AI Shopping Agents Reward Product Quality
Stuart Kearney, co-founder of Vetted, on AI agents in shopping
The big shift is that AI shopping agents can move competition away from who buys the most visibility and toward who actually makes the best product. In today’s marketplace model, brands often pay for placement through sponsored listings, affiliate fees, and other conversion tools before a shopper even compares the item itself. Vetted’s pitch is that if the recommendation layer becomes trusted and independent, more of that spend can flow back into product quality, price, and merchant economics.
-
Amazon helped teach merchants that discovery itself is a product they must buy. Amazon reports tens of billions in advertising services revenue, and adjacent marketplace software like Mirakl Ads is built on the same idea, that seller demand for placement is one of e-commerce’s richest revenue streams.
-
What Vetted is trying to replace is not checkout or fulfillment first, but the messy research step. Its product works across a site, app, and browser extension, and uses many model calls plus outside review sources to narrow choices, compare variants, and send high intent traffic to the merchant that already knows how to fulfill the order.
-
This changes what merchants optimize for. Instead of stuffing product pages for search rankings or bidding for sponsored slots, they need clean machine readable data, accurate stock, delivery speed, return terms, and evidence that a specific SKU is a good fit for a specific buyer. The merchant page becomes an input to an agent, not just a page for humans.
If agent led shopping keeps improving, the winners will be brands with genuinely better products and merchants with the cleanest operational data. The economic center of commerce will move upstream from ad auctions to recommendation quality, and downstream to checkout and payment rails that can reliably complete the order.