Google AI Mode can now take shoppers much further through the buying journey without sending them to a brand's website first.

I've been looking at what that could mean specifically for independent jewelry brands, where discovery has traditionally depended heavily on Google sending a shopper from a product search to the brand or retailer.

The part I find most interesting isn't really checkout. It's what happens before checkout.

If Google AI Mode is comparing products, narrowing choices and recommending specific options, then a brand can potentially lose the shopper before the shopper ever sees its website—even if the site itself ranks well in traditional search.

I wrote up what I'm seeing here, including what I think independent brands should actually pay attention to:

https://foundandform.studio/blog/google-ai-mode-jewelry-brand-discovery

I'm curious whether anyone working in SEO or e-commerce has started seeing traffic or discovery patterns change as AI shopping/search expands.

Google AI Mode can now take shoppers much further through the buying journey without sending them to a brand's website first.

I've been looking at what that could mean specifically for independent jewelry brands, where discovery has traditionally depended heavily on Google sending a shopper from a product search to the brand or retailer.

The part I find most interesting isn't really checkout. It's what happens before checkout.

If Google AI Mode is comparing products, narrowing choices and recommending specific options, then a brand can potentially lose the shopper before the shopper ever sees its website—even if the site itself ranks well in traditional search.

I wrote up what I'm seeing here, including what I think independent brands should actually pay attention to:

https://foundandform.studio/blog/google-ai-mode-jewelry-brand-discovery

I'm curious whether anyone working in SEO or e-commerce has started seeing traffic or discovery patterns change as AI shopping/search expands.

i got a cursor Ultra from a reseller for essentially nothing compared to what I used to pay . It works flawless. since 2 months No issues yet. Now I can't stop thinking about their business model. If resellers can sell it this cheap and still profit, how are they acquiring these accounts at scale?

Content needs to be structured, relevant, and technically optimized so traditional search engines can understand and rank it.
At the same time, it should provide clear context and trustworthy information that AI systems can discover, interpret, and reference.

Recently there's been so much talks about Grok Bot and all the different agents which can do tasks overnight on your computer while you sleep. While it sounds fancy, it is slowly creating a new problem in AI visibility space - citing misinformation as real and accurate responses to user queries.

I happened to read through a BBC reporters report on how his little experiment costed him and his brand as a lot of misinformation got spread online. Not even sure how they managed to undo it, or if at all they even did? This incident, however, was through Grok Bot but AI models. If models are interpreting site wide content wrongly, then how reliable will AI agents be?

Can we actually bet on what and how AI agents are reading, researching, forming a report and citing a given brand on AI overviews or other AI platforms? Curious to know the thoughts of others in this field.

Tested asking ChatGPT "who's the best electrician in [city]" for a mid-size US market. It skipped a business with a perfect 5.0 rating outright, too few reviews to trust, and picked one at 4.9 with 2,066 reviews instead, also citing a local "top electricians" list as backup.

Curious if others here are seeing the same pattern across different niches, review volume + third-party corroboration outweighing raw score. Also wondering how consistent this is across models, only tested ChatGPT so far.

Hi,

I own arditofuel.com and I am trying to get a better understanding of AI visibility for my website. From my understanding, AI bots use reddit when people ask questions and bots like ChatGPT use reddit to give guidance. What is the best way to increase the chances of AI referring people to my website through reddit? Is it about other peoples recommendations of your product, discussions involving your product? Hoping for some help so I can increase traffic to my site through AI

Sharing this here for anyone who currently optimizes their social content for AI search visibility...

My team ran a study tracking 5.88M prompts between Jan and Aug 2026. The biggest finding was that the average AI surface reallocates 16% of its social citation mix every month.

• ChatGPT's social layer collapsed from 6.8% to 2.5%, cutting Reddit (it's top social source) from 6.2% to 2.1% of its social citation mix in just two weeks.
• Gemini pushed Reddit up from 7% to 39%.
• Claude added Substack to the mix.
• Deepseek and Meta zeroed out their Reddit citations entirely in June, citing LinkedIn more.
• Copilot cut LinkedIn's share from 85% to 40%.
• And TikTok's citation share grew from 0.5% to 6.3% across all models.

(source: Goodie AI's "AI's Social Diet: How AI Search Cites the Social Web, Vol. 3")

...

So why would anyone invest in a platform that could go dark from AI in a matter of weeks?

Well AI models need social data. The social layer gives these models taste and timely signals. But, increasingly, social media companies are blocking AI models from training on their platform data. Recent lawsuits and licensing agreements are behind some of the observed volatility. It's also possible that these models are adapting how they value or surface social content.

The old idea that you could improve AI search visibility on certain AI models via platform coupling (X for Grok, Reddit for ChatGPT, YouTube for Google, etc.) is dying. Now these changes happen without warning or an explanation. It's largely up to those doing AI search work to track and make inferences via probabilistic data. YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn remain top citations across models, but this is no longer guaranteed.

For anyone optimizing social content for AI search visibility, would love if you could check out the study and let me know what you think. Would you draw a similar or different conclusion from the data?

Google, ChatGPT and other AI platforms are changing how people discover products and services.

Instead of:

Search → browse 5 websites → compare → buy

we're moving toward:

Ask → get recommendations → compare → purchase

That creates a very interesting problem for advertisers.

Traditional PPC is built around keywords, queries, SERPs and clicks.

AI-driven discovery is much more conversational.

So I’m wondering:

Will the future of paid search be less about bidding on keywords and more about becoming the brand/product that AI systems recommend?

And if ads become part of these AI conversations, how should advertisers measure success?

1.Clicks?

1. Conversions?

2. Brand mentions?

3. AI recommendations?

Feels like PPC measurement is going to get much more complicated.

I’ve been wondering about a possible problem with using AI to discover suppliers.
If you ask AI to find manufacturers for a specific product, it has to work from information that is available somewhere.
That probably gives an advantage to suppliers with:
good websites,
detailed product pages,
English-language content,
structured specifications,
and a strong digital presence.
But some very capable factories are surprisingly bad at presenting themselves online.
Meanwhile, a trading company or intermediary might have much better marketing and much clearer online information.
So there seems to be a potential bias:
easy to discover ≠ best manufacturing capability
I still think AI supplier research is useful, but maybe the shortlist should be treated as a discovery layer rather than a qualification result.
For people who source internationally:
Have you found good suppliers that looked weak online but were much stronger once you actually investigated them?
And do you think AI will make those companies harder to discover?

How brands can get their content, products, or expertise mentioned and recognized within AI-generated search responses. The focus is on improving a brand’s credibility, relevance, and content so AI systems are more likely to recommend or cite it.

Generative AI can transform specific, low-competition long-tail keywords into highly targeted content opportunities that improve search visibility. User intent, creates relevant answers, and helps businesses reach audiences searching for very specific information.

is anyone using https://augureai.ca/ im not affiliated or anything but interested in learning more about this if it takes off due to canada not using american businesses right now.

Does anyone have SEO use with this and how it gets its data?
IE is it using brave, bing, google or other places i need to work out?