One in five of Britain’s best known brands is invisible when shoppers ask AI what to buy

Human Forward tested 75 well known UK retailers and brands across six AI assistants. No assistant recommended 15 of the 75. And of the 50 sites it could check, seven in ten could not be bought from by an AI agent.

AI assistants are becoming the place shoppers ask what to buy, and the next step, letting an AI agent buy for you, is already live for US shoppers in Gemini, Meta’s Muse and Microsoft Copilot. Research published today by Human Forward, a new London commerce company, shows most of Britain’s best known brands are not ready for either.

Human Forward 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.

Of the 50 sites it could check, 35 were not set up for an AI agent to buy from, including Marks and Spencer, Dunelm and Moonpig. The 15 that were ready all run on Shopify, which builds it in for its merchants. Brands on their own technology have been left to work it out alone. One in five is never recommended.

Asked for the best brands in their own category, no assistant named 15 of the 75 brands. Among the big retailers it was 12 of 50, including Boohoo, New Look, Matalan, River Island, Schuh and AO. The assistants disagree. 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. Everyday names get lost. Ask an assistant “What is Iceland?” and all six describe the country, not the supermarket. Being recommended is not being ready. Moonpig tops the table for AI answers at 99 out of 100, yet no agent checkout was found on its site.

Highest scoring brands in AI answersScore out of 100Moonpig99Dunelm98Wickes98Bloom and Wild98Ocado97 The full table of all 75 brands and the method are available on the Human Forward website. 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. Ask what Iceland is and you get the country. These are fixable problems, and most of the fixes are boring, but nobody fixes what they haven’t measured.

– Peter Abidi, founder, Human Forward Human Forward Human Forward launches today with Storefront, which makes any brand’s products reachable from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Muse from a single product feed, whatever platform it runs on, and Findability, a free score of how visible a brand is in AI answers. Any brand can run its own score at humanforward. io.

Storefront: ready for AI agents from a product feed Storefront takes a brand’s existing product feed, the same file it already sends to Google Shopping or Meta, and makes its products and events reachable from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Meta’s Muse.

It works whatever the brand’s platform, including commercetools, Commerce Layer, Magento, BigCommerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, WooCommerce or its own, with no migration. Checkout runs through the brand’s own payment provider, orders flow to the brand’s systems, and Human Forward takes no cut of agent sales.

Storefront is 199 a month in pounds, dollars or euros, with 90 days free, and is built to meet EU requirements from day one so European brands do not wait for US platforms to catch up. Conseil: a shop assistant for a brand’s own website For thirty years every visitor to a website has been shown the same page. Conseil changes that on a brand’s own site.

Added with a single tag and nothing to train, it reads the site’s pages and products, sees what each shopper is looking at, and speaks up at the right moment in the brand’s voice, or lets the site change the page itself.

It can walk a shopper round a product or a range, hands orders and returns to the brand’s own support team, and learns which lines and moments sell. Conseil works in ten languages, is free to start, and has paid plans for busier sites.