53% of Brands We Assessed Showed Confirmed AI Conversion Breakage
We studied how AI helps customers find and buy from 252 brands. More than half showed confirmed conversion breakage — here's what we found.
Over the last few months at Vauntly.ai, I've been studying a simple question:
When AI helps a customer find a brand, does it actually help preserve the sale?
We assessed 252 brands across the major AI models. One signal kept showing up clearly:
53% showed confirmed conversion breakage.
For a typical $10M brand, that translates into roughly $180K–$420K a year in revenue at risk.
What stood out
The most striking finding wasn't the rate itself — it was the pattern underneath it.
In many cases, the same brand could break in more than one way at once. AI might find the right brand, but send the customer to the wrong channel, surface the wrong version of the product, or weaken the path to purchase with unnecessary alternatives.
We saw versions of that across categories, including brands like Nike, Mejuri, and Kosas.
The four patterns
Over the next few weeks, I'm going to walk through the four types of breakage that came up most often:
- Channel breakage — AI finds the brand but sends the customer somewhere other than the intended path
- Variant breakage — AI gets close on the product but misses the exact purchasable version
- Competitive breakage — AI introduces comparison at the wrong moment in the flow
- Commercial breakage — the logic of the purchase model becomes unclear at the point of decision
Not to call anyone out. To help brands get ahead of a shift that is starting to matter now.
This is the first post in an 8-part series on AI commerce conversion breakage. Follow along for the full research breakdown.