HOW AI IS CHANGING PRODUCT SEARCH – AND HOW ONLINE RETAILERS CAN REACH CUSTOMERS IN THE FUTURE
AI product search is shifting where purchase intent begins. Learn why retailers must combine SEO and GEO across platforms, marketplaces, and their sites. (Ad)
Google is losing clicks to its own AI Overviews, Amazon remains largely invisible to ChatGPT, and one in two Germans already asks a chatbot instead of a search engine. For retailers, optimizing individual channels is therefore no longer enough; they need a new visibility architecture.
Author: Jan Honsel, Chief Division Officer, Smarketer Group
The e-commerce search landscape is becoming increasingly hybrid. Traditional search engines and marketplaces may still be the most important drivers of high-intent demand, but generative AI systems, social media platforms and AI Overviews are playing an ever greater role in the earlier stages of product discovery. For online retailers and their marketing teams, this creates a new challenge: adapting to these new mechanisms without neglecting established visibility models. The question companies need to ask is shifting from the traditional “where does the user buy?” to “where does purchase intent emerge?” Businesses that ignore this shift are not risking market share tomorrow; they are already losing it today to competitors that are more rigorously rethinking their visibility architecture.
Online retailers and brands now operate within a field shaped by three forces: digital platforms, including Google Search, social media and social commerce, and increasingly LLMs and AI assistants; their own websites; and marketplaces. Each corner of this triangle follows its own market logic. None replaces the others, and none can be optimized in isolation. The strategically decisive question is therefore not “which channel?” but “how do these three forces interact, and at what point in the journey does the customer make the purchase decision?” This is precisely where most visibility strategies fail in practice: they maximize one corner of the triangle while overlooking the fact that purchase decisions today rarely develop linearly within a single channel.
PLATFORMS TAKE OVER PRODUCT DISCOVERY
Platforms increasingly deliver attention, but no longer necessarily the click – a distinction that many marketing organizations have yet to fully understand. Google remains close to the point of purchase, but is visibly losing organic reach to its own AI Overviews. According to an analysis by Seer Interactive, organic click-through rates can fall by as much as 61 percent when AI Overviews appear. This is not a marginal phenomenon, but a structural shift in the click economy. At the same time, social channels are becoming far more differentiated than could have been anticipated only a few years ago. In Germany, Meta and Instagram remain the strongest social commerce channels in terms of reach and customer relationships. TikTok, by contrast, is establishing itself as a discovery engine: within a year of its launch in March 2025, TikTok Shop had already been used by more than 15 percent of German online shoppers – an adoption rate that significantly exceeds that of many established formats. Pinterest, meanwhile, remains the planning channel with the strongest purchase intent and is therefore more strategically relevant than its overall reach might suggest.
Another, much faster-growing force is now entering the picture: AI chatbots are becoming a new product-discovery layer in the purchasing process. According to Capgemini, 59 percent of Germans already actively use AI assistants for product searches – and the figure is rising, as LLM-based advice provides the final element that e-commerce has traditionally lacked compared with physical retail. For companies and brands, the decision about which products even make it onto a customer’s shortlist is therefore increasingly being made outside their own controlled channels, in the dialogue between the user and an AI system.
MARKETPLACES REMAIN CRITICAL TO PURCHASE DECISIONS
Despite this shift, marketplaces such as Amazon remain the high-intent core of e-commerce: more than 60 percent of consumers still begin their product search there – for now. However, this reach is rented rather than owned, because margins, customer data and customer relationships remain largely with the marketplace operator. This is hardly a new insight, but it has acquired fresh urgency in the AI era. There is also a strategically significant limitation: because Amazon consistently blocks AI crawlers, its listings rarely appear in ChatGPT and comparable systems. What may look like competitive protection in the short term could prove counterproductive in the medium term – making alternative visibility surfaces all the more important for retailers that do not want to depend exclusively on marketplaces.
This is precisely why a company’s own website is regaining considerable importance after years in which many visibility strategies reduced it to little more than a conversion page. It remains the only asset a company controls in full: crucial for margins, brand management, customer relationships and, above all, first-party data, which is becoming the most powerful targeting advantage in a world without third-party cookies. At the same time, the company website or online store is the source of the structured product data that feeds shopping ads today and will supply AI agents directly in the future. Through OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol, retailers can already feed their product data directly into ChatGPT. In practical terms, the product feed is becoming the brand’s new “AI contract” – and will increasingly determine whether an AI system can recommend a product at all.
WHY SEO AND GEO MUST WORK TOGETHER
This development is fundamentally changing how visibility is managed – and it is also where the biggest strategic mistake occurs in practice. The assumption that GEO can replace SEO, or vice versa, is wrong because the two disciplines solve different problems. SEO continues to ensure that pages rank and users click; it owns the transactional moment at the end of the customer journey. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), by contrast, helps AI systems understand, cite and recommend a brand. This brand awareness develops much earlier, often before the user ever visits a website. Both disciplines share the same foundation of clean, structured data, but they use different levers: GEO depends on entities, third-party authority and up-to-date content. According to Ahrefs, brand mentions on third-party websites correlate around three times more strongly with AI visibility than traditional backlinks – a finding that calls many established link-building strategies into question.
The practical consequence is clear: companies that focus solely on SEO lose the upstream discovery phase in which the choice of brand is first made. Those that focus exclusively on GEO, however, still lose the purchase itself – at least for the time being – because transactions generally continue to take place through traditional search engines, marketplaces or the company’s own website.
WHY SPECIALIST PARTNERS ARE NEEDED NOW
In my experience, this need to manage everything simultaneously overwhelms most in-house online marketing and e-commerce teams – not because they lack expertise, but simply because of capacity constraints. Few companies can master Amazon, paid search, social media, GEO and data architecture at expert level at the same time, while also orchestrating them consistently across an end-to-end customer journey. This comprehensive orchestration is precisely where specialist partners add value: deep expertise in each platform, a cross-channel view of data and the consistent maintenance of the product data that is becoming the brand’s new AI contract. The role of agencies is therefore shifting noticeably from campaign service provider to architect of visibility and profitable growth. In the future, they will need to focus clearly on growth, performance and profitability rather than simply maximizing reach.
The challenge for the coming years is therefore clearly defined: e-commerce companies that rely on a single search model or visibility mechanism will lose reach precisely where discovery turns into revenue. Platforms create demand, marketplaces provide reach, and a company’s own website protects margins, data and customer relationships. Businesses must provide guidance wherever product discovery turns into purchase intent, while consistently using their control over website and feed data to support their own objectives. Those that build this complex architecture now will secure an advantage that will be extremely difficult to catch up with in the years ahead.
About the author
Jan Honsel is Chief Division Officer at the Smarketer Group, one of Europe’s leading performance marketing agencies. The experienced digital marketing expert has extensive expertise in performance marketing, e-commerce and AI-driven product search.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jan-honsel/
https://www.smarketer.de/
About Smarketer Group
The Smarketer Group has established itself as a leading performance marketing provider in the DACH region and supports more than 1,500 clients with a team of over 350 employees. The group offers comprehensive solutions in Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, social media advertising, Amazon marketing, holistic marketing strategy consulting and data-driven business intelligence. The Smarketer Group’s internal agency network includes Smarketer for performance marketing with Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising; AMZELL, a consultancy specialising in Amazon advertising and product marketing; WLO.Social, a specialist in social media advertising and community building; summ-it, a partner for data analytics and business intelligence; and SMAWAX, which focuses on holistic marketing strategies and cross-channel campaign planning. Close cooperation among the specialist agencies enables the development of tailored, comprehensive solutions that can flexibly adapt to dynamic market requirements. Through this close collaboration and the strong growth achieved since EMH Partners invested in 2022, the group has become one of the leading digital marketing platforms.
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This article is part of a winner’s prize at the E-commerce Germany Awards 2026. If you’d like to learn more about the awards, visit this website:
