The Toronto-based company, which operates a Reddit-like network of enthusiast forums containing more than 2 billion user-generated posts, said in its Tuesday (Nov. 10) third-quarter 2026 results that its new AI-powered commerce experience contributed to a 29% increase in affiliate commerce revenue from a year earlier. The gains came even as its monthly audience shrank and overall revenue declined 11%.
VerticalScope’s members own the vehicles, equipment and products they discuss. The AI recommends products inside those discussion threads, and VerticalScope earns an affiliate commission when a reader follows a shopping link and completes a qualifying purchase.
The revenue has grown each quarter since the feature launched. By August, affiliate commerce revenue on the forums was up 13% from a year earlier and approaching a $1 million annual run rate, double the level the company gave in May, VerticalScope said on its second-quarter call. The company has not disclosed the specific mechanics of the shopping experience or how much revenue the AI generated independently.
AI Commerce Grows Despite Falling Traffic
VerticalScope’s monthly active users averaged 76.8 million during the third quarter, down from 83 million a year earlier, and the company attributed the drop to lower organic search traffic. Advertising depends on those visits. Affiliate commerce depends on what a visitor does after arriving.
The recommendations draw on what members have written about products they own. AI can repeat a product’s specifications but “can’t tell you what it’s like to own something for 10 years,” CEO Chris Goodridge said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call.
VerticalScope is giving members more ways to share what they own, so it can show them a more relevant experience. It also plans to let vendors bring product catalogs directly into the communities, Goodridge said. Members could then shop alongside advice from people who own the product.
The same approach is running inside the company. VerticalScope’s team used agentic workflows to build Pulse, a tool that tracks each member’s activity across communities and reach out to them to increase engagement.
Forum Data Becomes a Second Revenue Stream
The two billion posts now have a second set of buyers. VerticalScope signed its first two agreements with frontier AI labs in October and did not name them. The first is a non-exclusive license to train models on data from a selection of communities, with fees based on the volume of content delivered. The second pays VerticalScope when its content contributes to an AI-generated answer. It started in November with a subset of communities, Goodridge said on the call.
AI systems are already reading the forums at scale. AI companies, AI search engines and AI agents made 115 million attempts to access the communities over the past 30 days, Goodridge said. None of those visits count as monthly active users. VerticalScope blocks any company that tries without an agreement.
Reddit Adds Shopping as Search Referrals Fall
Meanwhile, social platform Reddit is losing search traffic. Its search referrals fell by more than 1 million a week on average in October, TechCrunch reported, and the company is moving to a primarily logged-in experience to protect its data from AI scraping.
Reddit began testing an AI shopping experience in February, PYMNTS reported. The test puts product carousels with prices and purchase links in Reddit’s search results. The products come from community discussions.
According to the PYMNTS Intelligence report “From Prompt to Purchase: Who Wins the AI Shopper?”, about 61 million U.S. consumers, or 23%, now start their online retail research with AI. The report draws on an August survey of 2,191 U.S. consumers. The sale often lands somewhere else. Amazon closed 60% of respondents’ most recent AI-assisted purchases. Only 2.5% of buyers named a direct link from the AI tool as their main reason for buying where they did.
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