I made up a deodorant brand that does not exist.
And three weeks later, Chat GBT was recommending it to strangers.
I spent $11 on a domain. It took me one hour of work.
I didn't do any weird Reddit stuff,
no fake reviews. And here's why I did that.
So I've written a tech newsletter for five years and since June,
I've been mapping what I'm calling the a I shelf.
Picture an actual shelf in a store.
You ask Chat GBT what to buy
and there's a short list of brands it reaches for.
That's this shelf. That's the AI shelf.
I run almost 9,000 queries at it.
No one can see the shelf. It's go pay.
But it sits in front of $6 trillion worth of global e commerce,
if not north of that. So I wanted to know,
can you get on the shelf? And you can.
So by day 21, I got my first hit.
By day 30,
chat GBT with browsing on named Maroon and directly underneath it,
this very real brand. One of them exists,
one of them definitely does not.
Now it only moved to my 15 queries.
Native still fully owns the category.
I just found one little dusty shelf in the back of the store
that was still open. Long tail is where the opportunity is.
No surprise there. But beyond that,
it reveal something about my relationship to shopping in AI
that I think is going to have a huge Impact.
So you put something into Google and you get a list of links,
you have some media literacies,
you get to decide who to trust
what AI did with Maroon is it handed the copy that I wrote back to me
in its own voice and that voice made it sound vetted,
it made it sound like it had some authority
but of course it doesn't and that's before agents own the whole loop
from recommendation to purchase.
So pretty soon
I'm gonna be telling my agent to keep my cabinet stocked.
So it's gonna pick, it's gonna pay
trillions of dollars are gonna be moving through this door
that currently no one can audit.
It's very high stakes. Almost no one's watching it.
I am, I test every month.
So follow on.
The craziest part about this is that it's already happening.
So when you're looking for products,
when you're looking for services,
make sure that you're actually reading and looking into the companies
because it could be fake, it could be all AI crazy.