The Future of Search and Discovery: A Strategic Playbook to Understand Agentic Commerce
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The visibility imperative: How retailers need to stay discoverable as AI agents reshape search
We surveyed 6,000 consumers across the UK, US and France to understand how AI-led discovery, trust and delegation are evolving
Retail search and discovery is entering a new phase. Instead of shoppers relying solely on keywords, AI assistants and emerging agentic systems are beginning to interpret intent, retrieve information across the web, and curate consideration sets before a retailer is ever visited.
This report sets out what that shift means in practice. It combines a review of technological change with new consumer evidence to help retail leaders remain discoverable, trusted and commercially viable as AI intermediaries gain influence over visibility.
What you can learn from this report
• Where AI assistants are already influencing discovery and evaluation, and where consumers still draw boundaries around trust and control.
• Why visibility is shifting towards machine-readability, data structure and governance, not just human-facing optimisation.
• How to treat AI traffic as a strategic choice, defining what to allow, limit or block to protect performance, trust and value.
• Which categories and shopping missions are most exposed to AI-led disruption, and why impact will not be uniform.
• The practical readiness workstreams and metrics retailers need to manage discovery performance beyond traditional SEO.
10 key insights
• Agentic systems are becoming the new gatekeepers of retail visibility, with AI agents interpreting intent, retrieving data and curating consideration sets before a retailer is ever visited.
• AI-mediated discovery is already mainstream: 73% of consumers across the UK, US and France have used AI assistants, confirming this is not a future edge case.
• Shopping use is already material: 38% of consumers have used third-party AI assistants (e.g. ChatGPT or Copilot) for product ideas, suggestions or comparisons, shifting early-stage discovery outside traditional SEO pathways.
• Consumers value AI most when it reduces friction. The leading benefits are saving time (28%), finding better prices (20%), and help with complex or technical products (14%).
• Age is a major adoption driver. Around 1 in 4 shoppers aged 18–24 use AI assistants regularly and 1 in 5 use them day-to-day, versus fewer than 1 in 10 among 55+ for day-to-day use.
• AI bot traffic is scaling at pace. Average daily bot traffic increased 4.5x across 2025, which distorts traditional analytics and strengthens the case for crawl and log-level visibility.
• [Download the full report to access the other 4 insights]
The evolution of search and discovery
>> PREVIEW ONLY >> Full report coming very shortly
