudge on SMS, a promotional email, or a conversational shopping prompt.”
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Let’s define “AI shopping” for a minute. For retailers, it probably brings to mind the way they’re using the technology to assist customers with finding products once they’ve arrived on their brand website, perhaps through an AI-powered chatbot. Bloomreach is focused on the broader definition of search services that consumers use earlier in the journey.
In that sense, you could argue that consumers have always been more loyal to the services that connect them to what they want. This is certainly true of Google. Although the ungated report doesn’t break down or compare the popularity of ChatGPT vs. Google’s AI overviews, I suspect the latter gives a greater sense of trust given the company’s long history.
AI search is also different from agentic commerce experiences, where AI agents would shop on behalf of consumers. For now, 64 per cent said they’d rather do their own shopping out of concerns AI might make a purchase they’re not happy with.
Bloomreach’s advice is for retailers to try and stay visible through other shopping channels, but the real key may lie in creating a better digital experience once a consumer arrives on their site. There is lots to be improved in how many retailers organize product information, manage transactions and let shoppers log in and manage their profiles.
Retailers should also be doing as much as they can to optimize their content to be easily parsed by large language models (LLMs) that feed into AI search tools to ensure their content is scraped and cited in AI answers and overviews. This will be especially important as more AI shopping journeys focus on the recency of sales, discounts and special promotions that determine where consumers click next.