A.I. shopping assistants recommend national chains over smaller competitors between 90 and 94 percent of the time when drawing only on their training data, according to a Sept. 29 study from the research consultancy Vaer AI, commissioned by Lightspeed Commerce. The audit covered nearly 460,000 responses and more than 2.4 million links across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini, and it describes a recommendation layer that quietly reproduces the shelf logic of twentieth-century retail inside the interface that’s replacing search.

Turning on live web search softens the pattern without erasing it. National chains still took 46 to 58 percent of top recommendations in that condition, and Google AI Overviews named no local retailer in 68 percent of shopping responses.

The gap widens as intent sharpens. Vaer AI found small retailers surfaced as the top recommendation in roughly one in three broad shopping queries, but in as few as one in ten searches for a specific branded product. “The closer a shopper gets to buying, the harder it can become for an independent business to make the list,” Dax Dasilva, founder and chief executive of Lightspeed, told 6ix Retail.

Writing in Fortune, Dasilva flagged the deeper mechanic. Large and small retailers each accounted for roughly 38 percent of the citations the A.I. tools pulled in, yet big chains took 52 percent of top recommendations against 20 percent for smaller businesses. Vaer AI’s published example: ChatGPT cited three small stationery shops among six sources for a New York office-supplies query, then recommended Staples first.

One word rearranges the result. Adding “independent” to a prompt cut national-chain recommendations from about 44 percent to as little as 9 percent and more than doubled the share of small and local stores named. “Local” and “near me” did far less work, because models frequently treat a nearby chain branch as satisfying those terms.

Shoppers appear to want the opposite of what the systems default to. In a Censuswide survey of 2,000 North American consumers commissioned by Lightspeed, 50 percent said they’d shop locally more often if A.I. made nearby independents easier to find, 33 percent said A.I. should prioritize small businesses, and 13 percent said large brands should come first.

Search Engine Watch noted that Lightspeed is simultaneously promoting its own A.I. visibility campaign, which is worth holding in view. The underlying finding is still legible. “Visibility within these systems will become just as important as search engine rankings have been over the past two decades,” said Tom Wells, founder and principal consultant of Vaer AI. The two-decade SEO scramble is now restarting one abstraction layer up, and the retailers who labeled themselves early will be the ones the model repeats back.

Sources