Onsite search and ecommerce were transformed in 2025, as retailers adopted AI technologies. Some seemed to have memories, making human interactions with technology context-aware and autonomous.

Unlike older, reactive chatbots, new technologies are proactive, using multimodal options and emotional awareness to detect user cues such as frustration or excitement.

Cimulate, which offers agentic commerce solutions to retailers, announced on Wednesday a new AI-native ecosystem designed to improve how consumers shop through websites and conduct site search when retailers use its “CommerceGPT” platform.

“This is a new world for retailers and brands in terms of understanding product discovery, referral traffic, and direct purchasing from answer engines,” Cimulate.ai CEO and co-founder John Andrews told MediaPost. “They've observed both paid and organic traffic from Google declining as more shoppers research within answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude.”

Merchants have historically sought more control over ecommerce systems and experiences, and have attempted to fix ecommerce systems within their own companies themselves that did not intuitively work.

An enormous number of redirects and rules are outdated, Andrews explained. AI-native search understands things that keyword search did not, but merchandisers still need tools to control processes and ensure that AI responses represent their brand correctly.

Andrews described one of the three tools -- “Human Feedback,” announced on Wednesday -- as the “first collaboration system for merchandisers” that co-pilot AI search, enabling browsing and retrieval of recommendations.

It gives merchants the ability to provide feedback to AI, which in turn learns from that feedback to correct itself. Then it monitors site search and personalization services in the platform based on complex rules.

Human Feedback, along with two other agentic commerce features announced Wednesday, will support retailers.

While Human Feedback gives merchandisers a collaboration system with AI, "Commerce AEO" (answer engine optimization) helps them understand and engineer more traffic from answer engines and "Co-Pilot Analytics" helps retailers understand a new type of signal that comes from AI-shopping assistant conversations online.

Cimulate’s website chatbot now has an analytics platform, which launched Wednesday.

“We have moved on from generic chatbots on sites that were predominantly built for support requests,” Andrews said. “Now shoppers expect an expert AI-shopping assistant able to converse and understand their needs.”

Cimulate’s customers who have launched the company’s conversational co-pilot received higher engagement rates, and shoppers provide a much larger amount of context, Andrews says.

The challenge is to "synthesize all of those conversations to understand why people did or didn't buy," Andrews says, adding that analytics is needed to provide “actionable insights to improve conversational commerce outcomes, and synthesized insights from a deep library of conversations.”