ai-search

OpenAI is taking a bidding market inside ChatGPT to 31 European countries. On its own availability table, British advertisers can already buy into it and none of those 31 can.

New Vercel and World Retail Congress research says 43% of UK shoppers would switch retailer for better on-site AI. The same data shows AI has changed how Britain finds products far more than how it buys them.

AI chatbots get a fact wrong about 64% of UK high-street retailers. That, the shelf robots, and Gap's 'mindset beats mandate' study defined the week.

Two UK studies say shoppers won't hand AI the wallet. The same week, Visa proved an agent could pay and be safely accepted at both ends of the transaction.

The UK's first agentic checkout, three consumer datasets that agree, resale's trust problem, and Kingfisher's line: technology can be bought, trust has to be earned.

Pichai called I/O 2026 the agentic Gemini era. The actual commerce story is more concrete: Universal Cart, the cross-surface object Google wants every retailer to integrate with, with a UK launch date conspicuously absent.

Adobe's March 2026 data shows AI-referred traffic converting 42% better than non-AI channels. That's a record, and a number that needs careful interpretation: selection effects, early adopter behaviour, and the specific nature of AI-mediated discovery all shape what it means for your planning.

Jeremy Howard proposed LLMs.txt in September 2024 as a way for websites to communicate with AI crawlers. By October 2025, 844,000 sites had implemented it. The major AI crawlers are still largely ignoring it. So where does that leave us?

Google AI Overviews now appear on 48% of searches, with an average zero-click rate of 83% when they do. Between 58% and 68% of all Google searches now end without a click. The organic traffic model that UK retailers have relied on for fifteen years is structurally broken. Here's how to think about that.

AI-generated product content is now standard for large catalogues. The tooling works. The quality variance is the problem nobody planned for, and on a 50,000-SKU catalogue, even a 1% error rate is 500 wrong product descriptions.

Adobe's Q1 2026 data shows AI-referred traffic to US retail sites grew 393% year-on-year. A separate Adobe finding: product pages across the retail sector score an average 66% on machine readability. The traffic is arriving. The infrastructure to capture it is not.

The gap between virtual try-on demos and virtual try-on that consumers actually use has been wide for a long time. In 2025, it narrowed meaningfully. The question now is whether it closes all the way — and what retailers should be doing about it.

Between AI Mode, agentic checkout, virtual try-on expansion, and Project Mariner, Google confirmed more commerce-relevant technology at I/O 2025 than at any developer conference in recent memory. Most coverage led with the chatbot.

Schema.org Product markup and JSON-LD have been around for over a decade. In 2025, they became the infrastructure that determines whether AI systems can accurately understand and recommend your products. The SEO conversation became a GEO conversation. The stakes got real.

In September 2024, Answer.AI's Jeremy Howard proposed llms.txt — a standard for structuring web content so AI systems can read it more effectively. The technical case is interesting. Whether it matters for ecommerce is a more honest question.

The term GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is starting to circulate. Ignore the jargon, but pay attention to the underlying shift: AI-powered search is changing what good product content looks like.

OpenAI's new model processes text, audio, and images natively in a single pass. The voice demos got all the coverage. The more interesting story for retail is narrower and more actionable.

Amazon's new AI shopping assistant is imperfect and occasionally baffling. It's also probably the most commercially significant thing to happen to product discovery in years. Not because of what it does now, but because of what it implies about product content strategy.