{"id":643286,"date":"2026-05-02T15:48:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-02T15:48:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/643286\/"},"modified":"2026-05-02T15:48:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-02T15:48:09","slug":"as-ai-upends-shopping-retailers-tailor-their-pitches-for-chatbots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/643286\/","title":{"rendered":"As AI upends shopping, retailers tailor their pitches for chatbots"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

More than half of Canadians have used AI for a shopping-related task, such as researching and comparing products, according to a survey released this year by marketing technology company Omnisend.Illustration by The Globe and Mail. Sources: iStockPhoto\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

More than two decades ago, as search engines opened up the internet, brands took some of their first, toddling steps to get noticed online.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou would add all kinds of fake keywords at the end in white letters on white background,\u201d said Matthieu Houle, chief information officer at the Montreal-based Aldo Group shoes and accessories chain. Retailers crammed their web pages with terms invisible to human visitors, but designed to catch the attention of the crawlers that power the likes of Ask Jeeves, Yahoo and Google.<\/p>\n

Today, executives such as Mr. Houle are grappling with another major shift, as artificial-intelligence-powered chatbots upend the way consumers find information online. Shoppers looking for a wedding outfit or the best running shoes for wide feet are not asking Jeeves; they\u2019re asking ChatGPT.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

More than half of Canadians have used AI for a shopping-related task, such as researching and comparing products, according to a survey released this year<\/a> by marketing technology company Omnisend. Another 48 per cent said that ChatGPT offered better recommendations than search engines. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a new customer on the web, and that\u2019s an AI agent,\u201d said Hamish Gunasekara, co-founder of San Francisco-based startup Catalog, which works with retailers to tailor their product information for chatbots \u2013 taking websites designed for humans and making them easier to process for AI applications, including information invisible to a human consumer. <\/p>\n

Marketers who have spent years becoming experts in SEO, or search engine optimization, now have to become versed in generative engine optimization (GEO), a term that didn\u2019t exist until two years ago. The goal is to get recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude. In effect, companies are trying to influence the chatbots to influence you, the consumer.<\/p>\n

For retailers, the shift brings uncertainty. Companies are revamping their content to boost visibility with chatbots while startups are selling their own services to help brands \u2014 even as it\u2019s not precisely clear why chatbots say the things they do. These applications can give different answers each time a question is asked, too, meaning that brands hoping for mentions are playing a game of odds to some extent.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not something companies can ignore.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt won\u2019t take very long for most of the traffic on the web to be driven by chat,\u201d said Gil Luria, a veteran technology industry analyst with D.A. Davidson & Co. \u201c…This is going to be very, very transformative to online commerce.\u201d<\/p>\n

For retailers looking to be found online, a paradox of this new world is that AI assistants \u2013 which are not human \u2013 seem to prioritize content that sounds more human. Chatbots are trained to divine the meaning and intent behind questions, and to return relevant answers. That means retailers have to write about their products in ways that match the sorts of questions consumers are likely to ask.<\/p>\n

\u201cInstead of saying \u2018red dress,\u2019 it\u2019s \u2018red dress for a party,\u2019\u201d said Dave Stevens, chief technology officer at Montreal-based fashion retailer Groupe Dynamite Inc. His team has found that many AI agents respond better to information about the customers\u2019 needs than to a hard sales pitch. \u201cIt\u2019s more contextual.\u201d <\/p>\n

We tried to buy sweaters with AI. Here\u2019s how it went<\/a><\/p>\n

Mr. Houle\u2019s team at Aldo is moving from including tags such as \u201cbrown\u201d and \u201cleather\u201d to providing more information about how to wear shoes with certain outfits and other how-to guides. Aldo has also realized it may need to publish customer reviews, which its website currently lacks. \u201cIt\u2019s really thirsty for user-generated content,\u201d Mr. Houle said.<\/p>\n

But because AI models rely on information pulled from across the internet, every critical blog post and scathing Reddit thread can help to shape their answers.<\/p>\n

So, to influence what chatbots say, companies have to produce a lot of written content \u2013 some of it for their own websites, but also sponsored content in other outlets and media coverage from established publications. Some marketers say this is adding more weight to their public relations strategy. <\/p>\n

At Canadian Tire Corp. Ltd., for example, communications executives may not have played as prominent a role in marketing meetings in the past, but they are now seen as \u201ca critical element of that team,\u201d said Ilana Santone, the retailer\u2019s senior vice-president of business and AI transformation. <\/p>\n

\u201cYou have to be much more broad in terms of your thinking on how you build that brand credibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of these techniques are grounded in research. In 2024, academics from Princeton University and the Indian Institute of Technology published a paper<\/a> that coined the term GEO, and they found that AI pulled from content that included citations, quotations and statistics. Further research has shown that FAQs and bullet points can help, too, as does updating content regularly.<\/p>\n

A number of startups are now promising to have mastered these techniques to help brands ensure visibility. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

New York-based Evertune Inc. is just one firm that has popped up to advise clients on structuring content in an AI-friendly way. Evertune now has more than 100 customers, including advertising agency WPP PLC and Canada Goose Holdings Inc. The firm has built an automated process to run about 150 million prompts each month, across multiple AI models, to gather data on how chatbots surface Evertune\u2019s clients\u2019 brands.<\/p>\n

But Evertune\u2019s chief product officer, Ed Chater, acknowledges that some of this is outside retailers\u2019 control, because AI agents are learning from third-party sources \u201cat a faster rate\u201d than on brand websites.<\/p>\n

Vancouver-based luggage brand Monos runs its own test prompts, such as \u201cshow me the best carry-on\u201d or \u201cI\u2019m moving my daughter into her university dorm, what do I need?\u201d to see how the brand appears in chatbot responses. The results can vary widely depending on which AI platform is queried.<\/p>\n

\u201cBetween the four or five phrases that we like to test on, we would show up, like, 33 to 50 per cent of the time in the list,\u201d said chief executive officer Victor Tam. \u201c…There\u2019s definitely no winning at all times.\u201d <\/p>\n

To see how much chatbot responses can differ, The Globe and Mail ran a small experiment by writing an automated script to ask ChatGPT and Claude for product recommendations across five categories. The script asked each question 10 times to each bot.<\/p>\n

How AI is transforming work at Canada\u2019s biggest companies<\/a><\/p>\n

Claude recommended a wider variety than ChatGPT. When asked about backpacks suitable for work and travel, for example, Claude surfaced 18 brands and 38 retailers. ChatGPT recommended only four brands and a single retailer: Best Buy. <\/p>\n

The platforms also favoured different products. Asked for a beginner skin-care routine for a man in his 40s, Claude recommended CeraVe in all 10 of its responses; ChatGPT mentioned it in only two. It also suggested buying products from Best Buy again, which isn\u2019t exactly known for skin care.<\/p>\n

Even asking the same question to the same chatbot will yield different responses. ChatGPT recommended Saucony running shoes in four of its answers, but left them out the other six times.<\/p>\n

As Monos looks to surface in AI answers, it has seen some early results from changes to its website it made a few months ago. It now publishes more how-to guides, on subjects such as choosing carry-on luggage, advice on \u201cscuffs and scratches,\u201d and a list of carry-on size limits by airline. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we put stuff like that out, we can see in AI results, it\u2019s pulling that data,\u201d Mr. Tam said.<\/p>\n

Vancouver-based outdoor retailer Mountain Equipment Co. has been doing some similar work, taking blog content that it has produced for years \u2013 but that had been buried on its website \u2013 and updating it. Those articles are now featured more prominently, part of an effort to emphasize the expertise of MEC\u2019s (human) staff, but also to appeal to AI search. They feature subjects such as how to pack a backpack and tips for safer bear country travel.<\/p>\n

\u201cTypically, if we get asked those things on the store, then Claude or ChatGPT is getting asked those too,\u201d said Michele Guimond, MEC\u2019s vice-president of marketing. \u201cSo, we need to make sure that the top questions are in there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Canadian Tire has been changing how it describes products on its site, both in the content that is customer-facing and in the script that speaks to AI large language models. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re taking a very open approach to allowing AI systems to access and interpret our content,\u201d Ms. Santone said. <\/p>\n

Still, for all of the attention on GEO, some people in the field argue the concept is overblown. Thenuka Karunaratne, co-founder of marketing technology startup Daydream Labs Inc., offers SEO and GEO services. But maximizing visibility for AI involves many of the same fundamentals as traditional search engine optimization, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnyone that says they can get you to number one on ChatGPT is definitely a liar,\u201d Mr. Karunaratne said. \u201cYou can increase the probability, but you cannot guarantee it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amid all this hype, there is also a potential worry for consumers: Research is emerging that shows that chatbots can be more persuasive than traditional search engines.<\/p>\n

Academics at Princeton recently devised an experiment<\/a> to measure chatbots\u2019 influence on purchasing decisions: Participants shopped for e-books, with some typing in an online search and others conversing with chatbots. Some titles were engineered to appear at the top of the search results, while the chatbots were prompted to persuade participants to choose certain books. <\/p>\n

Around 61 per cent of participants chose the book promoted by the chatbots; only 22 per cent picked the top result when using internet search engines. Even when a \u201csponsored\u201d tag was placed next to a book shilled by a chatbot, 55.5 per cent of participants still opted for it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was quite surprised by the magnitude of the effects that we found,\u201d said Francesco Salvi, a Princeton PhD student and lead author of the study.<\/p>\n

The findings highlight the need for regulation, according to Mr. Salvi, especially as companies such as OpenAI experiment with advertising inside ChatGPT. AI applications need oversight to ensure they are not tailored to manipulate consumers, he said. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t know what\u2019s going on inside of them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: More than half of Canadians have used AI for a shopping-related task, such…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":643287,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61,5756],"class_list":["post-643286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology","tag-yesapplenews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=643286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643286\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/643287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=643286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=643286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=643286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}