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Retailers that built growth on attention may be about to lose customers at the trust layer.

ended 20. May 2026

Recent retail-focused research on generative AI search suggests ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini do not behave like Google. 

Instead of showing shoppers a familiar list of ranked search engine links, they synthesise answers and lean heavily on third-party “earned” sources such as reviews, publishers and comparison sites. That matters for retailers because the customer may never reach the old-school advert, the influencer post, the homepage banner or the carefully optimised product page.

For attention-based marketers, this is a structural shift.

The old game was:

Advert gets attention > shopper enters funnel > retailer retargets and persuades > customer buys

The new game becomes:

Shopper states requirements > AI interprets needs, specifications and suitability evidence > retailer appears or disappears from recommendations > customer buys from agent-curated shortlist

A retailer can still shout into the marketplace, but if the consumer’s machine does not see clear prices, specifications, availability, warranty terms and trusted third-party validation, it may simply recommend someone else with better descriptions and stronger trust signals.

We’d like your views:

  • Could AI shopping assistants reduce decision fatigue, or do they create a new kind of trust shortcut where consumers stop checking recommendations properly and may make risky decisions?
  • If AI systems start acting as the recommendation layer between shopper and seller, how should retailers make prices, specs, warranty terms, stock and reviews machine-readable and still keep human visitors engaged?
  • Are tools that block bot visitors a solid defensive move, or a poor strategic decision in the age of agentic sales?

3 responses from the Newspage community

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Colette Mason
AI Ethics Consultant at Clever Clogs AI
People are not asking AI shopping tools for product facts. They are asking them to help choose like they ask friends for their gut instincts. Now, they want to explore the messy human questions that matter most: "Is this actually worth the money? Will it work for me? Is the warranty a trap? Is there a better option I haven’t found?"

AI is moving from search box to shopping adviser, and that pulls retailers into the whole journey, not just the moment before checkout. Discovery, specifications, customer experience, comparison, purchase, setup, troubleshooting, accessories,trade-ins, resale value all become part of visibility. Retailers must make sure that digital shop window is better than their competitors.

Trust matters. Website infrastructure matters. If shoppers are sending AI agents ahead of them, corporate websites that block bots may need to rethink that strategy.

In agentic sales era, keeping machines out can mean permanently disappearing before the customer even arrives.
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Editor
Katrina Young
Futurist | Chief Technology Officer CTO/CDO Ethical AI & Digital Transformation Strategist at KYC Digital
The shift generative AI search creates for retailers is not primarily a marketing problem. It is a trust and data infrastructure problem most businesses are not prepared for.

When AI systems become the intermediary between shopper and seller, retailers are no longer optimising only for humans reading product pages. They are optimising for machines parsing structured signals while humans evaluate what the AI surfaces.

In practice, pricing, warranty terms, stock data and reviews often sit across disconnected systems that contradict each other or update at different speeds. AI agents are unlikely to work harder to interpret inconsistent information. They will prioritise retailers with clearer, verifiable and machine-readable trust signals.

The real risk is not lower rankings. It is being silently excluded from the recommendation shortlist before the customer ever reaches the website.
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Debbie Porter
Managing Director at Destination Digital Marketing
Attention-based marketing will always have its place, because consumers like to be entertained - this kind of marketing creates buzz, interest and desire around a brand. There has to be a desire to buy a product that's not as strictly logical as getting all the technical specifications laid out on a website and letting ChatGPT do its thing to find your customers. They have to want to be looking for you in the first place.

AI and generative searching is a new buzzword, but it is only an extension of what's always been around - SEO aka Search Engine Optimisation. Moreover, and contrary to what AEO/GEO snake-oil salesmen would have you think, Google recently announced that generative search optimisation just amounts to good SEO practice. So the mix is the same as it's always been - advertise and grab attention, then make sure your website's content takes care of the tech specs, answering FAQs and addresses the problems your product will solve for your customer. Then the sales will come.