AI Is Changing How Customers Find Products: Why Most Brands Aren’t Ready

This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.Usman Ilyas, product designer, strategic operations lead at Bebecan, is an ecommerce operator who launches and scales products.

getty​For years, the way people searched for products was predictable. They typed short keyword phrases. Stainless steel water bottle. Wireless earbuds. Baby teething toy. Brands built their product content around those phrases, and whoever optimized best for them won the traffic.

That behavior is changing, and I do not think most brands have noticed yet.

People are increasingly asking questions instead of typing keywords. What is the best water bottle for keeping coffee hot on a long commute? Which teething toy is safe for a six-month-old who is already crawling? These are conversations, not search terms. And they get answered by systems that read product information and make a recommendation on the customer’s behalf.

That difference matters more than you might think.

A search engine gives customers a list and allows them to decide. An AI assistant narrows that list down and hands over a recommendation. Your product is either included in that answer or it is invisible.

This changes what your product content is actually competing for. It is no longer competing for a click on a results page. It is competing to be selected as an answer. And the thing that determines whether it gets selected is whether your content actually addresses the question being asked.

Most product pages do not. They were written to rank, not to explain.

For most of the last decade, the accepted wisdom in ecommerce was to keep product copy short. Nothing too dense. Scannable bullets. Punchy headlines. Because that’s what customers want.

I think that advice is now working against brands.

When I audit a product listing today, I look for whether every attribute has been filled in, whether the use cases are written out explicitly, and whether the content explains things that feel too obvious to mention. If a product works for a specific age range, a specific temperature, a specific room size, a specific skin type, that needs to be stated plainly somewhere on the page. If it does not work for certain situations, that is worth saying too.

This feels excessive when you are writing it. It feels like you are over-explaining to an audience that already understands. But you are no longer writing only for a human who is skimming. You are also writing for a system that is trying to determine whether your product matches a very specific set of conditions someone just described in a sentence.

What I have found is that this does not hurt the human experience at all. Customers who want to skim still skim. Customers who have a specific question finally get it answered without having to dig through reviews. And the content becomes far more useful to the systems increasingly making recommendations on customers’ behalf.

Most brands treat reviews as social proof. Something that builds trust, drives conversion and needs to be managed when something goes wrong.

I would encourage brands to think about them differently. Reviews and customer questions are unstructured information about your product, written in the exact language real customers use. When a system is trying to understand what a product is genuinely good for, that language carries weight.

This means the customer questions section on your listing is no longer just customer service. If buyers keep asking whether something fits a particular use case and nobody has answered clearly, that gap exists in more places than you realize. Answering those questions thoroughly is now part of how your product gets understood and described.

Take one of your best-selling products and read its page the way a stranger would. Then ask three questions.

• Does this content answer the specific situations a real buyer might describe?

• Are there attributes or details that were left blank because they seemed unimportant?

• Are there recurring questions in our reviews that the page itself never addresses?

In my experience, the gaps show up quickly once you start looking.

The window is open, but it will not stay open.

What makes this worth acting on now is that most brands have not adjusted. Product content across most categories is still written for a keyword era that is fading. Which means brands should adapt early in order to become disproportionately visible during the transition.

That advantage narrows as more brands catch on. It usually does.

I have spent enough time in this industry to know that successful brands usually notice a shift slightly before everyone else and act while it is still inconvenient to do so.​

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