Brands Face a New Battleground: Getting Recommended on the AI Shelf
Consumers now ask ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini for product picks — and one writer's fictional deodorant brand actually won AI recommendations. Welcome to the AI shelf.
Updated
The brief
- Consumers increasingly ask ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for product recommendations, changing how brands position themselves online.
- Tech writer Deana Burke coined the concept of the 'AI shelf' in her newsletter Boys Club.
- Burke created a completely fictional natural deodorant brand and successfully got it recommended by AI bots.
Consumers are increasingly asking ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for product recommendations, and the shift is already changing how brands position themselves online.
For decades, brand teams have optimized their products for two environments: the physical shelf and the digital storefront. A third environment has now entered the mix. Tech writer Deana Burke recently outlined the concept of the "AI shelf" in her newsletter Boys Club — the idea that generative AI chatbots now act as a filtering layer between brands and consumers, deciding which products get surfaced when a shopper asks for a recommendation.
The comparison to traditional merchandising is direct. On a physical shelf, placement, packaging and distribution determine visibility. On a digital storefront, search optimization, ratings and retail media spend do the same work. On the AI shelf, the mechanics are still poorly understood — which is precisely what makes Burke's experiment notable.
Burke set out to test how the AI shelf actually works. She created a completely fictional natural deodorant brand and attempted to get it recommended by AI bots. The experiment worked: the non-existent product succeeded in landing on the AI shelf.
The result carries an uncomfortable implication for established brands. If a fictional company with no product, no customers and no revenue can earn a recommendation from an AI assistant, then the signals these systems rely on can be manipulated. The optimization playbook that brands built for search engines and e-commerce marketplaces may not simply transfer — and the old guard's advantage in distribution and shelf space may count for less when the intermediary is a language model.
For marketers, the development reframes a familiar question. Brand positioning has always been about being findable and persuasive at the point of decision. When that point of decision moves into a conversational interface — a chat window on ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini rather than a store aisle or a search results page — positioning work has to address a new arbiter.
The stakes grow with the behavior. Product recommendation queries are becoming a routine use of consumer AI tools, not an edge case. Every shift of that volume away from traditional search and storefronts reduces the value of investments made against those channels, from SEO programs to retail media placements.
The full details of Burke's method and results are available in her write-up on Boys Club, and Modern Retail's ongoing coverage tracks the shifting dynamics between retail's old and new guards. What the experiment makes clear is that the AI shelf is no longer hypothetical. Brands that treated AI assistants as a curiosity now have a demonstrated case of a made-up product winning recommendations — and a concrete reason to work out, quickly, how their real ones can do the same.
Based on podcasts.apple.com
Filed under ai, generative-ai, brand-visibility, chatgpt, retail
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Staff writer covering consumer brands and retail at Marketing Herald.
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