Why AI Shopping Is Still Just a Smarter Search Bar

More than a year ago, I asked AI to help me buy a toaster. Not to browse. I knew exactly what I wanted, down to the brand, and I gave the LLM every advantage a real buyer could offer. I wanted to test whether I could find and buy without leaving the chat. The AI produced a thorough, well-documented list, albeit somewhat skimpy. None of the brands listed included the toaster I already knew I wanted to buy.

But that wasn’t the most interesting part of my experiment.

Even if the AI had identified the right toaster, it still couldn’t confirm the actual price, verify that the item was in stock or tell me whether it could be delivered within any reasonable timeframe. It could not place the order. To do that, I was referred to a merchant site I had never heard of to navigate the checkout.

So, I ended up doing what most people still do instead.  I went to Amazon and bought the toaster there.

The infrastructure required to actually curate all of the available options, and then execute the purchase, is a big gap yet to be filled.

I have repeated my Toaster Test periodically ever since. The LLMs are smarter, faster and more conversational than they were a year ago. They have added a few better brands to the list they produce. They still cannot produce the brand I wanted to buy, confirmed in stock, at a real price, available for purchase right now. The research loop is impressive. The transaction loop is anything but.

My test is not evidence of a technology failure. In fact, the AI part worked amazingly well. It is a marketplace failure.

And it illustrates the core challenge of agentic commerce in 2026.

The models are breathtakingly amazing at helping consumers do the research and the shortlisting of options. The infrastructure required to actually curate all of the available options, and then execute the purchase, is a big gap yet to be filled.

What is billed as a revolution in commerce is, for now, mostly a highly intelligent search bar. A better one than Google. A more conversational one. But still, at its core, a tool that finds the answer and then hands the consumer off to someone else to close the deal.

The Consumer Shift Is Real

The behavioral shift behind this problem is no longer theoretical. It has gone mainstream quickly.

PYMNTS Intelligence research from January 2026 found that 41% of consumers have already used dedicated AI platforms for product discovery. More striking is that a third say they have fully replaced their prior methods. They are not layering AI on top of old habits.

They shut the door on the old way and left.

Read More: Why 30 Million US Consumers No Longer Search

AI adoption crossed 54% of U.S. adults in January 2026, up ten points in a single month.

Among millennials, two in three have used a conversational AI assistant for research.

That’s just the tip of the behavioral iceberg.  In December 2025, 34% of AI power users relied on native AI interfaces as their primary method for shopping discovery.

One month earlier that share was 22%. Among light users, reliance on AI models  jumped from 5% to 16% in the same period.

These are not gradual shifts. They are new habits forming at a pace the industry did not anticipate.

Read More: Gen AI: The Technology That Broke the Adoption Curve

The experience driving this shift is genuinely different from traditional search. Instead of scrolling through pages of links and sponsored listings, consumers receive a structured answer that explains the tradeoffs between competing products and can be refined through conversation until it matches the actual buying decision. It is something keyword searches could never deliver with any sort of precision.

But then the consumer leaves the conversation and goes somewhere else to complete the purchase.

The question that matters now is not whether agentic commerce will eventually close that gap. It is who becomes a casualty on the agentic highway, and who benefits.  And how.

Google and Shopify on the Defense

Let’s start with Google, because the damage there is real and already underway, even if their headline numbers still look healthy.

In Q4 2025, Google Search revenue grew 17% year over year. Gemini has 750 million monthly active users. Alphabet crossed $400 billion in annual revenue for the first time. This is not a wounded player. It is also not the dominant one it used to be.

Google has been trying to become a commerce destination since it launched Froogle (a play on “frugal”) in 2002. It rebranded that effort multiple times, built Shopping tabs, launched Google Express, acquired Pointy and embedded Gemini.

Despite all of it, Google Shopping remains a listing service that shows products and sends consumers somewhere else to buy. The transaction, the customer relationship and the post-purchase experience all happen in someone else’s ecosystem.

What has changed is the top of the funnel. Consumers who once opened Google to research a product are now opening ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity instead. The PYMNTS data makes that shift quantifiable. A  third of consumers who have tried AI for shopping discovery have fully replaced their prior methods.

Read More: What Happens to Stores When AI Agents Do the Shopping?

That is not a marginal shift in behavior. It is a structural fracture of the search functionthat Google has monetized for two decades.

Consumers who switch to AI for research are already bypassing Google at the top of the funnel.

Defending a position is not the same as expanding it. The highest-value transactional queries, consumers who already know what they want and are ready to buy, may still run through Google’s standard channels.

But the middle of the funnel, the research and comparison phase where consumer intent is shaped, is moving to AI platforms that Google does not own and cannot easily monetize, despite Gemini’s headline user numbers.

Consumers who switch to AI for research are already bypassing Google at the top of the funnel. If Google cannot capture them at the bottom with a transaction, it loses the journey, and that customer, entirely.

Google’s answer is the Universal Commerce Protocol, an open standard built with Walmart, Shopify, Target, and two dozen other partners, designed to let AI agents complete full shopping journeys inside Google’s own products. The logic is that if Google can plug trusted commerce players into its AI surfaces, consumers can transact through Gemini while the actual commerce relationship belongs to the retailer. Google becomes the front door without building the back end.

Read More: The Protocol Power Struggle Reshaping AI-Driven Commerce

This is more or less what it does today with Google Shopping, except with agents. It is also an acknowledgment that Google cannot build what a commerce network requires. It is borrowing the trust it does not have from partners who do.

Then there’s Shopify. Their situation is more complicated and more consequential for the merchants who depend on it.

Twelve months ago, Shopify had the most credible claim to being the open-web alternative to Amazon. Millions of merchants, a high-profile AI commerce partnership with OpenAI that sent competitors scrambling and a narrative about the future of direct-to-consumer commerce that the industry largely accepted.

Read More: Can Shop Cash Turn Shopify Into an Amazon Challenger?

That narrative is now in trouble on two fronts.

The OpenAI native checkout partnership is gone. OpenAI pulled it after fewer than 30 merchants went live with a product that had not built the systems to collect state sales taxes. The Shopify landing page built specifically for ChatGPT now redirects to its homepage. Catalog syndication still exists, so Shopify merchants can be discovered inside ChatGPT. But discovery without a transaction is a referral, not a commerce relationship.

OpenAI is now a discovery layer that sends consumers somewhere else to buy. That is exactly what Google has always been. It’s not where Shopify needs to play.

Shopify has no fulfillment network, no consumer credentials at scale, and no native AI agent with meaningful adoption.

Read More: From Assistive to Agentic AI: Consumers Wade Into Autonomous Commerce

The second front is Amazon. Shop Direct, launched in February 2025 and expanded to more than 100 million products from over 400,000 merchants, allows Amazon Prime customers to buy from brand websites using their stored credentials through the Buy for Me capability.

Amazon is now offering independent brands something Shopify cannot match: Prime subscribers, Amazon payment rails, Amazon logistics and an AI agent already in the consumer’s pocket.

Shopify’s strategic response is to position itself as open-protocol infrastructure for agentic commerce, building integrations that make merchants on its platform discoverable across any AI surface. That is a reasonable long-term play.

Read More: Shopify Bets Big on Agentic AI

It’s also coming from a fundamentally weaker position than the one Shopify held a year ago. With an uncertain timeframe for when commerce, at scale on AI models will happen.

Walmart’s Two-Step Agentic Commerce Play

Walmart has made a deliberate and smart decision. It has opened its full product catalog online to Google’s Gemini through its Sparky assistant, which surfaces a Walmart-branded experience inside external AI platforms. When a Gemini user searches for a product, Gemini calls Sparky, which opens what Walmart’s head of AI describes as a window inside Gemini where the Walmart shopping experience takes over.

This has been packaged as a bold bet on open agentic commerce. But is it?

What Walmart is doing with Gemini is not meaningfully different from what it has always done with search advertising. It’s funneling traffic to Walmart.com through a different front-end interface, hoping to snag net new customers who might not have found Walmart through a traditional search query.

The transaction still happens in Walmart’s commerce system. The consumer relationship still belongs to Walmart. The agent is the channel, not the commerce infrastructure. Calling it agentic commerce is a generous description of what is, in practice, a search query that renders inside a chatbot window owned by Google that funnels queries to Walmart.

Read More: Why the ‘Person’ of the Year in 2025 Should Be the Chatbot

The consumer relationship still belongs to Walmart.

The more interesting and strategically significant bet Walmart is making is Sparky and the opportunity it represents to convert its 100 million per week physical store shoppers into online customers it can monetize through agents. This is where Walmart’s agentic story becomes genuinely compelling.

Walmart has a physical footprint and, with One Pay, an online wallet and payment method that’s akin to Amazon’s in the physical world.  If Sparky can move even a meaningful fraction of those in-store shoppers into a digital commerce relationship where Walmart can apply personalization, subscription economics and agentic purchasing, well let’s just say that the opportunity is substantial.

Read More: Walmart Rolls Out Agentic Advertiser Assistant

The risk in the Gemini relationship is also real. Openness means the agent can send consumers to a competitor when the competitor’s offer is better. Walmart is trusting that it wins those comparisons often enough and that Google surfaces its products without letting its own commercial interests shape the ranking. That trust has not been tested at scale. And it runs directly into the structural problem that has undermined every search-based commerce experiment for two decades.

How intent and eyeballs get monetized.

The Right-Now Winners: Amazon and the Status Quo

The reality of agentic commerce in March 2026 produces a short list of those in the pole position right now.

Amazon is at the top.

The status quo of how most people actually shop online is a close second.

Amazon didn’t wait for the industry to agree on rules. It spent three decades building out a marketplace and AI-enabled it inside its own ecosystem. It’s now extending that solution outward on its own terms.

Rufus, Amazon’s AI shopping assistant, handled 250 million shoppers in 2025, with monthly active users growing 140% year over year. Amazon says that its Rufus users are 60% more likely to complete a purchase than non-Rufus shoppers. When the conversation ends, the transaction completes immediately because the marketplace already exists behind it.

Amazon is making its marketplace bigger, more open, and more valuable, while ensuring that every transaction, wherever it originates, runs through Amazon’s infrastructure on Amazon’s terms.

Shop Direct, however, is the more significant development. By expanding to more than 100 million products from over 400,000 merchants and enabling Prime subscribers to buy from brand websites using stored Amazon credentials, Amazon is doing something strategically important.

It’s not just defending its marketplace. It’s making its marketplace bigger, more open and more valuable, while ensuring that every transaction, wherever it originates, runs through Amazon’s infrastructure on Amazon’s terms.

The Prime subscriber base is the strategic asset that makes this possible. Prime members spend significantly more than non-Prime customers. Their purchasing intent is high. Their payment credentials are stored. Their trust in Amazon’s fulfillment is established. When Amazon brings consumers to a brand’s website through Buy for Me, it is not sending a casual browser. It is delivering a buyer with an intent to complete a purchase. That is a value proposition that competing platforms cannot replicate without the same combination of payment infrastructure, logistics capability and consumer trust that Amazon has spent 30 years building.

That’s despite the recent Perplexity lawsuit, which, within the space of a few days, clarified the legal landscape in Amazon’s favor, as another judge just yesterday (March 17) reversed it pending an appeal, according to Bloomberg.  For now, the bots are there, free-riding on an ecosystem that they didn’t build, and according to Court filings, they allegedly disguised their bots in order to gain access.

Read More: Amazon Injunction Could Change the Future of Agentic Commerce

The second winner is the status quo of how online shopping actually works.

Most consumers, most of the time, in 2026, still shop the way they did before AI agents arrived. The search and purchase journey is largely disaggregated. They search Chat or Google or Amazon, then buy from wherever they can find the right price and the fastest delivery.

Read More: Legacy Business Models Break

What Still Has to Be Built

The gap between what AI can figure out and what it can actually do about it is not a small one.

Closing that gap requires things that do not yet exist in combination. It requires a real business model for catalog access, not just technical protocols. Retailers need a commercial reason to make their live inventory available to AI agents, a compensation structure that makes that exposure worthwhile, and governance that protects them from being used as price comparison tools that send consumers to competitors. The open standards being developed are the pipes, not the economics.

Read More: What Happens to Stores When AI Agents Do the Shopping?

It requires careful thinking about those economics. Every commerce network built on a discovery foundation eventually faces the same crossroads. Merchants pay for visibility. Promoted products rise above better-matched ones. The consumer notices the results look like ads. Trust flies right out the window.

Read More: Why Trust is Data’s Only Real Currency

The AI agent that tells a consumer it found the best product for their needs while receiving compensation from the merchant whose product it recommends is not working in the consumer’s interest and looks like a more sophisticated ad disguised as advice.

Closing that gap requires things that do not yet exist in combination.

That requires brands to make hard choices and some big bets.

Meanwhile, Amazon isn’t waiting.

It is using every month of industry delay to extend its position. Every new merchant added to Shop Direct, every consumer who uses Buy for Me, every improvement to Rufus deepens an ecosystem that is already the hardest thing in commerce to replicate. The open AI platforms are not competing against a static target. They are competing against a moving one.

What’s Next

I have written about the promise of agentic commerce many times. The thesis has always been the same. Consumers want an agent that works for them. One that knows their preferences, understands their constraints, does the research, makes the comparison and closes the deal on their behalf. Not a better search bar. Not a more conversational listing service. An actual agent that shops.

Read More: How Consumers Want to Live in a Conversational Voice Economy

The consumer demand is not in question. It never was. A third of consumers have already abandoned their prior shopping methods entirely. More than 70% say they want to use AI agents to shop. These are not early adopters playing around with the shiny new object. They are mainstream consumers who’ve found something better than what they had and voted with their behavior. Those habits are sticking.

What the past year revealed is that the gap between consumer readiness and commercial infrastructure is wider than most of the predictions of 2024 acknowledged. The technology moved faster than anyone anticipated. The commerce plumbing did not.

Merchant agreements, live inventory access, payment rails connected to the conversation, governance frameworks, return policies, tax infrastructure, the whole invisible machinery that makes a purchase feel effortless rather than terrifying. None of that gets rebuilt in a product cycle.

That doesn’t mean it will take decades. The pace of AI development alone collapses the timeline. The models are improving every few months, the protocols are being written, the coalitions forming, the early experiments producing hard-won, even painful, knowledge about what the market actually requires. And all of it is laying the foundation faster than any prior generation of commerce infrastructure was built.

Read More: AI Doers Drown Out AI Naysayers

The question isn’t whether the loop closes. It is who closes it, under what terms, and who is left holding the better position when it does.

This is where time matters in a way the optimists tend to underestimate. Igniting commerce networks is more science than art, more strategic than wishful thinking. Every merchant recruited makes the next recruitment easier. And more consumers more likely to give it a try. Every consumer transaction deepens the trust that makes the next one more likely. Every improvement to fulfillment raises the bar that competitors must clear. Getting to that point is a tedious slog

The players who are building real infrastructure now, actually solving the hard coordination problems, are accumulating advantages that will be very difficult to displace once the market tips.

The opportunity on the other side of this infrastructure gap is unlike anything commerce has seen since Amazon proved that consumers would trust a website with their credit card if the experience was reliable enough and the selection was wide enough.

The gap between consumer readiness and commercial infrastructure is wider than most of the predictions of 2024 acknowledged.

What it produced is a marketplace that accounts for more than 60% of all online sales and a Prime membership that reshaped how an entire generation thinks about buying things. Not to mention the analog for how online transacting must behave. Agentic commerce, done right, with an agent that is genuinely aligned with the buyer, represents a comparable reset. Not an incremental improvement on search. A different model entirely.

Read More: How Time Became the Next Great Asset Class

My Toast Test still disappoints. The answers are better but still missing my go-to brand. Yes, I am picky. And the AI still can’t buy it for me. But the day that changes is the day I’ll buy, and then do it again, and build the trust that, next time and the time after that, an agent can do all of that for me.

Until then, agentic commerce remains just a smarter search bar. A better one than what came before. And one that I will continue to use that way.

But a search bar, nonetheless.

Until NEXT time.

Join the 21,000 subscribers who’ve already said yes to what’s NEXT.

PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster is one of the world’s leading experts in payments innovation and the digital economy, advising multinational companies and sitting on boards of emerging AI, healthtech and real-time payments firms, including a non-executive director on the Sezzle board, a publicly traded BNPL provider.

She founded PYMNTS.com in 2009, a top media platform covering innovation in payments, commerce and the digital economy. Webster is also the author of the NEXT newsletter and a co-founder of Market Platform Dynamics, specializing in driving and monetizing innovation across industries.