I asked AI to find me an external drive in 10 London stores. Which answer would you trust?
I'll tell you which one I'd trust at the end.
The task was simple. 1 TB, fast, under £250 with delivery. One drive per store, with price, stock and a link.
Gemini answered in 2 minutes. A neat table, 10 stores, prices, links, the cheapest offer in bold.
Perplexity took 25 minutes. For some stores its table said "could not open the site".
Then I opened every link myself. That's where it got interesting.
In Gemini's answer, 2 of the 5 prices I could check were different on the store's own page. A drive marked "in stock" was out of stock. And the "cheapest offer", £119.99, led to a catalogue page with no such price.
Perplexity got all 4 checked prices right. But it quietly dropped a cheaper drive at £135 because it was a pre-order. I never said I needed it today. And for 2 stores that had a suitable drive, it couldn't confirm any offer.
Before that, I checked how the stores open to automated tools, the kind that search and buy for people. 3 of the 10 didn't open to ours at all. One didn't open even to a regular browser from abroad.
Here's what this means if you sell online. The shopper is the same. The way they search changed. Before anyone sees your product, an AI has already decided which offers to show, which to drop and which prices to quote. The same class of 1 TB drive cost from £135 to £249.98 across these stores. Which of those prices the shopper sees depends on what their AI could open and how it read the request.
And the surprise. My own manual search missed 2 things the AIs found: a drive filed in the wrong section, and a pre-order label I didn't notice.
So which answer would I trust? Neither, until I've opened the link myself.
If you run an online store, try this: ask 2 or 3 AIs to find a product in your store for an ordinary need. Then check which option they picked, whether price and stock match your page, and whether they kept the shopper's requirements.
Full report, store by store, with every price and link: What Will AI Tell a Shopper About Your Store? One External Drive, Ten UK Stores, Three AIs.
Want this check for your own store? Send me a message.