AI commerce company Rezolve Ai has released shopper behaviour data indicating that purchase patterns in e-commerce are shifting.
According to the company’s analysis, seven in ten shoppers now complete a purchase after a single search query, compared to six in ten a year earlier.
Additional figures from the dataset: long-form queries of three or more words rose from 25% of all searches in 2024 to 40% by February 2026, and the average number of terms per search increased by 16% over the same period. Filter usage fell 13% year on year, and the share of browsing sessions extending beyond the first page of results also declined by 13%.
The data was released in conjunction with Rezolve Ai’s presence at ShopTalk Europe in Barcelona, where representatives from Accenture, Fashable, GUESS, Microsoft, PwC, Sonae Group, and RS Components participated in sessions on AI’s role in retail.
Two distinct search behaviours merchants need to account for
The data points to a split in how shoppers are now finding and buying products. There are two different scenarios and these two modes work very differently.
In the first case, a shopper goes directly to a retailer’s website or app and types or speaks a query. This is an intent-driven search. The shopper already knows roughly what they want and is expressing it in natural language rather than isolated keywords. The merchant’s own search infrastructure needs to interpret that intent accurately and return a relevant result quickly. If it does not, the shopper leaves.
“The first 30 years of ecommerce taught shoppers to think like machines and break down what they wanted into keywords a search box could handle. That era is now ending and instead, shoppers expect to express intent in full and have the system do the work. The brands that win will be the ones whose infrastructure understands intent and turns it into a transaction, which is exactly what we built Rezolve Ai to do.”
Daniel Wagner, CEO, Rezolve Ai
In the second variant, a shopper uses an external AI assistant, such as a chatbot, voice agent, or AI-powered search engine, to find a product without visiting any retailer directly. Their queries are likely to also be long-form and detailed, unlike main keyword queries characteristic of the Google-search era. The AI assistant selects and surfaces products on the shopper’s behalf, often without the shopper clicking through to a product page at all. This is what industry participants are calling the zero-click economy: the merchant may never appear in the shopper’s direct journey at all unless their product data is optimised for AI retrieval.
“The time will come where agents will be buying for us from other agents. That opens completely new business models. Who the new winners of this commerce age will be, we still don’t know. They might be walking around here today.”
João Silveira, Global Black Belt Business Applications EMEA, Microsoft
For the first case, merchants need a search and catalogue infrastructure that can handle conversational, long-form queries and map them to the right products. For the second, the relevant discipline is Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) — structuring product data, descriptions, and metadata so that AI systems can accurately interpret and recommend a merchant’s inventory when responding to shopper queries. A merchant with strong on-site search but poor AEO may remain visible to shoppers who arrive directly, but invisible to those who never leave their AI assistant.
“We’re heading toward a zero-click economy. You might have amazing touch points, but you will be invisible to customers if you don’t take care of AEO.”
Radoslaw Pijik, Retail Industry Director EMEA, Microsoft
Besides, targeted advertising methods should now accommodate both use case scenarios as well. Recent study showed that nearly half of consumers do not mind their AI helpers being ad-influenced, as long as they’re free to use. After all, only a small fraction of online shoppers proceed to buying the very first thing AI suggests without analyzing extra factors like real customer reviews and brand reputation.
“Generative AI retail traffic is growing at 1,200%. Yet 56% of CEOs see no significant AI financial benefit yet. We need to make sure that usage and demand is generating the impact that companies are expecting.”
Andrés Diego, Partner, AI Analytics and Platforms, PwC
