When people are trying to figure out what to buy, they don’t start by browsing anymore. They start by asking.
They open ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or another AI tool and explain their situation in their own words. Specific, imperfect, and shaped by real constraints.
These aren’t keyword searches like “women’s running shoe, size 8.” Instead, they’re context-rich queries like:
“What’s the best running shoe fit if I run long distances in cold weather?”
“I need a running shoe that works for snow and ice in Boston.”
This is the work customers used to do across category pages, reviews, comparison charts, phone-a-friends, and multiple site visits. Now it happens in one place, in plain language, before a brand ever enters the picture.
By the time someone lands on your site, they’re often past exploration, validating a direction that’s already in progress. And browsing comes later. If it happens at all.
Why most organizations are treating this like a channel problem
Inside most orgs, this shift is being treated like a discovery problem.
As buying behavior changes, analysts and strategists are trying to put language around what’s happening. AI has become a place where customers ask questions and form opinions before they ever reach a brand experience.
Terms like McKinsey’s agentic commerce capture that reality. They describe how AI systems are guiding decisions by anticipating needs and narrowing choices, and help consumers purchase.
The mistake is what brands do with the shift as a whole.
When this shift is treated as just another channel to optimize, its real impact gets missed. The asking moment isn’t a new surface to win traffic from; it’s the point where intent itself gets constructed.
That’s why so many organizations misread what’s happening. They focus on where to show up, debate AEO vs. GEO, double down on the platform that converts better, and invest in LLM surfacing tools while the actual decision is being shaped elsewhere.
The real cost of entering the journey late
Being left out of the moment when the decision actually starts leads to more complications than conversion or traffic sourcing.
The brutal truth is, the first real question isn’t happening with you. Neither is the early comparison, or the work of figuring out what “right” even looks like. By the time someone reaches your site, they already have a direction in mind.
Brands may influence this moment elsewhere, but they can’t rely on it. When the earliest reasoning happens outside your brand experience, you’re dependent on systems you don’t control and signals you can’t see. The only place you can consistently regain visibility and influence is inside your own environment.
That changes your role.
Instead of helping customers understand what they’re trying to solve, you meet them after that understanding has already begun to take shape. You inherit the outcome of that process without seeing the process itself. The reasoning, constraints, and tradeoffs behind the choice live somewhere else, outside your environment and your visibility.
Leverage breaks when intent forms elsewhere
As a result, leverage gets pushed downstream. Conversion, merchandising, and personalization are forced to operate on a narrowed, late-stage version of the journey. You’re improving what happens after direction is set. At that point, optimization can only refine execution.
Over time, the data loss compounds. What reaches your systems are outcomes without context, and that gap quickly erodes the core of modern marketing ideas and efforts.
Ask-First Commerce
There’s a name for the shift you’re dealing with.
Ask-First Commerce describes a buying journey that starts with a question—often asked in an AI interface. What makes it different is the timing: the question comes before categories, filters, or product comparisons ever appear.
By the time someone reaches your site, they’re confirming a direction that was shaped elsewhere.
That’s where the risk shows up.
When the asking moment happens elsewhere, you enter the journey late. You’re evaluated against expectations you didn’t help shape, and your role narrows to confirmation instead of guidance.
In an ask-first world, if you can’t support early decision-making inside your own experience, you become interchangeable.
What showing up earlier actually requires
Staying ahead in an ask-first world doesn’t mean chasing customers across every new interface. It means changing what happens when they arrive.
If customers are asking questions before they browse, your brand experience has to engage with those questions directly. Not after intent is clear, but while it’s still forming.
That’s something traditional commerce experiences struggle with.
Menus, filters, and chatbots work well once someone knows what they want. They all require the customer to translate uncertainty into structured inputs (categories, attributes, or commands) before they’re actually ready to do so. This makes them far less useful when a customer is still sorting through uncertainty or trying to reconcile real-world constraints.
Showing up earlier means being able to respond to how people actually describe their situation. And it means helping them make progress without forcing them to leave the site to get clarity somewhere else.
When the decision process happens inside your experience, something important changes. You’re no longer reacting to outcomes; you’re present while decisions take shape.
Why menus, filters, and chatbots can’t do this job
Meeting customers at the asking moment requires a different kind of on-site experience.
It needs to engage people while they’re still trying to understand what they want, and it has to do that inside the brand’s own environment. If customers have to leave to get clarity, the moment is already lost.
Most on-site tools weren’t designed for this. Menus, filters, and basic chat experiences work once someone knows what they’re looking for. They fall short earlier, when the real work is figuring out what “right” even looks like.
What’s needed next is an on-site experience that can stay with someone through that uncertainty. One that can follow how they describe their situation and respond in a way that helps them narrow options and move forward, without pushing the decision elsewhere.
When that moment stays on-site, your brand regains more than influence over what comes next. You regain understanding. Over time, that understanding strengthens everything downstream, from how experiences are personalized to how decisions get made.
Interested in exploring how to make the shift?
In a world where the first agent to understand intent shapes the outcome, Vwam ensures that agent is yours.
