This latest report by Vivek Pandya at Adobe shows how AI source shopping continues to grow significantly and more importantly conversion rates have jumped significantly from the -38% to 90% in just 18 months.
What is not evident from this report is that the beneficiaries of this growth in conversions will not be all brands and it is not true that this rising tide will lift all boats.
The reason is simple. Most AI answers recommend only 3-4 products. This is very different from search where even if a brand did not appear on top they would appear somewhere down the page or maybe on subsequent pages (for the determined shopper).
This means brands and retailers need to invest in discoverability now to ensure they appear in answers as one of these 3-4 choices,
The report has some not so good news for brands and retailers that think their content will be picked up automatically by LLM crawlers. Adobe’s Citation Readability Score on average is only 63% which means 1/3rd of the content of most websites is not readable by crawlers.
The 3 keys to discoverability on LLMs and Personal AI agents are:
- Ensure your product data is enriched using use-cases, benefits, occassions and fit-for-purpose content, without that, LLMs and agents will simply not recommend your products as they will not match what consumers are asking for
- Domain-authority is ranked higher by LLMs and Personal AI agents especially for product data as these agents want to make sure the product data and claims are accurate and trustworthy and would prefer that it comes either directly via a brand’s web site or a retailer that sells the product
- LLMs and especially Personal AI agents like MUSE, Instinct, ChatGPT dots and Grokbot prefer machine readable product data – its faster, more accurate and more efficient to retrieve than crawling a brand or retailer’s website. Updating your site with machine readable product catalogs via JSON-LD or an MCP server makes LLMs and Agents happy!
All of this points to the need for brands and retailers to invest quickly and heavily in the technology and services to get content and sites ready. This does cost money, however, looking at the Adobe numbers, the ROI is already proven but only for brands and retailers that make the investment. This is probably the report to take to your CFO if budgets are tight.
We at DaVinci Commerce have been building and deploying the Agentic Commerce technology needed to do this well and at scale, partnering with Accenture Song globally.
For our customers who made the investment earlier this year – this is music to their years as they are ready for the upcoming holiday shopping season For brands and retailers who have not, this would be a great time to secure budgets for this investment because after all shopping does happen all year round. Maybe be a good New Year’s Resolution to make right now!
