Retail & E-commerce

Optimising Your Ecommerce Store for AI-Powered Search

AI-driven search accounted for under 1% of US search ad revenue in 2025 but is projected to reach 14% by 2029. For Australian ecommerce businesses relying on organic traffic, this represents both existential threat and unprecedented opportunity. Gartner predicts a 25% drop in overall search engine volume by 2026 as users increasingly turn to AI chatbots and virtual agents. The brands winning in this new landscape are not those with the most products or biggest marketing budgets. They are the ones making their catalogues machine-readable through schema markup, feeding product data into AI shopping engines, and optimising for generative engine optimisation rather than traditional SEO alone. This guide reveals the exact strategies turning Australian ecommerce stores into AI-cited authorities whilst competitors remain invisible to the shopping engines reshaping online commerce.