UK retailers are lagging way behind their American counterparts in the race to be “AI-assistant ready”, according to a new analysis which reveals that most of Britain’s best known brands are simply not ready for this new world of shopping.
With AI assistants becoming the place shoppers ask what to buy, the next step is letting an AI agent buy for you. This is already live for US shoppers in Google Gemini, Meta’s Muse and Microsoft Copilot but most UK brands have yet to set up this facility.
Human Forward, a start-up based out of London, asked six AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google’s Gemini, DeepSeek and Meta’s Muse) the questions shoppers ask about 75 leading UK retailers and direct to consumer brands, and checked each brand’s website for the standards AI agents use to find products and complete a purchase.
It found most brands can’t be bought by an AI agent and of the 50 sites it could check, 35 were not able to, including Marks & Spencer, Dunelm and Moonpig. The 15 that were ready all run on Shopify, which builds the facility in for its merchants. Brands on their own technology have been left to work it out alone.
Asked for the best brands in their own category, 12 of the 50 big retailers were never named by any of the six assistants, including Boohoo, New Look, Matalan, River Island, Schuh and AO.
When one assistant recommends a brand, on average 39% of the others leave it out. ChatGPT is the hardest to get into: it named a brand unprompted 40% of the time, against 60% for Claude.
Meanwhile, everyday brand names get lost. When asked “What is Next?”, four of six assistants give a dictionary definition; when asked “What is Iceland?”, all six describe the country; “Dreams” gets the PlayStation game or sleep from all six; “AO” gets an abbreviation from four.
Human Forward founder Peter Abidi, who was formerly digital marketing and ecommerce director at Rapha, said: “AI shopping is arriving faster than most brands realise, and the brands most at risk aren’t the small ones. They’re the big names running their own technology, who have been left to work it out alone. Some of the most recommended brands in Britain still can’t be bought by an agent.
“Some brands will decide they don’t want agents buying for their customers, and that’s their call. Being forgotten isn’t. If your brand has an everyday name, assume the AI doesn’t know it’s you. These are fixable problems, and most of the fixes are boring, but nobody fixes what they haven’t measured.”
The full table and methodolgy is available here>
Related stories
Agentic AI assistants set to be judge and jury for brands
Three priorities for CMOs in the new AI-driven world
PwC: Act now so that data and tech spend gets results
Gartner: Industry must grasp ‘AI nettle’ or wither on vine
Decision Marketing at 15: The march of the robot army
Be the first to comment on "Most top brands invisible to agentic shopping in UK"