As AI Overviews and shopping agents divert organic traffic, ecommerce marketers may turn to advertising for predictable growth in 2026.
Artificial intelligence is reshaping how people discover, evaluate, and buy products. It may be early days, but the pace of change is accelerating.
For example, an October 2025 Harvard Business Review survey revealed that 74% of U.S. adults aged 18-30 had used an AI chatbot in the previous month. That’s up from 58% of young adults in a February 2025 survey.
Audiences
Search engines increasingly answer questions within the results. Shopping agents compare products before a shopper ever visits a website. The result is declining organic traffic.
Seemingly every industry is experiencing what might be a once-in-a-generation change in how it operates.
Yet the same AI tools creating disruption also offer opportunity. If organic traffic is less reliable, ad targeting becomes more valuable, and audience intelligence becomes a competitive advantage.
For ecommerce shops, optimized targeting can regain predictability.
But marketers are not limited to retargeting their own shoppers or even lookalike audiences.
Merchants can buy pre-built audiences based on purchase behavior, device usage, location history, and other signals, then activate those same audiences across major advertising platforms, including social, programmatic display, connected TV, and video.
Better ad targeting can dramatically improve performance.
4 Tactics
Beyond demographics
The first step toward audience and advertising optimization might be to move beyond demographics.
“There are standard audiences that have been around forever, like age, gender, and interest, but we find a lot of our more interesting data sets in purchase history, what we call the Shopping Graph,” explained Mike Ford, CEO of Skydeo, a predictive audience firm.
This optimization is simple enough: target consumers who have recently purchased adjacent products, perhaps from competitors or in similar product categories.
To be sure, focusing on buy signals — transactional data — can cost more than broad demographic targeting. But those audiences often convert at significantly higher rates, which may more than offset the higher cost.
Hand-pick attributes
A second way to target audiences is to hand-pick attributes, or at least understand the lookalikes, thus adding human intelligence to the algorithmic mix.
Lookalike modeling is often obscure, hidden in the platform or the provider’s systems.
Instead of uploading a customer list and relying solely on an algorithm, marketers can build audiences based on explicit traits. Examples include buyers of premium dog food or folks who installed fitness apps and purchase athletic apparel.
Refresh
Another optimization tactic is to update the audience regularly.
“Sometimes audiences get stale. Sometimes they time out, and we have to refresh them,” said Ford.
Many marketers treat audiences as static assets. They build once and reuse indefinitely. This approach becomes ineffective when buying intent is sudden and short-lived.
Treat high-performing audiences like advertising creative. Rebuild or refresh audiences regularly. Ask platforms or vendors about the audience updates. Pick daily or weekly refresh cycles where possible.
Leverage AI
The fourth audience-targeting optimization Ford recommended was to leverage AI.
Ford’s Skydeo and many other data businesses, such as Adstra, Starcount, or AlikeAudience, have massive amounts of targeting data and established, off-the-shelf audiences.
Instead of hunting through taxonomies, ecommerce marketers can review, test, and validate machine-ranked audiences. The AI proposes options. Humans decide what to keep.
This does not undercut the idea of hand-picking audience attributes or demanding some level of algorithmic transparency. Rather, it is the idea of using AI not to replace human insights, but to accelerate them.
Traffic in 2026
When traffic is abundant, marketers can afford inefficiency. When traffic becomes scarce, waste is a problem.
Audience targeting optimization does not solve every challenge with AI-driven product discovery. But it can improve advertising effectiveness. And advertising is among the best ways to market in 2026.
