Summary

• AI search is here, and $750bn in revenue is at stake.
• Discoverability is no longer just a marketing problem – it starts with what you buy, price, and promote.
• For merchandising and buying teams, the right assortment decisions are now visibility decisions.
  

The search landscape just changed. Is your assortment built for it?

Half of consumers now use AI-powered search. ChatGPT is closing in on one billion weekly users, Google’s AI Overviews already serve more than a billion people — and both are answering questions before a single link is clicked.

The behavioural shift behind those numbers is just as striking. A recent Bain & Company study found that 80% of consumers rely on AI summaries for at least 40% of their searches. Traditional website clicks are already down by up to 25% as a result.

This isn’t a trend to hand off to marketing. For merchandising and buying teams, it’s a structural shift in how customers discover products and whether yours show up at all.

The connection most brands are missing

Most brands are solving the wrong problem. Optimising content for AI search matters,  but it’s the second move, not the first.

AI search doesn’t reward good copy. It reflects real demand and the products consumers are actively searching for, comparing, and choosing. If your range doesn’t match that demand, there’s nothing to surface.

That means visibility is now decided on the buying floor, not the content team. For example, a product ordered six months too late, in the wrong colourway, at the wrong price point, won’t appear in AI-generated recommendations – no matter how well it’s description is written up. 

Three commercial decisions that now shape your search visibility

The first move is building an assortment that reflects what the market wants right now AND next. 

1. Assortment: Are you stocking what customers are searching for?

AI search rewards relevance. When a consumer asks an AI tool to recommend products, the answer reflects real market demand. Brands whose assortments align with emerging search behaviour show up. 

This means:

• Assortment planning needs to be anchored in real-time trend data and consumer behaviour – not just internal sell-through or lagging trade reports.
• Ranges need to reflect what’s gaining traction across competitor assortments and search behaviour before it peaks.

EDITED’s market intelligence gives teams that visibility early and in real-time – so your range is there when demand arrives, not after.

2. Pricing: Are you competitively positioned when AI compares options?

AI search increasingly does the comparison work for consumers. When tools surface product recommendations, pricing is a key signal — both for relevance and credibility. For merchandisers, this makes competitive price positioning a discoverability fundamental.

• A brand priced significantly above market without a clear rationale is easy to deprioritise by an algorithm or a shopper.
• Real-time visibility into competitor pricing lets teams see exactly where they sit relative to the market.

EDITED’s pricing analysis tools and AI summaries support faster, more confident decisions about when to hold, adjust, or promote based on your market.

3. Trend timing: Are you early enough to show up when demand spikes?

AI search amplifies momentum. When a trend breaks, search volume builds quickly, and brands already in that space get the visibility; being late is a costly mistake for your brand.

The challenge:

• Buying cycles can be long, which means the window between spotting a trend and having a product on-site is short.
• Acting on early signals – across competitor assortment, cultural shifts, social traction, and sell-out data – is the difference between leading and following.

EDITED surfaces trend signals early enough to act,  and gives you the data to validate whether a trend is worth investing in before you commit.

Three key questions for merchandising and buying teams

• Are our current ranges aligned with what AI search is surfacing for our key category queries,  or are we optimised for last season?
• Do we have real-time visibility into competitor pricing so we know when we’re being filtered out of AI comparisons?
• What attributes and words are most commonly linked to top-performing products?
• Are we acting on trend signals early enough to be in stock when search demand peaks, or are we consistently playing catch-up?

AI is redefining discovery, and discoverability starts with the range

With $750bn in revenue set to be influenced by AI search by 2028, the brands that win won’t just be the ones with the best content strategy. They’ll be the ones whose merchandising decisions kept them aligned with what the market was looking for.

EDITED gives buying and merchandising teams the market intelligence to make those calls with confidence on assortment, pricing, and timing, without relying on Marketing & Ecomm teams for search insights.

Speak to EDITED to see how market intelligence strengthens your commercial decisions in the AI search era.