Amazon, Google and Meta just reported on AI shopping. What CPG brands should take from it

Three of the companies that decide which brands shoppers see in AI answers reported earnings in the past two weeks. Meta went first on October 21, Alphabet on October 28 and Amazon on October 29. None of them called it an AI visibility update. Read the calls as a CPG brand manager, though, and you get a pretty specific to-do list.

Here’s what each one disclosed, what it left out, and what we would change this week.

What did Amazon say about Alexa for Shopping on its Q3 call?#

Andy Jassy gave three numbers. Over 400 million customers used Alexa for Shopping in the last 12 months. Customer interactions were up 570% year over year. And U.S. customers who use it spend 50% more per order than those who don’t. Treat that last one as a correlation. People who already buy a lot are the most likely to try a shopping assistant, and Amazon didn’t say how it controlled for that.

The sentence that matters more: “Though we anticipate working with horizontal agents, we believe Alexa for Shopping is going to be the primary shopping agent customers use to shop Amazon.” Jassy also said shopping through outside agents isn’t meaningfully affecting Amazon Ads, because “few customers are doing much shopping this way yet.”

So on Amazon, the agent that picks your product is Amazon’s own. ChatGPT or Gemini may shape the shortlist before a shopper gets there (we covered how ChatGPT picks brands before it searches). The final pick inside Amazon runs on your detail page, reviews, Q&A and price history.

Grocery is where this lands hardest. Jassy said Everyday Essentials grew about three times faster than the rest of the store and now account for about half of Amazon’s units. Customers who buy perishables through same-day delivery buy about seven times more Everyday Essentials units than those who don’t. Alexa for Shopping now handles Subscribe & Save changes by conversation, which we went through in our post on AI agents and the reorder.

Is Amazon putting ads inside the assistant?#

Yes, starting in January. Amazon Ads announced Branded Conversations on September 29 as the next step for Sponsored Brands prompts. When a shopper taps a prompt today, Alexa for Shopping already answers from the brand’s detail pages, Brand Store and campaign data. Branded Conversations adds expertise the brand supplies: what makes it different, which product fits which need, and which products work together. Amazon’s own example is a skin care brand explaining which cleanser suits oily skin, which suits sensitive skin, and what toner and sunscreen go with it. The conversations are marked Sponsored and launch in the U.S. in January 2027. In early Amazon testing, nearly 20% of shoppers who interacted with a Sponsored Brands prompt continued the conversation about that brand.

The same announcement covered Review Requests, launching this month, which asks verified buyers to rate a product from pages like the Amazon homepage. Amazon says products in early testing received about three times as many ratings and reviews each week. For a new SKU that has to be recommended by an assistant reading reviews, that matters.

The money behind it is growing. Amazon’s advertising services revenue was $19.6 billion in Q3, up 11% year over year, and Amazon expects high-teens growth in Q4. Amazon blamed the slower Q3 rate mainly on Prime Day timing.

Our take: the brief you write for Branded Conversations is the same content your detail pages should already carry. If the assistant can only explain why your product is different when you pay for the prompt, your organic answers are losing. Write the brief once and put it on the page first.

What did Google say about AI Mode and shopping?#

Sundar Pichai said Search query growth was the fastest in five years, including commercial queries. Queries in AI Mode are on average three times longer than traditional searches, and one in five AI Mode searches globally use voice, images or documents.

Philipp Schindler then said the quiet part. AI Mode monetizes at a lower rate, and its growth weighed on Search revenue. Google is now scaling ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode, taking AI Mode ads to international markets and adding multi-turn ads in the U.S. His evidence for doing so: “Click-through rates are already similar between sponsored and organic product list items within AI Mode.” As Search Engine Land pointed out, Google shared neither the rates nor how it measured them.

Two more lines from the Alphabet call belong in a brand deck. Google says its Universal Commerce Protocol now enables direct checkout for hundreds of thousands of brands, naming Chewy, Nike and Tapestry. And Google Cloud’s Thomas Kurian said Ulta Beauty’s AI shopping assistant produced a 3x higher conversion rate than traditional browsing on Ulta’s site. That’s a vendor citing its own customer, so read it as a direction, not a benchmark.

What it means for a snack or personal care brand: a three-times-longer query is a query full of attributes, like “gluten-free school snacks under $5 that kids actually eat.” Your product listing has to carry those attributes in plain text and in your Merchant Center feed. And if organic and sponsored product listings really do get clicked at similar rates inside AI Mode, feed quality deserves the same attention as the bid.

Why should CPG brands watch Meta’s Muse?#

On Meta’s October 21 call, Mark Zuckerberg said more than 10 million people in the U.S. and Canada set up Muse in its first six weeks, according to MediaNama’s report, with about 25% using it daily. Shopping is its most common use case: more than a quarter of Muse users engage in it, with an average purchase over $200. Meta plans to charge businesses fees on transactions Muse helps complete, though CFO Susan Li said it isn’t monetizing Muse outside subscriptions today. Muse comes to Meta’s glasses in November.

A $200 average purchase says Muse isn’t buying paper towels yet. We wouldn’t move budget here this quarter. But it’s one more assistant recommending products, so add it to the list of places you check.

What should a CPG brand do this week?#

Every platform on this list is putting paid placements into its AI answers within months. The organic answer is still where you win or lose a shopper who never clicks an ad, and it’s the cheaper one to fix. Score yourself:

Shopify reports on November 3 and Muse reaches Meta’s glasses this month, so the next round of numbers is close. We’ll cover them here. For the longer view of Amazon’s ad business, see the Xenalytics chart of Amazon’s revenue mix.

If you want to know which of your SKUs ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity name today, run a free SKU audit or book a demo. How we score each product is on the SearchPanel homepage.