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Well, hello, and welcome to this week's edition of the eCommercer.
When people ask Google about the returns policy on a pair of Adidas trainers, the answer they get often doesn't come from Adidas at all. This past spring, the biggest source feeding that answer was a woman on YouTube with about 6,000 subscribers. A Reddit thread did some of the work too. None of Adidas's own pages were part of it.
That's a pretty big deal when you think about it. One of the biggest sportswear brands on the planet, and a small creator is the one telling the internet how their returns work.
That's the world Dave McAnally and Alan Osetek came on to talk about, and between them they've got the best part of 30 years each in search. Dave heads up content and SEO at Resolution Media, part of Omnicom. Alan spent years running global agencies and now advises an AI-visibility platform. They know this space about as well as anyone.
The funnel just got squashed
The big shift they described is what Dave calls funnel compression. It used to be that someone researched, browsed, compared, and eventually landed on a shortlist. Now they type one prompt into ChatGPT and the shortlist arrives fully formed.
Dave ran a study on this. Ask something like "what are the best hiking boots for a rainy season" and 97% of the time the AI hands you brands, not a page of links. So all that middle bit, the research and the comparing, gets compressed into a single conversation.
Which means if you're not on that shortlist, you're invisible. There's no page two to fight your way up any more.
| | "They're not answering the one question you ask. They're anticipating the next four or five you might ask."
Dave McAnally |
I actually tested this live on the show. I asked Perplexity for the best men's hiking boots for a rainy UK day, and it came straight back with two boots and a proper reason for each. Then I clicked into its sources, and not one of them was a manufacturer's site. They were third-party review pages, the kind with a verdict score out of 100, pros and cons, someone literally cutting a boot in half to show you the insides. AI loves that stuff, because it's rich and it's comparable.
So what do you actually do about it
The good news is this isn't complicated, and it doesn't favour the big spenders the way paid search eventually did. A few things came out of the conversation that any of us can start on.
- Put a proper FAQ block on your product and category pages, mirroring the "People also ask" questions Google already shows you. AI is guessing your customer's next four questions, so answer them.
- Use FAQ schema markup. Google stopped reading it, but ChatGPT still does, and its crawlers are all over sites right now.
- Take video seriously. YouTube is the second most-cited source for Gemini, trading places with Reddit. Those unboxing and how-to videos are doing real work.
- Find the third parties AI keeps citing in your category and build relationships with them. PR now includes the niche blogger with a few thousand followers, not just the big magazines.
And it's worth knowing the scale of what's coming. Last year, AI overviews showed up on roughly 9% of ecommerce searches. This year it's heading for about 25%. One in four, right as we go into Q4. If you want to see where you stand, GA4 now has an "AI Assistant" channel, so you can actually watch the trend rather than guess at it.
A blogger did the same for my ecom business
Years ago, long before any of this, we ran a beauty company. We dug into where our sales were actually coming from, and one of the biggest sources of converting traffic was a Swedish blogger. Not a huge name. Just someone who liked what we did and wrote about it.
We reached out and offered to make it official. I told her that on affiliate commission she'd be earning around six grand a month. She said no. She just liked us and was happy to help.
That small blogger genuinely shifted the fortunes of that business. So when Alan says the smart move for a smaller brand is to find the niche questions you can own, and when he tells the bigger brands to defend their turf, I know in my bones he's right. The names change, the tech changes, but the little source you'd never have predicted is still the one quietly moving the needle.
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