Shopify thinks we're all obsessed with the wrong AI shopping story

Happy Wednesday.

It’s been exactly seven months since I launched this independent newsletter and, man, I’m grateful for each and every one of you. I have a lot planned in the coming months, including subscriber meetups, intimate off-the-record dinners (including one at the AI retail festival RetailClub in September), and experimenting with expanding The Aisle to different media formats. I hope many of you will join me when it comes time for these new experiences. More to come.

In the meantime, I appreciate all of the feedback you’ve given me over this time, whether morale-boosting praise or constructive criticism. It all helps. And as always, if you have ideas for what you want to see more of, less of, or just a recommendation or a tip, simply reply to this email. I read them all.

Lastly, if you’ve been enjoying what I’m delivering to you so far, but you’re still a free subscriber, today would be a great day to upgrade to paid to get access to everything I’m producing. The monthly sub comes with a free trial, but the annual membership is the best value by far.

Before we get into the main event, a couple of things that caught my attention in the last few days.

SEMrush sent me a new study published today that tracked how four major online marketplaces—Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and Mercari—rank across the same queries on ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, and Google AI Overviews from January to April 2026, both in terms of brand mentions and which retailer websites each AI platform actually cites as sources. Some of the findings: Google's surfaces mostly agree on brand mention rankings, with Amazon dominant across AI Mode, Gemini, and AI Overviews, while ChatGPT reshuffles things by ranking eBay above Amazon.

On the actual citations side, ChatGPT leans heavily on Alibaba and third-party aggregator sites like Top5Best, while AI Mode treats Amazon's international properties as authoritative, with four Amazon domains cracking its top ten cited sources.

The most interesting wrinkle might be that Gemini mentions Amazon most often in retail-related answers but rarely cites Amazon as a source, drawing instead from eBay, Etsy, Walmart, and specialty retailers. The practical implication is that brands can't assume that brand visibility on one AI platform translates to another, which is of course exactly what SEMrush wants you to believe it can help you fix.

One more thing: ReFiBuy founder and agentic commerce maximalist Scot Wingo flagged something worth watching: Claude apparently is testing product cards in query responses, which would mark a meaningful step toward Anthropic playing a more direct role in product discovery. While Wingo noted that this new visual experience is available across many product categories, I tried it out by searching for a kid's baseball glove and it didn’t return product images, instead opening up Instacart’s version of a Claude app. It wasn’t the best experience. You can read more about Anthropic and Claude’s approach to commerce in my Q&A with a company leader from a few weeks back.

Now on to the good stuff…

The AI checkout wars have gotten a ton of attention. Yes, here too. But even as the co-developer of the AI protocol that is in the lead to power AI shopping across the web, one top Shopify executive really, really, thinks we should be talking about something else more: product discovery and the need for cleaning, organizing, and unifying product data across the web.

"We were absolutely, as an industry, overlooking it," Vanessa Lee, Shopify’s VP of product, told The Aisle in an exclusive interview this week.

Her argument is that the industry has been so focused on UCP and the checkout and transaction layers that it has missed what she sees as the harder and more valuable problem: discovery. To that end, Shopify on Wednesday announced a few significant additions to what it’s calling its Catalog API, and Lee nerded out over all of it in our chat.