May 22, 2025
“Everything has changed – Absolutely nothing’s changed”
“Everything has changed – Absolutely nothing’s changed”
Corduroy, Pearl Jam
(For the Pearl Jam purists in the room – I know the lyrics on the album is “Everything has chains” but Eddie sings it both ways in concerts. So there.)
Over the last 2 months – starting with Gavin, and then Brian, and most recently Martin --- and this morning Krystina – I’ve had the conversation that everyone should be thinking about:
How is agentic search going to change eCommerce?
There is a seemingly dogmatic duality on the topic… on one side, let’s call them the futurists:
“There will be no brand sites in 3-5 years. Everyone will just talk to ChatGPT/Perplexity/Whatever and buy there. Haven’t you seen… they’ve all just released shopping!!”
On the other side, let’s call them the capitalists:
“Sure, ChatGPT/Perplexity/Whatever are a thing… but we’re just gonna end up buying adds and playing this BS game of Paid/Organic that we’ve been playing on every platform since the beginning of time."
So, which is true?
At the core of this question is how we discover things and shop… so let’s just take a walk down memory lane.
Radio, Television, Newspaper, Billboards, Search Engines + The Internet at Large, Social Media, App Marketplaces, Whatever TikTok is, Amazon, Video platforms like YouTube… There have been lots of places over the years where we find things and buy them.
And they’re all basically monetized the same way.
Ads.
Yes, whether we like it or not – we’ve all had the following exchange with ourselves:
“This is it! This is the platform (Instagram was a popular guess at the time) that I won’t have ad……... AWWWWWWWWW MAN!”
And then we, the consumer public, are outraged that the people that built this thing we love have the audacity to monetize it.
Do you believe that ChatGPT is different? It’s impossible to know, but it is worth noting their recent hire… who used to run Facebook App… which was monetized by ads.
Where does this all end up? Well, the honest answer is you need to plan for both outcomes on the ad-apocalypse/capitalism-business-as-usual continuum… as per the usual with a rapidly changing technology, a certain amount of alacrity is necessary.
On one side, you need to be discoverable to the agentic world. This is early days SEO stuff… just switch the S for an A. Business will be built by being good at this. And it’s FREE… FOREVER (just kidding). But just like it was hard to displace people from P1 on Google – or P1 on Amazon PLP listings – it will probably be hard to displace people entrenched in GPT et. Al’s algorithm
And you also need to prepare for the world where you’re gonna be buying ads and sending folks to your website in droves that your bosses and their bosses are going to be asking that same (somewhat stupid) question that we’ve been asking for 20+ years:
“WHAT WAS MY LAST CLICK ROI!?”
So here’s the punchline:
I will follow this post with a post early next week going deeper on AEO so we can all hold hands on what having a strategy really means. Stay tuned!
