Last week I facilitated a closed workshop for the Path to Purchase Institute's Retail Media Guild. In this room – mostly brands, but also some agencies and tech vendors, and a smattering of retailers – I shared a few provocations for the room to discuss among themselves. Regular readers may be familiar with these:
- 'Dark Search' Makes AI-Facilitated Commerce Look Smaller Than It Really Is
- Why Agentic Shopping Poses an Existential Threat to Retail Media
- 5 Markers Of A Lasting Shift
- When The PDP Becomes The Homepage
- Discovery Has Moved Upstream
While the conversations in the room were animated, the mood was calm and curious.
But calm isn't the same as safe. So here's what brands say they're seeing, what they're not yet seeing, and what's keeping them up at night.
What's holding
The first surprise was how little had moved on the surfaces everyone worries about most.
- Ad conversions are stable. The consensus across tables: no dramatic change in performance yet.
- Sponsored products are holding. One table confirmed they hadn't seen much erosion there.
- Nobody is reallocating in a panic. The instinct in the room was to test and monitor — not to rip up budgets.
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Discovery is shifting. Media economics are following. The brands and retailers who figure out what comes next won't be the ones who wait — they'll be the ones already moving.
What's shifting
While the outcome of actual sales looked steady, the path to it is changing. This was the single most consistent observation in the room: the sale still happens, but where the journey begins has changed.
- Google referrals are down. Shoppers are starting in ChatGPT and Claude, and Google has been, to date at least, "a little late to that game."
- Browse traffic on Amazon has come down — "quite a bit," by one account.
- Trust and community surfaces are rising — Reddit, Pinterest, Wikipedia — as starting points instead of on-site search.
- Social commerce is up, with TikTok Shop singled out as a growth area that might bypass RMN ecosystem entirely.
- It's all a boon to food ingredient brands. Recipe-component brands reported a real jump in being referenced and converted — they ride inside the meal plans and recipes that LLMs surface.
One nuance: in some DTC contexts, conversions are changing before traffic is changing — a reminder that the funnel can change shape before it changes volume.
What they can't see
A journey that starts in an AI chat is mostly invisible until checkout.
Several tables landed independently on the same idea — that AI shapes the decision but leaves no trace in standard analytics. I've written about this before as "dark search" — the LLM equivalent of dark social. A shopper researches in ChatGPT, never clicks through to a landing page, then buys in store or types your domain directly days later.
The UTM tags that would let us see this shift aren't there, and so the AI conversation gets zero credit.
Measurement is more of a mystery than ever.
What's on their minds
So the room started naming replacements for the metrics that no longer work.
- Share of agent recommendations was the headline new KPI — how often your brand surfaces and gets recommended across AI assistants. Part of a broader shift toward shopper-impact measures over raw ROAS.
- Agent-readiness is now something brands track: how referenceable you are in the sources AIs cite — Reddit, Wikipedia, brand hubs.
I asked the room to rank retail media surfaces by how defensible they are against AI, most tables put in-store at the top — predictable enough, given 80-90% of sales still happen there.
But one table went off-script and ranked influencer and word-of-mouth above everything. Their logic: it's about who you trust and what you trust them for, and people trust influencers in a way AI can't easily disintermediate. The nods around the room suggested they were onto something.
Calm, for now
The disruption everyone's been bracing for isn't showing up as a wholesale collapse. But it is changing — quieter, harder to measure, easy to miss if you're only watching conversions.
Maybe that's the storm already arriving, just too softly to register on the dashboards we've got. Maybe we're still in the calm before the storm.
But to me the brands watching where the journey starts — not just where it ends — are watching the right thing.
