The warning comes as AI-powered search moves rapidly from an emerging technology to a mainstream part of the customer journey, with Storyblok research shared with Retail Gazette finding that 46% of buyer journeys were already beginning in AI rather than traditional search, based on research published on November 3, 2025. Storyblok CEO and co-founder Dominik Angerer said the figure was likely to be higher now.
“If this is not already your source of truth, and you’re not trying to compete there, you’re going to be left behind for sure, 100%,” he said.
The shift is significant because retailers are no longer simply competing to appear near the top of Google’s traditional search results, Their products, prices, descriptions and wider brand information increasingly need to be understood by AI systems that can summarise information and make recommendations on a shopper’s behalf.
Google has been accelerating that change. It introduced AI Overviews to Search in 2024, while AI Mode began as an experiment in March 2025 before being rolled out more widely in the US. By May, Google said AI Overviews had reached more than 1.5 billion users across 200 countries and territories.
The scale of adoption is growing quickly. Google said the Gemini app had more than 400 million monthly active users in May 2025, five times the number of developers building with Gemini compared with a year earlier. By May 2026, Google said Gemini had passed 900 million monthly users, more than doubling in a year.
Sundar Pichai, its chief executive, told the National Retail Federation in January that “AI can help at every step, from discovery and decision to delivery”, describing the change as a fundamental shift in how consumers shop. Google’s Shopping Graph now contains more than 50bn product listings, with more than 2bn refreshed every hour, while its Gemini app has been connected to the Shopping Graph to answer shopping-related questions.
ChatGPT has followed a similarly steep trajectory. OpenAI’s own research shows that the service grew from one million users in 2022 to more than 800 million weekly active users by 2026, and in February this year, the business began testing advertisements. The company says the ads are displayed separately from answers and do not influence the responses, but their arrival nevertheless marks an important moment for retailers.
For retailers already adapting to TikTok and other alternative ecommerce and discovery platforms, the arrival of AI as another commercial channel is therefore less of a surprise than a question of timing. The difference is that AI could decide which retailer or product gets recommended rather than simply providing another place for shoppers to browse. Angerer believes much of the immediate work for retailers is less glamorous: cleaning up the information they already have.
Retailers should first establish where their content actually lives, he said, pointing to the multiple websites, markets, languages, help desks, FAQs and other systems typically operated by large businesses.
“Find out where your content actually lives right now,” he said. “Make sure that this is the intended place it should be governed.”
The second step is to remove duplication and outdated material. Angerer urged retailers to examine content created five years ago or more and either update, redirect or delete it.
“I really mean delete it because wrong content is way more harmful than less content,” he said.
That problem extends beyond the main website. PDFs, documents and other publicly available assets can also be picked up by AI systems, meaning a retailer could clean its website while leaving contradictory information elsewhere.
“If you remove all your content of the websites that are publicly facing, but you still have the old PDFs online, you will still have the same issue,” Angerer said.
He also warned retailers against flooding the internet with AI-generated material simply to improve their visibility. “Make sure that you’re not creating more content, but better content,” he said.
The underlying problem, however, is not necessarily poor technology or careless teams. Angerer said retailers had often accumulated fragmented systems because different departments were trying to improve customer experience independently.
“All of them have the best intentions of making the experience for the customer better,” he said, but large retailers often have “limited… overview across the different tools that they’re having”.
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