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AI isn’t assisting discovery. It’s rewriting it.
Explore how AI is reshaping shopper behavior — and what brands must do to stay visible.
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Use Feedonomics to connect your product data from BigCommerce, Magento, NetSuite, Shopify, and many other platforms to your Bazaarvoice dashboard.
AI doesn't ask your permission to present your information. It reads your data and it decides. If your catalog isn't in the mind of the agent, you're invisible.
That quote landed at Commerce Live earlier this year, and it's been hard to shake. Not because it's alarming — because it's accurate. The rules of product discovery have fundamentally changed, and most brands are still playing by the old ones.
In 2024 we published a white paper on why product feed management is the backbone of crucial ecommerce processes. It covered all the essentials: listing, catalog optimization, order management, data synchronization, and data protection.
In the past two years, AI-powered discovery has moved from emerging trend to present-day reality, agentic checkout has gone from concept to live pilot, and the Commerce ecosystem itself has evolved significantly with the launch of new products and partnerships. To us, these changes were significant enough to warrant a meaningful update.
So we revisited the paper, rewrote what needed rewriting, added what was missing, and brought in fresh data, new customer stories, and perspectives from Commerce Live to reflect where ecommerce actually stands right now.
Here's why the updated version is worth your time.
Generative AI-driven shopping traffic to U.S. retail sites surged 1,300% during the 2024 holiday season. By early 2026, AI-referred shoppers were converting at a 42% higher rate than non-AI traffic — a new record high. And, 39% of consumers reported that they’ve already used generative AI for online shopping, with 53% planning to increase that use.
Those numbers would have been hard to believe even a year ago. Today, they're the baseline.
Google AI Mode, ChatGPT Shopping, Perplexity, Amazon Rufus, and Walmart Sparky have become primary discovery environments for a fast-growing segment of shoppers. And the brands showing up in those results aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets, they're the ones whose product data is structured, enriched, and ready for how AI systems actually work.
That's the core argument of the updated white paper, and it runs through everything.
The original structure, eight sections covering the key processes that product feed management enables, remains intact because they haven’t changed. What has changed is what each section needs to address.
Catalog optimization has always been about making your listings more relevant and more likely to convert. What's new is that relevance now has to be built for AI systems, not just channel algorithms.
Traditional keyword optimization gets your product in front of a search bar. Semantic optimization gets it in front of an AI agent interpreting what a shopper is actually asking. The white paper walks through what that difference looks like in practice, and what your product data needs to include to bridge the gap.
Intelligent order orchestration has evolved too. The section now addresses agentic checkout, where AI agents complete transactions on behalf of consumers without them ever visiting a product page. Commerce has already enabled this for pilot merchants through its PayPal integration, and the opportunity for brands that have their real-time inventory, pricing, and fulfillment infrastructure in place is substantial.
Data synchronization gets updated to reflect that real-time accuracy is no longer just a channel performance issue, it's the infrastructure requirement for participating in agentic commerce at all. If an AI agent encounters stale pricing or inaccurate inventory, it doesn't wait. It moves to a competitor whose data it can trust.
A brand new section, AI-Powered Discovery and Agentic Commerce, ties everything together. This is where we explain what's actually happening in commerce right now, what it takes to be found in AI-native environments, and what agentic checkout means for brands at every stage of readiness.
The brands investing in AI-ready product data now aren't just positioning for the future — they're building a compounding advantage. Every catalog optimization tuned for semantic retrieval, every feed syndicated to an AI surface, every agentic checkout transaction completed — that's knowledge that accumulates.
For example, Euro Car Parts jumped at the opportunity to participate in the beta for Feedomics’ AI Data Enrichment, designed to automate the enrichment process. The team chose to test their top 100 best-selling products first to see if it delivered meaningful improvements before committing further. Today, they’re using the solution to enrich 25,000 products.
What we can see in the data, is that with the enrichment, customers have found it easier to shop with us. We always want to focus on the customer, and AI enrichment is the piece enabling us to do that.
The brands that choose to wait will be starting the race late, with less data and less time.
If the agents don't find you, you don't have the opportunity to deliver the experience you've been working so hard on. The window is closing quickly, and you need to act.
This white paper wasn’t created as a technical manual or a product pitch. It's a practical look at the processes that power modern ecommerce: listing, optimization, order orchestration, synchronization, data protection, and AI readiness, along with everything you need to know about each one to stay competitive in an environment that's moving faster than most teams can keep up with.
Brands and retailers trying to figure out what AI actually means for your day-to-day operations and agencies/partners helping clients navigate multi-channel complexity will benefit from the up-to-date information and ideas presented in Why Product Feed Management Is the Backbone of Crucial Ecommerce Processes — and the Key to AI Visibility.
If you read the earlier version and want a clear picture of what's changed and why it matters, you’ll also appreciate the new information it offers.
The brands already winning in this environment such as Cole Haan, Puma, Revelyst, Pickleball Central, and others featured in the paper, didn’t wait to see how AI commerce played out as an option. They all recognized early on that commerce was changing and that treating product data as infrastructure, not an afterthought, is the key to thriving in commerce today and in the future.
Once you as an operator understand that the opportunities out there to find your products and your company are beyond what you've even considered, and it all comes back to the oil that lubricates your store, your platforms, your processes, then that's the catalyst to say, 'All right, I've got to block out my time. I've got to get started on this. I've got to start biting off chunks of this project and understand that the project never ends.
Download your complimentary copy of Why Product Feed Management Is the Backbone of Crucial Ecommerce Processes — and the Key to AI Visibility now.
Use Feedonomics to connect your product data from BigCommerce, Magento, NetSuite, Shopify, and many other platforms to your Bazaarvoice dashboard.
Anita J. Temple
Head of Content at BigCommerce
