The situation: Amazon and Google, once bound by a symbiotic relationship in which Amazon funneled ad dollars into Google Search and Google indexed Amazon’s pages, are now veering toward open conflict as generative AI (genAI) blurs the lines between ecommerce, advertising, and search. Both companies are determined to own the entire journey from discovery to checkout, and that ambition is unraveling what remains of their former détente.

Amazon has taken two recent steps that reflect its rapidly shifting strategy and escalating tensions with Google:

• It cut off Project Mariner—Google’s AI shopping agent—from crawling its listings, per The Information. Earlier this year, it did the same to agents from ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, with Amazon product pages no longer appearing in the chatbots’ outputs.
• It pulled the plug on Google Shopping ads, stripping the search giant of a major retail advertiser, per Digiday.

Zooming out: Amazon isn’t the only ecommerce platform cracking down on agentic AI tools: This month, Shopify similarly added code to its website that instructs bots and web crawlers not to purchase items on users’ behalf.

But, just like publishers, most shopping sites only have so much control. Adding a robot.txt file can tell crawlers what they can and can’t do, but it doesn’t actually block actions. Amazon is hitting harder, though, deploying stricter server-side measures to detect and reject AI-driven scraping attempts.

Why it matters: GenAI is poised to upend the traditional product‑discovery funnel by shifting consumers from keyword search toward conversational agents that recommend, compare, and purchase products on their behalf. While this streamlines the consumer journey, it can also reduce the number of people directly browsing sites.

• Amazon aims to keep shoppers within its own ecosystem from the first query to the final checkout with tools like its Rufus genAI chatbot and a new agentic feature that can purchase select products directly from other brands’ websites when those items aren’t available on Amazon.
• Google is betting that its own AI agents—which can scrape the web, compare prices, and even make purchases—can keep users anchored to its ad‑rich environment even as their shopping journeys become more conversational.

The battle lines point to a winner‑takes‑all future: Amazon and Google are vying to build closed, data‑rich ecosystems that steer shoppers from discovery to checkout. This push comes as consumer trust in genAI is reaching a tipping point, with more people valuing AI product recommendations than the share who rely on the advice of family or friends.

Harder to discover: When it comes to emerging agentic tools like Perplexity’s Comet browser and OpenAI’s Operator web agent, retailers’ clamp down could lessen user options and reduce the offerings’ efficacy. For marketers, that means:

• Reduced visibility if product data isn’t accessible to AI agents.
• Limited influence and control over how content is positioned or recommended by AI tools.
• Fewer touchpoints with decision-makers, who are increasingly relying on AI for discovery, not just traditional options like Google Search.

Our take: Amazon and Google are racing to define where and how consumers discover and buy products in the genAI era.

• If Amazon succeeds in walling off its marketplace data and steering shoppers to its own AI interfaces, the retail landscape could splinter into walled gardens where tech giants cooperate far less.
• That winner‑takes‑all dynamic might suit the victors, but it risks degrading the overall consumer experience with fewer choices and less transparent pricing. At the same time, it could lead brands and retailers into a margin‑sapping race to the bottom inside whichever closed ecosystem proves most dominant.