Contrary to viewing Amazon as solely a competitor, savvy DTC brands use it as a customer acquisition channel. Consumers who discover a brand on social media often make their first purchase on Amazon, trusting its robust return policy and reviews, before graduating to buying directly from the brand's own site.

Amazon is exploring a hybrid search combining AI summaries with product listings. This is a strategic move to engage customers earlier in the buying journey—the "product discovery" phase—a role traditionally dominated by Google. This could increase user time on site, ad revenue, and direct purchases, effectively moving "up the funnel."

The traditional buyer journey is being upended as users turn to AI search for direct, synthesized answers, bypassing top-of-funnel discovery on brand websites. The marketing focus must shift from traditional SEO to a new discipline of influencing AI recommendation engines to ensure brand inclusion.

As AI agents shift e-commerce from high-margin cost-per-click models to lower-margin commissions, search platforms will likely retaliate. They will make free, direct, and unpaid traffic more difficult to acquire, forcing a higher volume of transactions into their paid ecosystem to compensate for the lower per-transaction revenue.

Google is evolving from its traditional ad model of sending users to external sites towards an integrated AI checkout experience within Gemini. This is a defensive move to protect its core business from AI search erosion and directly competes for control over the customer relationship, posing a threat to D2C brands.

Google's Universal Commerce Protocol allows users to buy products or book demos directly in AI-powered search results. Marketing success is no longer about site clicks, but about influencing decisions and completing transactions within Google’s ecosystem, a fundamental change for all marketers.

While large retailers will adopt Google's in-app AI checkout, smaller D2C brands face a tough choice. Participating means ceding control of branding and the customer relationship, but sitting out risks becoming invisible as shopper behavior shifts to AI-native purchasing, making it difficult to catch up later.

These two seemingly contradictory trends can coexist. While overall search queries on Google are increasing, the platform is answering more queries directly with AI overviews and featured snippets. This means a higher percentage of searches are "zero-click," resulting in less referral traffic for websites.

Just as websites were optimized for Google's crawlers in the late 90s, brands must now structure their digital presence to be readable by AI shopping agents. Failure to do so will result in being completely invisible to automated purchasing systems, as agent traffic is already overtaking human traffic.