AI is rapidly reshaping discovery, commerce, and consumer behavior. I recently attended Profound’s Zero Click Summit in London to see how the biggest names are responding. Around 1,000 people attended, with another 1,000+ on the waitlist.
The message from the stage was consistent. AI is past the testing phase, customers are deciding inside answer engines, and optimizing for this new era of discovery is a core commercial priority. Laura Lynch and Francis Cooney of Bank of Ireland explained what that looks like in practice. The shift is already visible in their numbers: organic traffic fell 35% in Q1 while conversion rose 40%.
The market is shifting quickly, and AI is changing how your brand and products get found and chosen. The brands that win are the ones that optimize now. Here’s what we’re seeing across AI discovery and commerce, what it means for your brand, and where partnerships drive results.
Shift One: AI is moving from recommending to buying
Product research, comparison, and even purchases increasingly happen inside AI chat interfaces and dedicated shopping agents, where users and agents decide and transact without ever visiting your website. According to Profound, one in five AI conversations now has commercial intent, and commercial volume grew about 120% between June 2025 and June 2026. Transactions are set to follow: Juniper Research expects agentic commerce to reach $8bn in 2026 and $3.5tn in 2031.
What this means is that the decision is often made before anyone reaches your own site. In their session, The Genesis of Agentic Attention, Profound’s Jennifer Zou and Josh Blyskal shared that 60% of shoppers start with no brand in mind, and the average recommendation names just 3.7 brands. That makes AI a real route to new customers, but only if you’re one of the brands it names.
Ian Massingham of Anthropic explained how agents work. They read the web meticulously and pull hyper-specific facts, but they don’t see visual design, and they don’t email brands or complete complex forms. Information that isn’t made transparent is effectively invisible, so if you don’t optimize your on-site content for agents, you’re left out of these decisions.
This matters for partners as much as it does for brands. Even at the product level, affiliate publishers and UGC creators shape the answers and influence which products LLMs surface and recommend. A good visibility strategy does two things: it optimizes your product data, and it identifies and works with the publishers and influencers who help shape the answers.
Shift Two: Earned media is driving AI citations
The truth is that most of what an AI engine reads about your brand isn’t on your site. If your product isn’t mentioned on the third-party pages an AI crawler trusts for your category, it effectively doesn’t exist to the agent. The publishers in affiliate programs are among the sources AI answers cite, and those citations move demand. Profound’s data shows Claude cites evaluative content most: listicles (35.6%), comparisons (12%), news and editorial (11.3%), and research (9.1%).
Across our client portfolio, more than 95% of citations in AI-generated answers come from third-party content, and 20% to 45% of those come from affiliate-style publisher content. Another 10% to 20% come from UGC and social creators. That means you can influence up to 65% of your visibility through affiliate and influencer partnerships.
So where should you focus next? We help you answer that with a citation diagnostic.
We start with the sources AI engines cite most for your category, products, and key topics. We check the sentiment of the answers they return to customers, then compare those sources against your active publisher and creator roster. Next, we rank targets by citation strength, topic demand, and partner fit, and we track progress against a baseline each period.
- Stage one: active and cited. These partners are in your program, and AI engines already trust them. Protect and deepen the relationship.
- Stage two: cited, not active. AI engines trust these sources for your category, but they aren’t working with you yet. Recruit them first.
- Stage three: active, not cited. These partners are in your program but missing from the citation data. Have a content conversation with them.
Shift Three: Content now has two audiences
Agents and people read your site differently, so it must serve both. For agents, make the site crawlable and accessible to bots, with consistent, self-contained sections, clear structured data, semantic HTML, and structured metadata. Build FAQs from real customer questions, and use tables, lists, and small blocks of content that are easy to digest.
For people, deliver the best user experience you can: clear structure, intuitive navigation, fast page-load, and mobile optimization. Keep investing in visual assets, brand reputation, and emotional resonance.
Partners shape both sides. Publishers and creators supply the third-party presence AI trusts, and the human-facing content people respond to.
AI doesn’t create trust, it sources it
In the new discovery and commerce era, your brand’s visibility rests on the third-party signals AI trusts and surfaces. Strategic partnerships build the authority behind those signals and turn that authority into measurable performance.
Want to learn more about the strategic shifts required to capture share? Watch our webinar with Profound and the New York Post: Winning in the AI Era: Partnerships, Trust & Discovery
