How AI finds products in online stores · 10 UK stores · Gemini and Perplexity checked against saved store pages
What Will AI Tell a Shopper About Your Store? One External Drive, Ten UK Stores, Three AIs
For ecommerce teams and online store ownersConsumer research into how a shopper's own AI assistants find products. I needed an external drive and asked AI to find one in ten UK online stores. Every offer the AIs named was opened through their own links and checked against store pages saved the same day.
This is an independent research project run by an individual, Sergei Ponomarev, under the AI Business name. It was not commissioned or funded by any store or technology vendor. It describes what two public AI assistants, Gemini and Perplexity, answered to the same task on 13 October 2026, and what we found on store pages saved the same day. It checks the search for offers, not the checkout: no orders were placed, no baskets filled, no personal data entered. It is not a ranking of stores or of AIs and not a recommendation to buy. Pages that did not open are reported as observations about our tools and connection; their causes were not established. The report includes the task, the offers each AI named and their status, the results in numbers, examples of what helps and what gets in the way when verifying an offer, practical checks for store teams, the method and its limits, a card for each store and an access check. If a store finds a factual inaccuracy, please send the supporting evidence to info@aibusiness.vc: confirmed corrections are published in a dated change log. Version 1.0, 13 October 2026; the PDF's SHA-256 is published next to it.
What's inside · 10 pages
- The task in plain words: one shopper in London, one 1 TB external SSD, ten UK stores, one list for every search
- What Gemini and Perplexity offered in each store and what was confirmed on the saved pages
- The results in numbers: prices checked, matched and differing, stores without offers, approximate response times
- What helps verify an offer and what gets in the way: stock labels, the search index, prices that differ from the site, site search built for people
- What to check in your own store, step by step
- A card for each store and an access check with three browsers
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