The middle of the eCommerce funnel, i.e. long the domain of comparison sites, product roundups and affiliate marketing, is being hollowed out. AI-powered shopping “agents” from OpenAI, Google, Perplexity and Microsoft are now intercepting customers before they ever reach a retailer’s website.

From Search to Agents

For two decades, brands and affiliates alike have fought for visibility on search engines, investing resources in SEO, content, and paid ads to capture intent-rich queries. Now, AI agents are not only interpreting those queries but executing them. Instead of a shopper typing “best running shoes” into Google and clicking on an affiliate blog post, they might ask an AI assistant to “find me trainers for marathon training under £120 and order them.”

The funnel is about to collapse. Research, shortlisting and even checkout can take place within the AI layer, leaving both retailers and affiliates on the margins.

A New Battleground for Visibility

Marketers are scrambling to understand how products are selected for inclusion in chatbot responses. Traditional SEO signals like site speed and keyword relevance still matter (especially for BOFU terms, but agents increasingly privilege semantic cues: “outfits for a wedding in the south of France” rather than “blue cocktail dress.” This shift requires brands and affiliates to restructure their catalogues, rethink their descriptions, and reorient their value proposition.

For affiliates, the challenge is existential. Their business model has depended on intercepting shoppers in the research stage and funnelling them to retailers. If the “answer engine” does that job natively, affiliate sites risk losing their audience entirely.

Why Amazon Isn’t Losing Sleep

Amazon sits apart from this turbulence. For millions of consumers, it is the default shopping endpoint, the place where carts are checked out, regardless of how discovery happens. AI agents may recommend products, but more often than not, they will still funnel users into Amazon’s vast marketplace. That leaves Amazon largely insulated, even as it experiments with its own AI-driven shopping tools.

The real squeeze is on smaller retailers and niche D2C brands, who have relied on organic discovery and affiliate channels to compete. If agents bypass that middle layer, these businesses risk being invisible. Their challenge is twofold: optimising for AI visibility, and finding ways to maintain direct customer relationships in a landscape increasingly dominated by a handful of platforms.

Implications for Retailers and Affiliates

If Gartner is right and search volumes fall by a quarter within the next year, middle-of-funnel eCommerce will look very different. Shoppers will skip product pages and affiliate “best-of” lists. Agents will become the intermediaries that both gate and guide consumer choice.

For affiliates, commission-based models may be eroded as transactions are completed inside chatbots rather than via tracked referral links. For smaller retailers, the stakes are even higher: losing visibility could mean losing customers altogether.

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The Rise of AI Shopping Avatars

In China, the story is already moving a step further. AI-powered shopping avatars are fronting livestreams on TikTok Shop and other platforms, pitching products around the clock. They never sleep, never tire, and can be endlessly replicated. For brands that promise relentless reach and efficiency. For human sellers, it raises difficult questions: how do you compete with an agent that can sell 24/7 without fatigue? And what does it mean when the persuasive role of the salesperson – once the heart of retail – becomes automated?

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The Bigger Picture

The rise of AI shopping agents isn’t just a technological shift; it’s a reallocation of power in eCommerce. Amazon will endure. Affiliates and smaller retailers, by contrast, face a reckoning. Those that adapt early – rewriting product data, experimenting with semantic search, and building strategies for agent-led commerce – stand a chance of staying in view.

For the rest, the danger is stark: the funnel narrows, the agent intermediates, and visibility vanishes.

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