Finding Products Online is Changing

Written by Nicholas Teodori , Director of Product Management, Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Artificial intelligence is changing how users find products faster than ever. Generative AI continues to influence the tools consumers use to find products online, and that trend doesn’t seem to be stopping. Users grow more accustomed to searching with long-tail queries on both search engines and online shops directly by the day. 

Merchants will need to continuously evolve with the ecosystem as the technology and user landscape shifts. That means keeping up with these fast-moving innovations. Here are some things I’m paying attention to from the last year:

SearchGPT emerged. 

Early previews indicate that SearchGPT favors content-heavy review and list articles. This could elevate the importance of long-form content and respective links to your site, especially as these often aim to address specific intents hidden in a long tail.

Google SGE and commerce

Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) continues to double-down on its commerce layouts, taking a bigger space in the browse part of the journey. Product pages take on higher importance in SEO with these generative layouts taking some of the space in the user journey that category pages used to fill. Integrations to Google’s tools and accurate schema markup are more important than ever, and backlinks to these pages.

“Conversational queries are gradually becoming more common in many search contexts.”

Users grow more comfortable with conversational queries. 

Of course, users are getting ever more accustomed to typing anything into a search bar and getting good responses. Conversational queries are gradually becoming more common in many search contexts. A full conversational interface isn’t needed to address this—simply showing relevant results powered by semantic search is enough to move the needle here as new patterns continue to emerge.

These challenges must be met with a commerce platform that looks to the future by integrating generative AI throughout the entire platform.

Takeaways

The landscape for online consumers is evolving quickly with major players in generative AI staking claims in search, content marketing, and user experience. Long-form content like reviews and list articles, updated product pages, and accurate search results through semantic search to keep up with growing comfort by consumers with conversational search queries can keep you competitive as the industry continues adopting generative AI. Learn more about Commerce AI tools.

Nicholas Teodori is the product lead for search and SEO in Commerce Cloud. He has worked in many industries in the ecommerce and digital experience domain and loves to geek out talking about new innovations. Nick is based in San Francisco, but you can often find him traveling around the world, usually skiing or eating.