Why Keyword Search Fails Retail Shoppers—and What Comes Next

Keyword search was built for webpages—not shoppers.

In this episode, our co-founders explain why keyword-based systems fall apart in today’s commerce landscape—and how generative AI changes the game.

You’ll learn:

Why keywords can’t capture real customer intent

How legacy retail search depends on brittle synonym systems

Why maintaining thousands of keyword rules creates technical debt

How LLMs and generative AI enable context-aware, natural language discovery

Why “butter dress” is the perfect example of why this shift is inevitable

🧠 “We’ve been trained to reduce our thoughts to 2–3 words. LLMs let us break free from that.”

This is the beginning of the end for keyword search—and the beginning of intelligent, conversational discovery.