The Four AI Surfaces

Why this module exists

"AI commerce" is not one channel. It is four, and they differ on every dimension that matters: who controls the surface, whether you can pay to appear, whether you can measure it, and what it costs to be there.

Teams that treat it as one thing produce a single undifferentiated workstream, usually owned by whoever is nearest to SEO, and are then surprised that half the work has no effect on the surface where their customers actually are.

This module separates them, and gives you an instrument for finding out which ones matter to you specifically — because the answer varies enormously by category and by market.

2.1 The four surfaces

Four surfaces, four different games. Most programmes are built for the first and assume it covers the rest.

Surface one: AI search

Generative answers on general search and assistant surfaces — Google AI Mode and AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini.

Control: none. You influence citation, you do not place content.
Payment: emerging and uneven. Sponsored formats exist in some surfaces and not in others; see Module 10.
Measurement: poor by default, improvable. Module 6.
Your lever: be citable, and be legible when the click lands. Modules 3 and 4.

This is where most of the addressable change sits today for most retailers, because it touches the large majority of demand that is still human.

Surface two: on-platform assistants

The AI inside a marketplace you already sell on. On Amazon this was Rufus, merged with Alexa+ on 13 May 2026 and rebranded Alexa for Shopping — a single assistant spanning the Shopping app, the website and Echo devices. In Europe the equivalents matter at least as much: bol.com in the Netherlands and Belgium, Zalando and Otto in Germany, each with its own assistant and its own listing rules.

Names matter here in a way they do not elsewhere in this course: a marketplace manager cannot find documentation, brief an agency or locate an ad setting for "the assistant."

Control: none over the assistant, full over your listing.
Payment: yes, and increasingly formalised — Amazon's Sponsored Prompts became billable on 25 March 2026, priced inside existing Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands auctions rather than as a separate bid.
Measurement: limited. Amazon does not expose assistant-specific attribution in Seller Central; brand-registered sellers see partial signals in Brand Analytics. Look for shifts in impression share on long, conversational queries.
Your lever: structured attributes, review substance, Q&A and A+ content — the assistant reads all of it.

Amazon has cited around $12bn in incremental annualised sales attributed to the assistant, on its Q4 2025 earnings call, alongside a user base in the hundreds of millions.

Surface three: third-party agents

Software acting for a shopper: an assistant completing a purchase, a comparison agent, a procurement bot.

Control: none, and it may not render your page at all.
Payment: not meaningfully, yet.
Measurement: poor; often indistinguishable from bot traffic unless you deliberately identify it.
Your lever: protocol support, feed quality, availability accuracy, and an access policy that lets the right agents in. Modules 4, 6 and 7.

Volume here is small today. The work is long. That combination is why it belongs on a roadmap rather than in a quarter.

Surface four: your own agent

The assistant you run — on your site, in your app, in your service channels.

Control: total.
Payment: it is a cost, not a placement.
Measurement: excellent; it is your own telemetry.
Your lever: everything, which is exactly why it is the surface most often built first and justified last.

Note the asymmetry: this is the only surface you fully control, and the only one where the constraint is your own execution rather than someone else's platform. It is also the one where a poor implementation does direct brand damage, because the shopper knows it is you.

2.2 The comparison, in one table

	Control	Can you pay	Measurable	Time to value	Usual owner
AI search	None	Partly, unevenly	Poor → fair	Weeks to months	Growth / SEO — often renamed AEO
On-platform	Listing only	Yes	Poor	Weeks	Marketplace team
Third-party agents	None	Not yet	Poor	Quarters	Nobody, usually
Your own agent	Total	N/A	Excellent	Months	Product / CX

The column that decides your next quarter is time to value. The column that decides your next year is usual owner — and specifically the row where the honest answer is "nobody."

2.3 Finding out where your demand actually is

Category variance here is enormous, and the trade press reports averages that may describe nobody. Considered purchases with long research phases behave differently from replenishment. Regulated categories behave differently again. B2B differs from B2C on nearly every dimension.

Four measurements, each cheap:

1. The referral floor. What share of sessions and revenue arrives from identifiable AI sources today? Treat it as a floor rather than a total — a large share of AI referrals arrive without a usable referrer and land in "direct." Module 6 fixes this properly; for now, note the floor and the date.

2. The prompt test. Take twenty questions a real customer would ask before buying in your category. Run them across the engines your market uses. Record whether you appear, in what position, and what is said. That is your Module 3 baseline, and it usually reorders people's assumptions within an hour.

3. The marketplace check. Pull impression and conversion data for long, conversational, question-shaped queries and compare the trend against short keyword queries. Divergence is the assistant.

4. The agent check. Look at your server logs for declared agent traffic. Most retailers have never looked and are surprised in both directions — some find far more than expected, some find their edge provider has been blocking it entirely.

Marlowe & Finch — the map that changed the plan

The e-commerce director maps the four surfaces before allocating anything.

Surface	Finding	Owner today
AI search	1.9% of sessions, 2.6% of revenue. Prompt test: cited in 6 of 20 buying questions, and in three of those the citation quotes a review site that gets the price wrong	SEO manager, informally
On-platform	Marketplace is 25% of revenue. Long-query impressions up sharply over two quarters; conversion on those queries below site average	Marketplace manager — not in any AI meeting
Third-party agents	Logs show declared agent requests concentrated on 40 SKUs. The CDN has been challenging most of them	Nobody
Own agent	An on-site chat pilot the agency built, 0.3% of sessions, no measured effect	Agency

Three decisions follow, and none is the one the board expected.

The agency's on-site chat pilot is paused — total control, no measured effect, and the most expensive surface per unit of learning. The marketplace manager joins the programme, because a quarter of revenue sits on a surface where AI is already changing results. And the finding that stops the room: a third-party review site with the wrong price is being cited more often than Marlowe & Finch's own product pages. That is not a technology problem. It is a Module 3 and 4 problem, and it is fixable in weeks.

2.4 The surface with no owner

In almost every organisation that runs this exercise, third-party agents come back owned by nobody — while a decision about them is already being enforced, usually by an edge provider's default that nobody has reviewed.

That default may well be right. It should still be a policy, taken deliberately, by a named person. Module 4 §4.5 gives you the framework and the current landscape.

Exercise — Map your surfaces

Time: 60 minutes. Produces the artefact for this module.

Build a four-row table for your own business.

Surface — the four.
Present size — sessions and revenue where you can measure it; write "unmeasured" where you cannot, and do not estimate.
Trend — direction over the last two quarters, with the source.
Named owner — a person, not a team. Where the answer is nobody, write nobody.
Next action — one, this quarter, or explicitly not this quarter.

Then run the twenty-prompt test in step two of 2.3 before your next planning meeting. It takes an hour and it reorders the agenda more reliably than any deck.

Self-check

Which of the four surfaces gives you total control, and why is that not the same as it being the priority?
Your marketplace revenue share is 30% and nobody in the AI programme works on marketplaces. What have you probably misallocated?
Why is "we see very little agent traffic" an ambiguous finding rather than a reassuring one?
Which surface currently has no owner in your organisation, and who should hold it?
What would the twenty-prompt test most likely reveal in your category that your analytics does not?