AI Shopping Agents Replacing Google
Stuart Kearney, co-founder of Vetted, on AI agents in shopping
This is what makes shopping a real candidate to become its own destination instead of a feature inside general search. Amazon did not just win product lookup, it bundled search with trust signals that matter at the moment of purchase, fast shipping, predictable returns, reviews, and a checkout flow people already know. That turned shopping from a Google referral use case into a habit people start directly on a commerce platform.
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The key difference is workflow depth. General search is good at finding pages, but shopping requires narrowing millions of SKUs into one buyable item, then confirming merchant quality, delivery speed, price, and return terms. That favors a purpose built interface over ten blue links.
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Consumer behavior followed that product design. In 2024, 56% of consumers started product searches on Amazon versus 42% on search engines, showing that product discovery itself had shifted away from Google for a large share of purchase intent, not just checkout.
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That is the opening AI shopping companies are chasing now. OpenAI added product recommendations to ChatGPT search in April 2025, and later added Instant Checkout, which shows that the next battle is not web search overall, but who owns the research to purchase path inside high intent categories.
The market is heading toward specialized agents that combine recommendation quality with transaction reliability. The winner will look less like a classic search engine and more like a trusted buying assistant, one that can ask follow up questions, compare options clearly, and hand off or complete checkout without breaking user trust.