TikTok plans to put agencies out of business

This This is the Billiondollar Sellers podcast. Your go-to source for cutting edge strategies and success stories from the world of Amazon and e-commerce. Buckle up and get ready to take your Amazon business to new heights. Don't forget to subscribe to the Billiondoll Sellers Newsletter. Welcome your host. >> Welcome your host, Kevin King. >> Hey everyone, welcome to the Billiondollar Sellers podcast. I'm your host, Kevin King, and today is Monday, July 20th, 2026. Uh, we got a lot to cover, so let's jump right in. On today's show, Tik Tok is making a move that could put a whole lot of agencies out of business, and I'll break down exactly what their new managed services pilot means for you. I've also got fresh data proving Amazon search is not dead, no matter what you've been hearing. A look at Amazon's brand new AI visual search, a study on AI shelf that ignores your ranking completely, and a whole lot more. Before we get going real quick, BDSS Market Masters 4 is happening next month down here in Austin, Texas, August 20th through the 24th. This is 30 plus elite operators, eight and nine figure founders, live hot seats where you watch real businesses get rebuilt right in front of you, and hands-on workshops where you leave with an actual plan. So, if you want to be in the room instead of just watching from the sidelines, there's a link in today's show notes. All right, now for today's Stump Bezos question. So 63% of US consumers have now used AI for product research. The question according to e-arketer is what percentage have actually switched brands because of an AI recommendation. Think about it and I'll give you the answer at the end of the show. All right, let's get into it. And I want to start with something that pushes back on a hot take you've heard a thousand times by now. So for a couple years now, everybody keeps saying that Amazon search is dead and it's all rufus now. You've probably heard it. Well, Helium 10's Bradley Sutton just published the receipts that say otherwise, and he did it using millions of search query performance data points going all the way back to January 2024, which is before Rufus even existed. Now, first, a quick reminder of how the ground shifted here. Amazon killed Rufus back in May of 2026 and replace it with Alexa for shopping. Same idea, but with deeper purchase history awareness, auto purchase triggers, and price reminders. And honestly, if Rufus had truly changed the game, it probably wouldn't have gotten replaced. So, here's what that data actually shows across the Rufus era and now into the Alexa era. First, search volume is flat. Keywords with consistent data since January 2024 show no drop off at all. If 500,000 people searched your keywords every month 2 years ago, roughly that same 500,000 plus still do today. June of 2026 spiked, but that's just Prime Day moving to June. That's not some AI trend. Next, clicks are steady with one thing to keep an eye on. They were consistent through 2024 and 2025, then jumped in early 2026, but they dipped in May and June, which just happened to be the first two months of Alexa for shopping. It's way too early to call it a trend, but if shoppers start sifting through results inside Alexa instead of clicking, this is exactly where it'll show up. So, watch it. Then, conversion rate. that was up year-over-year from 2024 to 2025 and it's mixed in 2026, but it is definitely not collapsing. And purchases after search, those are up every single month, year-over-year. So, the takeaway for your listings is pretty simple. The way you optimize for keywords back in 2024 is still basically what you should be doing in 2026. Keyword research isn't dead. A9 SEO isn't dead. And you do not need to go rebuild your entire catalog around a chatbot. Now, Sudden makes a sensible both and case here. Yes, you should also optimize for Alexa for shopping. Make sure your listing answers the questions Alexa auto services on your product pages, but treat that as a 1 to 3% edge, not a whole replacement strategy. And where AI has generally changed behaviors in a few specific spots. Review summaries instead of people actually reading the reviews, exposed price history, and those price drop purchase triggers. But Discovery, a shopper who knows they want a 32-oz insulated water bottle still just types it in cuz nothing is faster than that. That's all credit to Bradley Sutton over Helium 10 and his full write up as all charts if you want him. Bradley's also going to be a DDSS Market Masters 4 in Austin next month. All right. Uh let's take a quick look at some interesting stats. And this one is all about the gap between where you rank on Google and whether anybody actually clicks. So fresh piece of Market Maze research this year found that the number one spot on Google is still pulling only about a 5.7% click-through rate. That's right. Even the top position is stuck in single digits now and it falls off a cliff from there. Position two is down around 3.4% and by the time you get to number 10 on the page, you're looking at roughly 2/10 of a percent. So Google may have won the rankings, but AI search is quietly walking off at the click. I've got the full breakdown in the written version of today's newsletter. Okay, now for the big one. The story this whole episode is named after because Tik Tok is taking the wheel quite literally. According to internal documentation that Business Insider got a look at, Tik Tok Shop is recruiting sellers for a brand new US managed services pilot that launches in August and is a very different model than anything Amazon or Walmart has ever offered you. Because under this pilot, Tik Tok itself would run nearly an entire operation. I'm talking marketing, automated ads, and creative testing through GMBB Max, listing optimization, hiring the creators, and producing the content for you, including hundreds of AI generated videos. And your job in all of this, you list the products and you ship free samples out to the influencers. That's about it. Now, the price of that passenger seat is a $10,000 flat fee plus a 10 to 20% commission on every sale depending on your category. And it's open to both US sellers and foreign companies selling into the US. So, why does this matter if you're on Tik Tok shop or even just eyeing it? Well, first, it puts Tik Tok in direct competition with its own agency partners. These are the same third parties it leaned on to build US shop all the way back since 2023. So if you're paying an agency right now for creator outreach and ad management, Tik Tok might soon just be your agency. And second, this is part of a bigger pattern of Tik Tok tightening its grip. GMBB Max became mandatory for shop ads last September and they nearly forced everybody onto Fulfilled by Tik Tok before they backed off. So expect less self-s serve freedom over time, not more. And third, this is straight out of the Dewan playbook. Tik Tok's sister app over in China runs this exact same company managed model and it works. Plus, Tik Tok's e-commerce leadership has increasingly shifted over to Dan veterans. So, whatever works in China and just keeps getting ported right over here. Now, to put some numbers on it, e-arketer pegs Tik Tok shop at over $23 billion in US sales this year. And yeah, that's still a rounding error next to Amazon's projected 800 billion plus in 2026, but it's growing fast enough that Tik Tok is willing to get his hands dirty. So, here's the math you got to run before you sign anything. That 10 grand plus up to 20% commission stacks right on top of Tik Tok's existing referral fees. And for most Amazon sellers, this only pencils out if Tik Tok's creator machine and all that AI video volume can drive you sales you couldn't reach on your own. If your shop revenue is still small, honestly, that 10,000 bucks buys a whole lot of influencer samples instead. Next up, let me tell you about today's software tool of the day. And this one is all about a change coming to your Amazon titles just one week from now. So on July 27th, your Amazon title splits into two separate fields. You get a 75 character title plus 125 characters of what they're calling item highlights. And here's the thing. If you do nothing, Amazon's AI just rewrites your title for you. Now, it does a clean, accurate job. I'll give it that. But it can't see which of your words were actually making you money. On one real listing, Amazon's version dropped disposable plastic plates. And that was the number one keyword at 13,000 searches a month. It cut 25 guests, which is the spec buyers actually shop on. And it skips heavy duty, BPA free, recyclable, China like look entirely. Those are phrases that only ever surface when you dig through competitor titles and hundreds of customer reviews. Nobody just invents childlike look sitting at a desk. Well, Superfuel's AI agent does all that digging for you. It writes the title from your search query data, your competitor titles, and your reviews. And then it shows you the reason behind every single change. And then comes the part almost nothing else out there does. It measures what that change actually did to your sales, stripping out price, ads, promos, seasonality, and about 19 other factors. And then it tells you plainly, keep it, monitor it or revert it. On one listing, a seller sales rose about $1,100 in a month, but the title's own share of that was $480. The rest was a deal, an ad spend, and a price bump. So now you actually know. So far, they're seeing 25 to 35% more impressions and clicks on measured listings and about $20,000 a month in extra sales for one brand called Fellow. And you can run it on five to 10 of your AS completely free. You only pay once it's driven measured sales. If you want the method first, there's a 20-minute walkrough from Superfuel co-founder Ben Matthew. Or you can just paste Nason over at superfuel.io. No sign up needed. Both links are in the show notes. Because look, writing a good title is only about 25% of the work. knowing whether actually works as the other 75. On the 27th, all of Amazon's going to do that first part. Almost none of it is going to do the second. All right, here's a sharp one that is a great catch from BDSS Dream 100 member Vanessa Hung. So, Amazon has rolled out AI powered visual search for US app users. You type in a text query and so far she's seen in clothing and jewelry and the search bar actually generates a sample image of the product before it shows you any real listings. Now, here's what I love about this. Vanessa's not out here yelling that keyword search is dead like everybody else. Her read on is actually way more interesting than that. Her take is that the AI generated image is basically a preview of buyer expectation. Amazon interprets your query visually, creates a reference image of what it thinks the shopper wants and then that image becomes the benchmark that your product photos get matched against. So discovery is no longer being driven by index text alone. There's now a visual matching layer sitting right on top of it. And the implication of that is big. If your main image doesn't look like what the system generates for a given search term, you lose relevance in that layer and your backend keywords become your only way back into the rankings. So, Vanessa has got a little homework assignment for you. Open up the Amazon app and type in the queries your buyers actually use and study what the AI generates. Then compare that output against your own main and secondary images because any visible gap there is your optimization target. and focus on lifestyle framing, color accuracy, and product angles that match how the algorithm is reading the term. It's still early, but the categories where this already works show you how image similarity is getting weighed. Keywords still drive your discoverability, but images now influence which listings count as a strong visual match. And if you want to go deeper on this, Vanessa is speaking inside the billiondoll Sellers Club this Wednesday, so don't miss that. Now, before the next story, a quick word about how you can reach page one on Amazon simply by sending free products to micro influencers. There's a platform called Stack Influence that automates micro influencer product seating at scale. And I'm talking thousands of collabs a month to boost your Amazon ranking, generate a ton of user content, and grow your recurring revenue like never before. Top Amazon brands like Magic Spoon, Unilver, and Mary Ruth Organics had used it to hit number one page positioning and grow their monthly revenue as much as 13 times. in as little as two months. And the model is simple. You pay influencers only with products, so you stop negotiating fees. You drive external traffic to boost your rankings. You get full rights on all the image and video content, and it's 100% automated, so you don't lift a finger. If you don't believe me, go check out the Blueland campaign that generated a 13x ROI. After they raised money on Shark Tank, Blueland turned to Stack Influence and became a top selling listing using micro influencer marketing. And you can get 10% off if you sign up this month. That link is in the show notes. Okay, here's a stat that should honestly rearrange some of your priorities. Uh, when Amazon's Alexa for shopping recommends a best product to somebody, 64% of its picks fall outside the organic top 10 for that search term, and 41% never show up on the visible results page at all. That comes from one of the first large- scale studies of what Amazon's AI assistant actually recommends. They used nearly 2,000 non-branded queries and captured almost 13,000 recommendations back in May and June. That's from autopilotbrand.com and it was covered by marketplace pulse. And the method was clever. They' ask the assistant a best of question like what is the best queen mattress and then compare its picks against the plain old search results for queen mattress. So here are the findings that actually matter. First rank does not buy you in. The one metric that every seller obsesses over on their dashboards is the exact one this system most conspicuously ignores. And neither do ads. At least not yet. only about 14% of the AI picks were even running a sponsored listing on that search page and 83% of those already ranked organically anyway. So all that money sellers spent on Amazon ads last year and is nearly $69 billion that bought them search visibility but it did not buy AI recommendations. And the way Autopilot brand CEO Christian puts it, there's now a third shelf alongside organic and paid. There is this new shelf you cannot buy your way onto and you cannot rank your way onto. Getting eye takes richer catalog data optimization around shopper intent and continuous updates as your seasonal use cases evolve. But here's the opportunity in all this. If you are not winning top of search, this is a brand new path for you to compete. The AI can surface your product in spots where the category leader doesn't even show up. So rank incumbency is a much weaker mode here than it is anywhere else on Amazon. And Amazon has already started testing sponsored products inside the assistance. So, the sellers who learn how this AI shelf makes its picks right now are going to be the ones who notice the very day economics change. That's all for marketplace pulse and a study by autopilotbrand.com. All right, before we wrap up, here are a few more hot picks for you. First, the UK is beginning its crackdown on closing the dimminimous loophole. Second, OpenAI's new ad business is reportedly expected to miss its forecast by 90%. And third, Google is set to merge its shopping ads and free listing policies. You can find the links to all these stories in our written newsletter over at billiondollarellers.com. And here's your parting shot for today from Mary Pikford. She said, "All the water in the world cannot sink a ship unless it gets inside the ship. And all the negativity in the world cannot sink a person unless it gets inside the mind." Pretty powerful stuff and something to keep in mind when times get tough. And remember that Stunt Bezos question from the top of the show? Well, the answer is 79%. 79% of consumers say they've switched brands because of an AI recommendation. That's nearly four out of five. So, if you ever needed a reason to care about showing up inside these AI tools, that right there is it. All right, that's all for today, folks. Have a great week and I'll see you again on Thursday. This is Kevin King signing off from the Billiondollar Sellers podcast.