We all know AI is quickly becoming a permanent part of the online shipping journey, but 2026 promises to be the year it becomes commonplace for the average shopper, not just early adopters and experimenters. It will be imperative that ecommerce brands understand how their store and products appear in AI results, if they do at all.

Brands should carefully evaluate and scrutinize all aspects of their website, from product listing to schema markup, to ensure they are relevant in search results. They then need to evaluate how their products are displayed, the ways consumers interact with their online touchpoints once discovered, and what the typical conversion path looks like. If any point in the process is not smooth, they should fix it.

As AI becomes a common shopping gateway, brands that optimize for discovery and own their customer relationships will pull ahead.

In this evolution, AI results are not the only things that matter, how brands continue to communicate with shoppers is also important. There needs to be an added emphasis by ecommerce brands to maximize the value of website visitors, such as by collecting email addresses and mobile numbers. As more shoppers turn to AI, the fewer direct brand interactions exist, making high-ROI retargeting, such as through email marketing, increasingly important.

While the customer journey is changing, it’s changing in a way that makes everyone take notice at once. This gives small brands the same insights and opportunities to evolve as large ones. Those who find themselves trailing will likely only do so because they chose to ignore the change, not adapt to it.