This white paper shares new research by eClerx into how AI search is changing ecommerce visibility, examining which brands and products appear across AI-generated answers, comparisons, shortlists and recommendations.

Search once functioned as a guided path where shoppers entered a query, reviewed the results, compared product pages and made the final decision themselves.

That journey still matters but AI search is changing how products are discovered and evaluated by interpreting shopper intent, comparing options, summarizing trade-offs and narrowing recommendations before shoppers ever reach a traditional product page.

AI is expanding what it means to be visible on the digital shelf, moving influence beyond familiar measures such as rank, paid placement, content quality, price, availability, reviews and PDP performance. Brands now also need to know whether their products are clear, credible and complete enough for AI systems to interpret, compare and recommend when shoppers express a specific need.

In our whitepaper, we provide practical takeaways for brands, showing how digital shelf signals such as content depth, pricing, availability, reviews, ratings, images and video may influence recommendation readiness and what eCommerce teams need to strengthen as discovery shifts from search ranking to AI-driven product selection.