THRIVE: eCom News - 03 July 2026
This week: LLMs are driving discovery your analytics can't see, Shopify's Spring '26 Edition puts AI-channel sales into your Admin and more
Happy Friday!
Here's what you need to know this week across organic and paid that matters for your ecom store:
01 · LLMs are driving discovery your analytics can't see and your post-purchase survey is the only place to catch it
What it means for you: Our good friends Vervaunt and their founder Paul Rogers has shared data showing LLM-sourced discovery rising sharply, yet almost none of it lands in analytics. Shoppers meet you in ChatGPT, then convert via search or direct, so the LLM never gets the credit. Add an "AI assistant / ChatGPT" option to your post-purchase and NPS "how did you hear about us?" questions now, so you hold first-party proof of AI-driven demand before anyone asks you to justify AEO/GEO spend.
02 · ICYMI: Shopify's Spring '26 Edition puts AI-channel sales, and the searches you're invisible for, into your Admin
What it means for you: Genuinely useful, but Catalog only ranks what it can read, so if your feed calls one colour e.g. "Sage," "Eucalyptus" and "Soft Green", then the dashboard tells you you're invisible without telling you why. Clean, structured product data stops being a nice-to-have and becomes the price of entry to agentic commerce. The panel only counts purchases on Shopify's own surfaces, not whether the model recommends you in the first place.
03 · Google Merchant Center's conversational attributes are a first-mover feed play for AI shopping answers
What it means for you: Google now wants conversational feed data, i.e. FAQs, product highlights and richer detail to match products to intent like "a boot for muddy hikes" instead of head-term keywords, and so many brands aren’t filling them in. The six globally available attributes are a feed job you can roll out this quarter, and they're how you get surfaced in AI Mode and Gemini answers before your category catches on.
To read more:
Paul Rogers on LLM attribution & Census — Vervaunt
Selling everything, everywhere, all at once: The Spring '26 Edition — Shopify
How to use conversational attributes — Google Merchant Center Help
From NOVOS
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