Kiri Masters, on her Retail Media Breakfast Club, has drummed up a huge amount of noise on Linkedin with the exposรฉ of Amazon Rufus AI in search, and in search ads.
This sort of publicity around AI in action, is immensely exciting for the retail media market and a learning opportunity for everyone. Understand it or get left behind.
In this deep dive, we unpack Amazon Rufus's patent and what it means for e-commerce strategy. Learn how its semantic similarity model, click training data, and visual label tagging are reshaping product discovery. Discover why traditional keyword optimization may soon be obsolete, and how brands can prepare for this AI-driven shift in Amazon's ecosystem.
In short, what does it mean for online retail product discovery, and retail media?
โก๏ธ Keyword search is disappearing, it is fundamentally broken
โก๏ธ Sentence transformers understand the context of words and characters in a query (the 'T' in ChatGPT)
โก๏ธ Query:Click pair reinforcement learning leverages human feedback to optimise search
Democratizing Access to All Retailers
In May 2023, Particular Audience launched Adaptive Transformer Search (ATS) making available to all retailers what is now happening at Amazon, find the press release on VentureBeat here.
Particular Audience's mission has always been to democratize access to Amazon's technology, as noted by Techcrunch, Particular Audience takes in $7.5M to give retailers way to take on Amazon.
For those interested, the Whitepaper we released goes into detail about how this differs from legacy keyword search, Whitepaper available here.
Leading retailers globally now use ATS for entire organic search experiences, hybrid retail media, and/or to power sponsored placements within third party search experiences. It is an order of magnitude better than legacy keyword search approaches, and promises to more than double ad yield while retaining or improving customer experience.
Particular Audience Named in Forrester Researchโs 2025 NRF Innovators Report: Retail-Focused Tech Companies to Watch
Forrester Research recently described Particular Audience in the following words, more information available on Yahoo Finance, here.
Optimally sorting products and offers on search results and category pages has vexed retailers for decades. Retail media now complicates those matters further, as retailers must weigh what resonates most with shoppers against revenue from retail media ads, which donโt always provide the most relevant content for shoppers. Onsite personalization has been a Holy Grail in e-commerce for decades, and Particular Audience is tackling this challenge. It has several solutions that aim to improve how retailers present products to shoppers โ be they on a search results page or in a retail media ad.
...and finally, the words 'multi-modal' starting to be used in the context of Retail Media, learn about AI That Can See, Read & Predict here.
On-Site Search is still where the majority of retail media advertising growth will come from, tech like ATS and Rufus guarantee it
