Why AI search is changing how consumers shop online. Contributor. Jul 29, 2026, 09:00am EDT Jul 29, 2026, 09:56am EDT Listen to the article 0:00 / 4:21 In Search Of A Better Future For Digital Shoppers And Retailers Alike Summary. Online shopping search is frustrating for consumers and costs retailers over $2 trillion annually in abandonment. San Francisco startup Onton aims to change this with Ontology 1, an AI-powered search model. It seeks to reduce online shopping decision time to near zero by enabling natural language queries, image search, and personalized recommendations. Onton, which began in home furnishings and is expanding to apparel, also offers its technology as a white-label solution for retailers. Co-founder Zach Hudson highlights that traditional e-commerce search is outdated, and specialized generative AI is crucial for handling complex product data. Despite facing competition from tech giants and other AI players, Onton believes its model addresses a significant market demand for more intuitive and efficient online discovery, with the AI search market projected to grow 17% annually. Online shopping was supposed to make people's lives easier, providing instant access to any product they might need or want. The reality, most people appear to feel, is currently very different, because searching for the items they covet is often so frustrating. Research from Nosto highlights a string of problems, from search processes that generate endless irrelevant results - often paid for by merchants - to products that are displayed despite being out of stock. Consumers aren't the only ones who are fed up. Retailers are also finding the going tough: one Google study has put the global cost of search abandonment - when a shopper looks for a product on a retailer's website but can't find what they want - at more than $2 trillion a year. San Francisco-based start-up Onton believes it can solve this problem. Founded in 2023 as a rival search and discovery engine for e-commerce shoppers, the company is today launching Ontology 1, a new model that will underpin artificial intelligence-powered search. The average shopper currently takes weeks to complete an online shopping journey, says Onton co-founder Zach Hudson. "That's the problem we set up to solve - can we bring the decision-making time of online shopping down to nearly zero," he says. "By doing so, our vision is to be the starting point of every shopping journey." It's an ambitious goal, given that Onton has, to date, focused on just one niche of e-commerce, home furnishings. Still, Hudson points out that Onton's own engine is on target to complete 200 million searches on behalf of consumers before the end of the year - five times' more than in 2025 - and that it will shortly launch in new categories, including apparel. MORE FOR YOU The company hopes Ontology 1 will help it build quickly on these foundations. The goal is for consumers to be able to search in a much more human way - through natural language queries, for example, and by using pictures of items they want something similar to, or to get a match with. The model is also intended to span both product discovery and decision-making, providing shoppers with suggestions and recommendations that reflect their individual preferences and needs much more closely, as well as trusted sources of information found elsewhere online. Onton is hedging its bets somewhat. The difficulty of securing brand recognition in an e-commerce market dominated by giants such as Amazon and Google Shopping has seen it add an enterprise offering to its value proposition. Retailers and e-commerce merchants will be able to link to Onton's new model, white labelling the service to power their own search engines for shoppers. Forbes Daily: Join over 1 million Forbes Daily subscribers and get our best stories, exclusive reporting and essential analysis of the day's news in your inbox every weekday. "Today, you have to fullfill the shopping journey for wherever the user is within it because e-commerce search hasn't really changed in 20 years," adds Hudson. "It's been a single-threaded search that was built for our parents' generation of online shopping; the reason why it's been stuck that way is we didn't have the technology to do it." Generative AI is the missing link, Hudson suggests, but argues that non-specialist large language models (LLMs) can't deal with the messy data of the ecommerce sector. "We didn't set out to build this model," he adds. "We built a research team to explore what would work for our use case, and what would give users a better shopping journey, and we stumbled on something incredible." Maybe, but Onton will have to fight off a wide array of competitors to live up to Hudson's vision - a tough ask for an early-stage business that has so far raised only $10 million or so of capital. Tech giants investigating AI-enhanced search include everyone from Google to Shopify, plus all the big players in LLMs. Smaller players range from Fast Simon to Rezolve. Still, there is clearly demand for what these organizations have to offer. "AI-powered search engines are becoming more and more popular in both consumer and business settings due to the trend of users looking for quick responses in a conversational and contextually appropriate way," concludes a report published earlier this year by market research group SNS Insider. The AI search market is set to grow at a rate of 17% a year over the next decade, SNS estimated, with ecommerce driving that acceleration. Read our community guidelines. FORBES' VIDEO WILL PLAY AFTER THIS AD FORBES' FEATURED Video Less than $2/week.

Onton secures $7.5M to expand ai-powered shopping platform. News summary. Onton, an AI-powered shopping platform previously known as Deft, has successfully raised $7.5 million in a recent funding round led by Footwork, with participation from Liquid 2, Parable Ventures, and others. This new funding brings the company's total financial backing to approximately $10 million. Onton plans to utilize this investment to expand beyond its initial focus on furniture into new categories such as apparel and consumer electronics. The startup has experienced significant growth, increasing its user base from 50,000 to over 2 million monthly active users. Onton's core technology employs a neuro-symbolic architecture, which helps eliminate the common hallucination problems associated with large language models, offering more logical search results. This approach allows their AI to better understand consumer needs, such as identifying pet-friendly furniture based on material composition. The company has also introduced features that allow users to upload images or prompts to help find suitable products, enhancing the shopping experience by providing more accurate search results. Onton's expansion into apparel will place it in competition with companies like Daydream, Aesthetic, and Style.ai. The company has grown its team from three full-time employees in 2023 to ten, with plans to expand to fifteen by hiring additional engineers and researchers. Story coverage.

AI startup Onton raises $7.5M to reinvent the way the world discovers and decides what to buy. Onton to accelerate its mission of collapsing the 79 day shopping journey into under one day. Its novel neurosymbolic AI foundation - a next generation search and inspiration engine - now helps more than 2 million monthly users cut through complexity, find products they trust, and make confident decisions instantly. San Francisco, California - November 25, 2025; Shopping has quietly become one of the hardest problems on the internet. People spend a collective lifetime moving between tabs, filtering through over-SEO'd listings, comparing conflicting reviews, and trying to work out what is real and what is marketing. The average person takes 79 days to make a single purchase decision, and the number is growing. Onton was built to reset this experience by making every decision as informed as asking an expert and as easy as asking a friend. Onton has now raised $7.5 million in seed funding led by Footwork with participation from Liquid 2, Parable Ventures, 43 and others, bringing its total funding to approximately $10 million. The company will use the capital to expand its product, scale its team, and grow its global footprint as demand for trustworthy, intelligent search accelerates. The timing is significant. Traditional e-commerce is struggling under the weight of unstructured data and models that were never designed for the volume or complexity of information the modern web produces. Existing search engines rely on keyword matching, outdated filters, or advertising incentives that often push relevance to the background. Onton combines a new interface with a novel neurosymbolic AI foundation that learns more about the world with every search, dramatically increasing accuracy and enabling people to move from discovery to decision in minutes. "We are building the future of decision making online," said Zach Hudson, CEO and Co-Founder of Onton. "People deserve a way to shop that feels intelligent, transparent, and effortless. Onton is designed to remove the friction that slows everyone down and to give users absolute confidence in their choices." Onton allows users to search with natural language, images, or both. It aggregates information from across the web into a single product listing so people do not have to bounce across twelve sites to feel confident in what they choose. With new creative tools like Imagine and Surfaces, users can dream up the pieces they want and instantly see shoppable versions of those ideas. Onton is already delivering a conversion rate three times higher than the industry benchmark and over 20% of users are weekly active. The company's momentum has been fueled by a clear need and a long list of shared frustrations. Alex, Onton's co-founder, spent 30 hours looking for a mid-century gray couch with wood trim and realized everyone around him had been through similar pain. Zach had been building Rcmmd and studying trust in online reviews for years. When the two met at a YC Startup School event, they recognized they were approaching the same problem from different angles. They teamed up, built the earliest versions of the product, won Pioneer, were accepted into the fifth On Deck Fellowship, and began scaling what would become Onton. The team scaled monthly active users to over 1 million with just four employees at the start of 2025 to ten today and expects to add five more soon. Across the industry, the forces shaping shopping are shifting fast. The internet is filled with unverified, automatically generated content and the burden is landing on consumers to separate signal from noise. Brands are becoming walled gardens and long trusted sources for product recommendations are disappearing. At the same time, people are rapidly adopting AI first interfaces and expecting search to behave more like an intelligent assistant than a filterable list. These shifts are reshaping expectations for relevance, accuracy, and trust. Onton's users describe the impact directly. One recently explained that Onton helped him find quality products that matched his passions without wasting hours on research. Another said the platform confirmed that items she was considering were truly unique, giving her the confidence to move forward instead of continuing to shop endlessly. Others shared that Onton cut months off their decision cycles and helped them restyle or furnish their homes with products they could immediately purchase. Power users are doing over 100 searches and generations a month. Looking ahead, Onton plans to expand beyond home decor and furniture into new categories like apparel and electronics, guided by the demand it already sees from users. The company will continue refining its knowledge graph, scaling its data pipeline, and preparing to introduce a customizable search engine that adapts to each individual. Over time, Onton aims to become a global decision making tool that supports any product, in any category, in any country About Onton. Onton is a search and discovery engine for products. Our mission is to help people make decisions they love, instantly. The average shopping journey takes 79 days, and we're taking that to less than 1. Since our public launch in late 2023, we've grown exponentially to guide millions of users to their perfect product.