Five Actions Digital Retailers Must Take Now to Win in the Era of AI-Driven Shopping

This IDC Perspective explains why the traditional search playbook is losing relevance and why digital retailers must adapt before AI-mediated discovery becomes the dominant customer starting point. AI is reshaping how shoppers discover products, and retailers are seeing the effects in real time. As agentic discovery grows, impressions rise while traffic declines because users stay inside AI environments that summarize research for them. Classic attribution breaks, midfunnel behavior collapses, and branded pages shift from destinations to data sources.IDC outlines five actions retailers must take now to stay visible, trusted, and competitive within AI-driven shopping journeys. These include treating Google AI Shopping as part of a unified GEO strategy, strengthening content and product data supply chains, improving schema and feed quality, designing assets for conversational and visual discovery, and adding continuous measurement across content systems. This document previews how retailers can regain influence within AI layers that control early consideration and how better structure, clarity, and governance can help brands remain present when the assistant, not the shopper, decides what to surface."The traditional search funnel is collapsing into a single conversational layer. Retailers that still measure success through last-click models will miss where influence is actually occurring," says Heather Hershey, research director of AI-Enabled Digital Commerce at IDC. "In an agentic environment, the question is not whether customers see you, but whether AI systems understand you well enough to consider your brand relevant to the consumer's highly subjective and complex longtail search prompts in the LLM interface."