Owning the Shopping Research Session
Stuart Kearney, co-founder of Vetted, on AI agents in shopping
This is why the company kept moving away from classic publisher style commerce and toward a destination product. Slant could get millions of visits from Google, but that traffic sat on unstable ground, because Google increasingly answers shopping questions itself and pushes organic links lower on the page. The result is a weak business foundation for any recommendation product that does not own a repeat user habit or a direct app relationship.
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The shift from Slant to Lustre to Vetted tracks three attempts to solve the same problem with less dependence on search. Slant used community answers, Lustre used product graphs and search overlays, and Vetted is designed as a standalone shopping assistant that people return to directly for frequent, lower price decisions.
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SEO became harder not just because content was crowded, but because Google and Amazon absorbed more of the shopping journey themselves. Google rebuilt Shopping around AI generated briefs and its Shopping Graph, while Amazon expanded AI shopping discovery and merchant feeds inside its own marketplace.
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That same pressure is now hitting review publishers too. In the interview, trusted sources like Wirecutter still matter as data and brand, but incidental search traffic is fading, and AI Overviews have been associated with large click through declines for publishers when answers appear above links.
The market is heading toward fewer businesses built on ranking pages in Google, and more built on owning the research session itself. For Vetted, that means the prize is not just better recommendations, but becoming the default place where shopping intent starts, before Google results pages or merchant sites ever enter the flow.