The rise of conversational commerce and what it means for your product feed

For fifteen years, product discovery worked the same way. Keyword query in Google. Keyword signals in your feed matched. Product appeared. The visitor clicked. That model hasn't disappeared — but a parallel model is growing fast: the person asks an AI assistant, the AI evaluates your product data against the intent behind the question, and your product either appears or it doesn't. There are no ads to bid your way in.

The three AI commerce surfaces UK merchants need to know

ChatGPT Shopping processes 50 million product-related queries daily. UK merchants need a correctly-formatted JSONL feed delivered via SFTP. ChatGPT evaluates your product data for factual richness and relevance to conversational queries.

Perplexity accepts Google Shopping XML feeds through its merchant programme — the same feed you already use for Google Merchant Center can power Perplexity commerce with minimal additional work.

Google AI Mode (AI Overviews) uses your existing Google Merchant Center feed to power AI-generated product recommendations. Feed quality matters more here than in standard Shopping, because Google's AI is evaluating semantic relevance rather than keyword matching.

What your feed needs to do differently

Traditional Shopping: Title keywords match query keywords. Keyword density in descriptions matters.

AI Commerce: Factual specificity enables contextual matching. The AI understands "Gore-Tex membrane" relates to waterproofing. "Gore-Tex Pro with 28,000mm hydrostatic head" is more useful than "waterproof". Use cases in your description help AI match to situational queries.

The opportunity gap

Right now, most UK merchants have not adapted their feeds for AI commerce. Their descriptions are marketing copy. Their ChatGPT feeds either don't exist or are converted Google Shopping feeds with HTML-heavy descriptions that fail validation.

Merchants who build AI-ready product data now will have a competitive advantage in AI commerce for as long as it takes the rest of the market to catch up.