By Taylor Brisch, Director of Affiliate Marketing
The brands best positioned in AI-driven commerce right now are not the ones with the biggest media budgets. They’re the ones that have spent years building the partner relationships, publisher trust, and creator ecosystems that AI systems pull from when they generate a recommendation.
That was the throughline at IPX 2026 in Austin, impact.com’s annual conference. impact.com CEO David Yovanno opened with a frame worth sitting with: the industry is on a roller coaster with no visibility into the track ahead. The only real question is how you operate under those conditions.
Discovery Has Shifted, and You Can’t Buy Your Way Into the New Model
Three out of four AI-using consumers now start their purchase journey outside a traditional search results page. They’re not browsing links or scanning sponsored placements. They’re asking a question and acting on the answer. Nearly a quarter are choosing AI search specifically to avoid ads.
The paid placement model doesn’t break in this environment. It just becomes less relevant to the moment that shapes the decision. When an AI answers a query, it isn’t drawing from your media budget. It’s synthesizing what third parties have said about you: affiliate content, creator reviews, comparison articles, publisher coverage. The content you don’t own is now doing more work than the content you paid for.
The strategic question is no longer how to buy visibility. It’s how to earn citation.
That requires auditing your partner mix differently. Which of your affiliates, creators, and publishers are already appearing in AI answers for your category? Those are your most valuable relationships right now. The ones missing from that list are the ones your competitors are likely already cultivating.
Creators Have Graduated from Awareness to Accountability
68% of brand-creator contracts now include performance benchmarks, up from 42% two years ago. On the creator side, 71% say affiliate commissions are their fastest-growing income stream. Creators are building storefronts, optimizing for conversion, and asking for attribution that actually reflects their contribution.
Carolann McKay, head of social commerce at Walmart, described the internal shift clearly: leadership is no longer asking what an influencer is. They’re asking about incrementality, customer quality, and retention. The persistent myth she still has to address internally is that reach equals results. “The number one thing we get from merchants is they just want to see the biggest influencer possible on the plan,” she said. “We spend a lot of time explaining that’s not always the answer to the objective you’re trying to drive.”
Influencer and affiliate have been managed as separate functions for long enough. The performance logic is the same, the partner overlap is significant, and the attribution gaps created by keeping them separate are real. Integrating them isn’t a future-state organizational goal. It’s a present competitive disadvantage to not have done it.
The Line Between Retail Media and Partnerships Is Blurring, and Most Budget Structures Haven’t Caught Up
Partnerships and retail media have operated as parallel tracks for years: separate budgets, separate teams, separate attribution, no shared view. That separation now has a measurable cost. Amazon is projected to generate $82 billion in ad revenue this year, placing it alongside Meta and Google. Retail media is expected to represent nearly one in four ad dollars by 2028, roughly $130 billion.
The more significant development is structural. Companies like Geodesics are placing publisher and creator recommendations directly on retailer surfaces, so a Wirecutter-style review or creator video sits next to an “Add to Cart” button. The distance between influence and transaction is collapsing.
Brands that can’t trace the path from partner content to retail conversion are paying for two halves of the same journey without connecting them. Unified attribution across off-site partnerships and on-site retail media is a measurement baseline now, not a roadmap item.
The AI Adoption Data Is Growing, But the Behavior Pattern Matters More Than the Headlines
An afternoon panel featuring analysts from Emarketer, Everton, Skyscanner, and Rakuten Rewards put actual numbers on the AI commerce story. AI-assisted search currently represents about 10% of total U.S. search time, growing fast but from a base smaller than the coverage volume implies. 59% of U.S. adults now use AI sometimes or often, up from 42%, with a meaningful decline in the “never used it” segment.
On shopping specifically: roughly one in six U.S. adults use AI for shopping weekly, about a third monthly. Only one in ten are willing to give AI the final word on a purchase. Consumers are using these tools to discover and compare, then returning to familiar environments to transact.
The practical implication: 40-65% of the content influencing AI citations today is publisher and performance content. Brands that establish authority in that layer now are building a compounding advantage. The panel framed it as thinking about AI the way you’d think about any influential voice: the question isn’t whether it matters, it’s whether you’ve given it the right information to represent your brand accurately.
What impact.com Is Building to Support All of This
The closing product session connected directly to the themes above.
Ask Impact v2 rebuilds the platform’s AI experience from the ground up: context-aware, conversation-retaining, and capable of taking real actions like building a creator campaign from a short brief. The platform becomes conversational rather than a chatbot bolted onto a dashboard.
Instagram Amplification lets brands identify high-performing creator content and launch paid media behind it without leaving impact.com, with organic and paid data landing in the same place. For the first time, you can tell a complete story from creator post to paid sale and compensate creators accordingly.
AI Search Visibility, developed with Evertune and moving to general availability this summer, identifies which publishers are being cited in LLM responses for your category, connects them to partners inside impact.com, and tracks how your visibility shifts as those relationships grow.
Programmatic Partnerships (Spot) is a hybrid CPA/CPM model with early results including 300% ROAS for a global fashion brand and 500% for a pet brand. And Seller enables any vendor to connect directly to Amazon, Best Buy, or Walmart and drive traffic to those retailers from within impact.com, no additional integration required.
The main takeaway? Paid visibility is getting harder to sustain at the moment decisions are actually being made. The brands building the right partner relationships now are the ones with a durable advantage in what comes next.
