TL;DRA study of 9,720 ecommerce stores by AI commerce company Recomaze ran 58,320 product queries through Google Gemini. Six in ten stores were recommended for nothing, and the recommendations that did happen scattered across more than 50,000 brands.
Shoppers are starting to ask AI assistants what to buy, not just how to spell a word or what to cook for dinner. A new study suggests that when they do, most online stores are nowhere in the answer.
The research, from AI commerce company Recomaze, ran six purchase-intent queries against each of 9,720 ecommerce stores through Google Gemini, 58,320 tests in all. In 60% of cases the store was recommended for nothing. Across every test, a store was named just 14% of the time. The rest of the time the assistant pointed the shopper to a competitor, or named no store at all.
The question is becoming less abstract by the month, as Amazon, Google and others push AI assistants deeper into how people find and buy things. When the answer to “what should I buy” is a short list of names rather than a page of links, being one of those names is the new version of ranking on the first page. The study’s argument is that most catalogues were written for human readers and for Google, not for an engine that has to read a product, understand it, and recommend it on a shopper’s behalf.
