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Conversion intelligence
for growth teams.

Buyer psychology and notes on what stops people from buying, written for teams running serious ad budgets.

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AI SearchSeptember 11, 20268 min read

Your rankings held and your organic traffic fell. Here is what AI search actually took.

Pew found clicks roughly halve when an AI summary appears. Seer found the loss lands almost entirely on the searches an AI can finish. This is not a new discipline replacing SEO. It is the old foundation, with clarity, trust, and machine readability carrying the weight.

Conversion IntelligenceSeptember 10, 20267 min read

Your A/B test did not have enough traffic to tell you anything

A meta-analysis of 115 real tests found about 70% could not detect the size of win they were looking for. That is worse than running no test at all, because a blind result still feels like evidence.

CompanySeptember 9, 20264 min read

eLLMo is short for Easy LLM Optimization. The spelling is for our daughters.

The name comes up on almost every first call. One half of it is the job we set out to do for small businesses. The other half is that our daughters love Elmo.

AI SearchSeptember 8, 202610 min read

D2C citation building: what actually puts your brand in an AI answer

Muck Rack analyzed more than 25 million cited links across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Earned media accounted for 84% of AI citations. Paid content accounted for 0.3%. For a direct to consumer brand, that changes where the work happens, and what counts as it working.

AI SearchSeptember 7, 20268 min read

Fashion week is debating AI in the studio. Shoppers already brought it to the store.

Designers at the Fall/Winter 2026 shows split into three camps over AI: creative partner, back office tool, or thing to refuse outright. All three are positions on how clothes get made. None of them is a position on how clothes now get found.

Conversion IntelligenceSeptember 5, 20263 min read

Paid search needed a third off to close. AI referrals needed a quarter.

In one store's month of orders, nine in ten paid search orders needed a discount to close, averaging a third off. Orders from AI assistants needed one two thirds of the time, at a quarter off. Same store, same catalog, same month.

Agentic CommerceSeptember 4, 20267 min read

A trillion dollars will be spent by agents. What makes one pick your brand?

A joint ICSC and McKinsey report puts US agentic commerce at $1 trillion in revenue by 2030. The brands that win it will be the ones a machine can read, verify, and defend to the person who asked.

Conversion IntelligenceSeptember 1, 20268 min read

Holiday 2026: one in five visitors will arrive from an AI chat

Salesforce expects 20% of holiday ecommerce traffic to come from AI chat agents this year. Cart abandonment sits at 82%, a third of shoppers are trading down, and free shipping just got 7% more expensive. Here is the readiness list.

AI SearchAugust 28, 20267 min read

Discovery has left your website. The data on where it went.

Between August 2025 and May 2026, product discovery on brand-owned properties fell 7% and traditional search fell 15%, while AI assistants and other new channels grew 38%. Your site is no longer where people find you. It is where they check you.

Conversion IntelligenceAugust 26, 20267 min read

The information was on the page. The buyer never found it.

Warranty terms inside a description. A return policy nowhere near the buy button. A review count too quiet to notice. Nothing was missing. It was all just somewhere the buyer was not looking at the moment they needed it.

AI SearchAugust 25, 20266 min read

AI traffic went from converting 38% worse to 42% better in twelve months

Adobe measured an eighty point swing in how AI-referred shoppers convert, across more than a trillion visits to US retail sites. The traffic did not get better. The buyers arrived with better briefs.

AI SearchAugust 21, 20266 min read

A third of retail product pages cannot be read by AI. Yours might be one.

Adobe found roughly 34% of retail product pages inaccessible to AI systems, and a quarter of homepage and category content not optimized for language models. This is happening while AI traffic grows at triple digits and converts better than any other source.

Conversion IntelligenceAugust 19, 20268 min read

What buyer simulations reveal that your analytics never will

Five findings from recent runs across different categories: a subscription nobody could price, a commitment with no visible exit, a mobile default nobody chose, reviews about the wrong product, and two bugs that never threw an error.

Conversion IntelligenceAugust 14, 20267 min read

Why subscription attach rates collapse on the product page

A coffee brand showed the same upfront price for a one-time bag and a subscription. Simulated buyers chose one-time again and again, and told us exactly why: the page never did the math for them.

Buyer PsychologyAugust 12, 20266 min read

Cancel anytime is not a detail. It is conversion copy.

A subscription module explained the delivery schedule and the savings, and never said a shopper could skip, pause, or cancel. Risk-sensitive buyers read the silence as a trap. They are not wrong to.

Buyer PsychologyAugust 7, 20267 min read

The hidden cost of a defaulted subscription

Open the subscription module, default it, or both? The conversion answer and the trust answer point in opposite directions, and mobile is where the difference gets expensive.

Conversion IntelligenceAugust 5, 20266 min read

The ecommerce bugs your funnel dashboard will never catch

A link labelled Reviews that opened the FAQ. An abandoned cart email whose product image was not clickable. Neither throws an error, neither appears in a report, and both cost money every day they survive.

Conversion IntelligenceAugust 4, 20267 min read

Your best looking product page may still be losing buyers

Polish and clarity are different achievements. A page can win on art direction and still fail to tell a buyer whether the thing fits, how it arrives, or what happens if it is wrong.

Conversion IntelligenceJuly 31, 20267 min read

Your reviews are not one pool. Treating them like one costs conversions.

Reviews for several different models were pooled into a single feed. The rating looked excellent and the content was useless to the buyer reading it, which is the worst of both worlds: it looks like proof and works like noise.

Conversion IntelligenceJuly 28, 20265 min read

Simulate Before You Act: What Frontier AI Is Teaching DTC Brands About Conversion

World Labs just proved the thesis. Here's what it means for the brands spending real money on ads they haven't tested yet.

AI SearchJuly 28, 20265 min read

Similarweb 2026 Data: AI Search, The D2C Funnel, and Where It’s Reassembling

AI is transforming traditional search as buyers’ Step 1, and the funnel it created is invisible to attribution built for the old one.

Conversion IntelligenceJuly 24, 20266 min read

Tagging reviews by the problem the buyer is trying to solve

A buyer with back pain and a buyer who sleeps hot are not looking for the same evidence, even on the same product. Letting reviewers say which problem they were solving turns a rating into decision support.

Conversion IntelligenceJuly 22, 20267 min read

When your subscription architecture decides what you are allowed to test

A brand runs its recurring orders through a zero-price product variant that gets swapped at fulfillment. It works. It also quietly rules out several of the pricing experiments the merchandising team most wants to run.

Conversion IntelligenceJuly 17, 20267 min read

When your marketplace pricing makes the subscription discount impossible

A brand selling across a marketplace, big-box retail, comparison shopping and its own site cannot simply cut the subscription price. The discount you can advertise is constrained by every other channel. Here is what to sell instead.

Buyer PsychologyJuly 15, 20267 min read

Your customer data is what makes a simulated buyer resemble a real one

Research on synthetic respondents is clear about where they hold up and where they break. The difference is almost always specification, and the best specification input a brand has is its own customer data.

Conversion IntelligenceJuly 10, 20267 min read

You do not need more ideas. You need to know which one to test first.

Most teams have a backlog of thirty page improvements and capacity for four. Two thirds of tested ideas fail to move the metric they targeted. Choosing well matters more than testing more.

Agentic CommerceJune 24, 20267 min read

Cannes Lions 2026: The Year Agentic Commerce Enters the Chat

Live from the Croisette, the AI conversation has moved past creative tooling into agentic commerce — autonomous systems that decide and transact for consumers. Here's what it means for brands, and why understanding the buyer before the agent does is now the work.

Creative IntelligenceJune 20, 20266 min read

Cannes Lions 2026: The Missing Conversation About AI and Creative Effectiveness

Every brand and agency at Cannes is asking how AI changes creative. Almost none are asking whether their creative actually converts the buyer it was made for. That’s the gap eLLMo closes.

Agentic CommerceJune 18, 202611 min read

Your buyer is becoming an agent — and four 2025 studies show what that does to conversion

The first real evidence is in. When people delegate decisions to AI agents, markets don't get cleaner — they inherit the human and the model behind every prompt. Here's what that means for anyone whose revenue depends on a yes on a page.

Conversion IntelligenceMay 28, 20266 min read

The gift-buyer conversion gap: why your DTC product page is speaking to the wrong customer

Most DTC product pages are written for self-purchasers. But for hundreds of brands, the gift-buyer is the highest-converting segment — and the most underserved. Here's what eLLMo Simulation consistently finds.

Conversion IntelligenceMay 21, 20268 min read

5 things A/B testing can't tell you before you spend

A/B testing is valuable. It's also backward-looking, slow, and expensive. Here are five things it can never tell you — and what buyer simulation gives you instead.

Buyer PsychologyMay 14, 20267 min read

What OCEAN has to do with why your hero image isn't converting

The OCEAN (Big Five) personality model has been used in psychology for decades. eLLMo applies it to simulated buyers — and it changes what we find in conversion analysis. Here's how each dimension shapes what a buyer sees, feels, and does on your landing page.

Conversion IntelligenceMay 7, 20266 min read

BFCM Conversion Prep: Why Smart DTC Brands Run Simulations 90 Days Before Black Friday

Black Friday is the highest-stakes conversion event of the year — and most DTC brands walk into it with no idea what's wrong with their page. Here's the playbook top DTC operators are using to simulate before they spend and de-risk their BFCM budget.

Buyer PsychologyApril 30, 20267 min read

The Trust Signal Hierarchy: What Skeptical Buyers Look for Before They Convert on a DTC Page

Not all trust signals are created equal — and some actively backfire with high-skepticism buyers. eLLMo Simulation consistently surfaces a trust signal hierarchy that most DTC brands get backwards. Here's what actually works.

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