For those who might have been plugging in “what to make for dinner” for inspiration (guilty), this could be a game changer for grocery list-building. These personalized and sophisticated queries surface new brands (or variants like flavors or pack sizes) for companies that wouldn’t normally have earned a result from a branded search, bringing visibility to emerging brands that don’t have the budgets for highly competitive keywords like “mac and cheese.”
And then, of course, Walmart recently debuted generative AI-powered search enhancements that enable use case queries that give relevant cross-category results. Instead of a list of products that are nothing but the exact item as your search but different brands or flavors, you’ll get a curated experience of “Big Game party must-haves,” for example, relevant to your previous baskets. So chips, dip, napkins, beverages—perhaps a new TV?
Walmart has millions of loyal shoppers across an extensive range of geographies whose interaction with the brand can be more utilitarian than inspirational or experiential. Shoppers can keep counting on Walmart for everyday low prices and vast selection and also augment their run-of-the-mill shopping trip, pick-up or delivery with online and in-app experiences to help curate and inspire.
What this all means for advertisers
Brands need to understand how this AI-driven search revolution, combined with retailer first-party data, is changing their audience’s expectations; shoppers will expect search engines to become recommendation engines, yield better search results in general, include video and AR, and, of course, aid discovery—especially in complementary categories and eventually (less obviously) those based on individual shopping habits and evolving needs.
Search isn’t just lower funnel anymore, and the funnel isn’t just awareness, discovery or intent. We’ve evolved to have many more layers, with something that looks less like distinct buckets and more a gradient-like fade into one another. The addition of first-party data signals to models that refresh and change alongside shopper habits creates the ability to be more granular in between shopper journey points, pulling forward discovery and consideration into the search results pages. This puts the shopper in a discovery experience that sits over consideration and conversion.
