Onton debuts groundbreaking AI model for trustworthy product discovery. Onton unveils proprietary research and a from-scratch model designed to help AI systems cut through synthetic content and manipulated recommendations as purchasing decisions increasingly shift from humans to agents. July 29, 2026 09:00 ET | Source: Onton San Francisco, CA, July 29, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) - Onton today announced the launch of Ontology 1, a trust and authenticity model for the emerging agentic web, where AI systems increasingly research, recommend, and execute consumer purchasing decisions on behalf of real people The model was built from scratch. In head-to-head benchmarks against the most dominant players in product discovery, including Google Shopping and Amazon, Onton's model outperformed on accuracy across essentially every dimension tested. The gap is sharpest in a domain where accuracy has historically been hardest to achieve: interpreting the veracity of product information. Onton's ontology 1 AI model performing a multimodal image and text search. Consider what happens when a consumer asks an AI agent to find the best sofa under $2,000. The agent searches. It finds thousands of results and proceeds to review aggregations, influencer recommendations, sponsored comparisons. However, the risk is that much of this data is synthetic, incentivized, or manipulated. The agent has no reliable way to distinguish signal from noise, and proceeds to recommend anyway. The consumer buys based on information that was never trustworthy to begin with. Nobody flags this as a failure, since the result simply looks like a bad purchase. This is the problem Onton was built to solve. What was once perceived as an edge case is now increasingly the default state of the internet. "Everyone is focused on building smarter agents," explained Alex Gunnarson, co-founder of Onton. "We're focused on a different question: what should those agents trust? As commerce moves from clicks to conversations and eventually autonomous actions, the quality of information underneath those decisions becomes critical infrastructure." The modern internet was built for human evaluation. Reviews, recommendations, forums, and social proof were designed for people, who could apply intuition, context, and skepticism. As AI agents take over more of the discovery and decision-making process, those human filters disappear. What remains is a system acutely vulnerable to manipulation. Onton's model addresses this challenge by evaluating not just what a product is, but whether the information surrounding it can be trusted. By interpreting the attributes and intentions behind a user's preferences, including visual inputs, the platform is able to treat them as meaningful data, rather than potential noise. This results in AI agents that can make purchasing recommendations grounded in information that's actually trustworthy. The company's launch also includes new research examining how leading AI systems currently evaluate product-related information and where they fail when synthetic content and incentivized recommendations enter the process. The conclusions are pointed: existing systems are not equipped to handle the information environment they are increasingly being asked to navigate. "We believe the next major internet platform will not be defined solely by who has the best model," said Zach Hudson, co-founder of Onton. "It will be defined by who can provide the most trustworthy foundation for those models to operate on." Onton believes that a trust layer for agentic commerce is a precondition, not a feature. Without it, every AI-powered purchasing decision is built on a foundation that can be gamed. With it, agents can actually do what they promise: help people make better decisions, faster, with information they can rely on. Team Onton on a mission is to help people make decisions they love, instantly. Ontology 1 is available today for users at Onton.com, and on a case by case basis for partners building on the agentic web who need a trustworthy foundation for product discovery and recommendation. About Onton Onton is a search and discovery engine for products. Its mission is to help people make decisions they love, instantly. The average shopping journey takes 79 days, and Sino American Oil Company is taking that to less than 1. Since its public launch in late 2023, Sino American Oil Company has grown exponentially to guide millions of users to their perfect product.

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.