0:00 Alright. Good morning, everyone. Or good afternoon or good evening, depending on where you are. 0:09 We got some Chicago joiners, California joiners. I am in Austin, Texas. And I'm in London, UK. 0:21 Raleigh, North Carolina, Cleveland, Ohio, Minneapolis. Wow. 0:33 It's too fast for me to catch up on it, but it looks like a pretty diverse crowd for us, John. Yes. Another person from London there. Good to see. 0:43 Yeah. Brussels. Very nice. Great European representation too. Let's just give a couple more minutes for people transitioning to their previous appointments. 1:04 Stockholm, Sweden. Amazing. Alright. We're get started, everyone. Hello. 1:35 Thanks for joining. I'm Hannah Montevani. I'm a director for marketing strategy and AI transformation here with the Bazaarvoice team, and I'm joined by my colleague, John. 1:45 Hi. I'm John Howes, lead product manager for AI strategy and enablement at Bazaarvoice. And Joe and I are here today to share with you some fresh data from our most recent AI visibility study and to talk a little bit about what that means for your brand. 2:01 So I hope you guys have your coffee in hand because we're get started. So a quick prep on what we're gonna cover today. 2:12 We're gonna start by briefly briefly contextualizing how AI is changing product discovery. We're gonna talk about the results of the study that we just mentioned, and we're gonna have some practical steps to help you improve your AI visibility today. 2:26 And finally, we're gonna tell you a little bit of what Bazaarvoice is building to help you get there next. So we're gonna have our teams monitoring the q and a part of our channel as well. 2:36 So if you have any particular questions about anything, please don't hesitate to ask us right there. Well, the shift in shopper discovery that has been brought by AI is happening faster really than anything that we've seen in the industry before. 2:52 More and more shoppers are starting their product research inside AI tools, like Google AI mode, which is the surface we're gonna be focusing on today. 3:01 And we know that SEO and a really solid product description page still matters, but they are necessary, but they're not sufficient anymore. 3:10 So with that in mind, let's talk about what is actually making AI engines show, compare, and recommend your products. 3:21 So what we've been seeing is that when consumers are asking a question in AI shopping surfaces such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, and others, is that these AI engines are now essentially building a new storefront in front of the consumer. 3:40 So what initially started in the early days of large language models is just getting the answer. Now what you can see is that citations are appearing from different sites as well as, in some cases, the product carousel, which we'll dive more into. 3:55 And with across these three different parts of the AI shopping result, the consumer voice can influence all three in different ways. 4:03 And you can now see that reviews are really visible and important in those product carousels with the review rating, the review count, as well as the review verbatims. 4:20 So this idea of AI shopping results can sound fairly abstract, but what we'd like to do here is ground it in a real example. 4:28 So what you can see on the screen is a example of a Google AI overview shopping result. And here you can see the product images, the products themselves, the review rating, the review count, the price, as well as the actual review verbatims in the case of AI overviews. 4:44 And Google have rolled out this experience to AI mode, AI overviews, and Gemini in some countries. And ChatGPT equally have a similar shopping experience. 4:56 So we wanted to understand this more and really understand how these ratings and reviews are influencing these results. 5:05 So we carried out a study looking at twelve thousand seven hundred and forty five AI recommended products across twelve shopping categories, including apparel, food and beverage, furniture, electronics, and more, and across three stages of the consumer journey. 5:21 So looking at prompts across the top of the funnel where consumers are carrying out more research, understanding and understanding the category. The middle of the funnel where consumers are comparing specific products, and the bottom of the funnel where they know the product they want to buy, but they're looking where to buy it, which retailer, at what price, etcetera. 5:39 And we also looked across ratings and review volume. This analysis was done on Google AI mode because because this surface now has over one billion monthly active users and is somewhere where you can really see the impact of ratings and reviews. 5:58 So the first finding that we identified was that star ratings are really the baseline requirements to get your products recommended by AI engines. 6:10 Across this large sample of over twelve thousand products, what we found was that the median review rating of those products was four point six out of five stars, which is a little bit higher, naught point two three stars higher than the industry benchmark. 6:25 Furthermore, we found that less than one percent of all the AI recommended products had fewer than three stars. So, really, you can think of this as the entry ticket to get your products to be visible in these AI product carousels. 6:38 So the a good star rating gets you through the door. However, what we also found, and this is really the interesting insight, was that review volume is the fast pass to get your products recommended. 6:51 We saw that looking across this huge sample of products, that's the products in those carousels had nine hundred and forty nine reviews on average, looking at the median, compared to just a hundred and twenty across standard organic listings on traditional Google Shopping. 7:09 So that's eight times increase. And so what we can see is that these AI shopping channels are favoring items that are backed by substantial, customer proof, and products without reviews aren't in the picture. 7:24 So review volume is really a way to get your products prevalent in those AI shopping experiences. We looked beyond this and looked across the different stages of the journey at the top of the funnel, middle of funnel, the bottom of funnel, to understand how product carousels are influencing how consumers discover, compare, and ultimately choose products. 7:47 And we saw that these product carousels are appearing across all stages of the journey, but particularly at the top of the funnel at that research stage where a customer is trying to understand the category. 7:58 For example, they may be asking, I'm looking to buy trail running shoes of a certain price. I'm trying to understand what brands are out there, understand more about the products in that category when they're doing that research. 8:11 Traditionally, we thought of ratings and reviews as really being a conversion tool. What we're seeing now is that this awareness and discovery and research stage is really where the shopper voice is having an impact. 8:25 And this varies by category. As mentioned, we did this across twelve categories, which you can see on the screen, and the review count really varied a lot depending on what category. 8:36 So high volume, fast moving categories such as health and beauty generally has lots of reviews, whereas more lower volume, more consideration based categories such as hardware and furniture, they had a fewer reviews, but still higher than the overall benchmark. 8:57 And what third party research has been showing us is that consumers are actually using AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, etcetera, to really compare and understand and research products in that higher consideration space, which might maybe higher value items. 9:13 So, actually, fewer reviews may go further in those spaces where consumers are using AI to ask complex queries and really understand what they want for high ticket items. 9:32 So I'll hand over to Hannah now to talk about what this means for brands and retailers. You're on mute. Sorry, Hannah. 9:44 Thank you. Yes. So what I picked up from this, John, was that the AI shopping visibility that brands are very likely trying to drive right now is really built on the content standards, the foundations that they will already have. 9:59 Right? So we have ratings. And what you told us is that they kinda get you in the room in this new storefront. And we also have review depth. We have review accessibility. 10:10 We have review volume, the relevance to the specific category. So those are the elements, the contextual elements that will set a product apart from the competition that might also be served during that that prompt. 10:24 So this makes me think of the Bazaarvoice triple a framework. Right? It talks about content being accessible, authentic, and abundant throughout the journey. 10:35 And we heard from a lot of clients that's really already paying off for them. Great. 10:49 So in terms of actually how can you action this these insights and how you can turn the customer voice into your AI advantage, we think of this in in a kind of two sides of the coin. 11:01 One is measurement, understanding how your brands and products currently perform in AI shopping results. And secondly, having measured, how do you optimize? 11:11 Regarding measurement, we you can look at just prompting models themselves or for your brands and products to understand how you're appearing. But beyond that, you can also look to third party AI measurement solutions such as ProFound, EverTune, BlueFish, and others to really understand how your brand is performing and getting that baseline measurement around understanding your AI visibility in this new space. 11:40 Having measured, the next part to look is how can you optimize. So there are we have this framework called triple a content, which is making your content accessible, authentic, and abundant. 11:52 By accessible, we mean that it is easily crawlable or readable by AI models, and there are two methods of doing this. 12:00 One is by making the content on your pages crawlable to all of these AI shopping crawlers, And then the other mechanism is by direct data feeds. 12:10 So those could be your product data feeds to Google Merchant. We also, as Bazaarvoice, we provide a review data feed to Google, and these reviews are used in Google Shopping experiences. 12:23 Beyond accessibility, the second part is authenticity. So for a long time, Google has said that they prioritize content that shows experience, expertise, authority, and trust. 12:35 And by using the authentic consumer voice, not AI generated slop or overly relying on branded content, by relying on user generated content, which is authentic consumer experiences, you can leverage the consumer voice and build that content pipeline, let the shoppers do the work for you by providing that authentic feedback that can be used by large language models to recommend your products. 13:02 And finally, abundancy. So making sure you you have an abundancy of content as mentioned, lots of reviews is really a factor, but also an abundance in terms of where it shows up, not only on your retailer sites, but syndicating to to other retailers and making sure that you have lots of content in lots of places increases the chance that those places will be cited by the different AI shopping surfaces. 13:34 So an idea of way where we as Bazaarvoice are heading. Firstly, we have recently launched the authentic discovery API, which really taps into that point around accessibility. 13:45 This API structures all of the user generated content that you have, whether it's ratings and reviews, questions and answers, review summaries, and more into a structure that is easily crawlable by the different large language model crawlers. 13:59 And the early results are promising. What we've seen across a sample of thirty eight clients is that having implemented this and looking pre and post implementation, we saw an increase in referral page views from those AI shopping services. 14:14 So from chat g p t dot com or gemini dot com, Claude, to the client product detail pages post the implementation. 14:23 So we saw that increase in referrals. Secondly, when we're looking at the actual accessibility and crawlability of the the content by using Adobe's third party content visibility checker, we could see that that content on the page was now crawlable by the different AI engines, some of which can't crawl traditional JavaScript content. 14:46 So that's why we built this system to make it more easily accessible. And something new is coming this fall. We'll be launching a new offering to help clients measure and act at AI visibility at scale. 14:59 So more to hear soon. Keep an eye out. Finally, a thirty second recap of what we've been explaining here. 15:09 So firstly, AI is reshaping product discover discovery. That's no question. More and more shoppers are going to AI tools to help understand categories and discover products and brands. 15:21 And ratings and reviews are now a visible part of it. Secondly, star ratings, they're really table stakes. You've got to have well rated products to be discovered. 15:32 But beyond that, review volume can be a strong differentiator against your competitors. Thirdly, these product carousels are now more and more prevalent, and they span the entire journey. 15:42 They don't just influence discovery, but also comparison and ultimately choice and conversion. The barriers barrier to entry really depends on your category. 15:53 So think about what the specifics of your category, what your competitors are doing, what good review ratings and good review counts look like that might may differ from hotels compared to credit cards, compared to apparel or electronics. 16:09 It really depends on what's important and what's the benchmark for you. And finally, AI readiness starts with strong content foundations. 16:17 You really have to have that good content pipeline, whether that's product content, even things that, you know, aren't really Bazaarvoice's area, we still recommend that you focus on having good product descriptions, product information, FAQs, etcetera. 16:34 Content really is king. And what's really important to understand is that, you know, there's not just this one silver bullet, generative engine optimization as it's called, similar to search engine optimization is multifaceted. 16:51 So making your content accessible and crawlable, that's important, but so is everything else. So is your broader brand equity, so is your product content, your data feeds. 17:01 Your whole content strategy really influences how your brand and product show up. We're not claiming to be the panacea, but we are sure that ratings and reviews is a really critical part, and user generated content in general is absolutely key for product discovery. 17:22 So I'll hand over to Alice. Thank you, John. That was so good. Very enlightening. John conducted this research himself, so it was really good to hear you talk through the detail of it, John. 17:33 And for everyone in the audience, I I believe that a lot of this is reiterating the strategy that you already have in place. 17:42 Right? For the practitioners here, for the Bazaarvoice clients here in the room, we've been talking about high quality reviews. We've been talking about recent reviews and a volume of reviews coverage across your catalog. 17:53 So I'd love to hear from you guys if there's anything that you think you're gonna be different doing differently in your strategy based on what you learned here today. 18:03 And as you guys type on the chat for us, I'd love to extend the invitation to this group to our upcoming Inspire twenty twenty six event. 18:13 So if you want to continue to learn about the art and the science of product discovery and how it's transforming so fast in the age of AI, come join us for Inspire. 18:23 It's very likely we're gonna be in a city near you. The cities we're gonna be having our Inspire event on globally are listed here on your screen. 18:33 It's a really great opportunity to connect with other practitioners, other industry leaders, and also to update your playbook. Right? So we're gonna have a lot of research there as well. 18:43 You are able to register on the link that is on the site on on the chat here, and you can also contact your Bazaarvoice team if you have any questions to whether this event is right for you. 18:55 I will absolutely love to see you there in one of these cities. Alright. 19:07 I know the full recording of the session will be sent to you guys straight after. So I hope we can go a little bit deeper in the research, and don't hesitate to contact Bazaarvoice if you like to talk about this a little bit more. 19:21 And that's all for John and I today. Thank you so
