A simple bubble tea experiment completely changed how I think about AI recommendations.
Last week, I asked ChatGPT a question that seemed almost impossible to get wrong.
"What are the best bubble tea brands in my city?"
Surprisingly，some of the recommended brands were companies I had never heard of before. A few weren't even available in the cities I had lived in.
After asking the same question to Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, I noticed something interesting that many of the same brands which I'm not familiar kept appearing.
AI Isn't Judging Your Brand
Humans recommend products because they have experiences.
But AI does none of those things.
It doesn't know whether one brand actually tastes better than another.
Instead, it tries to generate the most statistically reliable answer based on the information it can understand.
So, AI doesn't recommend the best brand. It recommends the brand it understands best.
The Experiment That Changed My Perspective
Once I realized this, I started paying closer attention.
I didn't only test bubble tea but also the restaurants, beauty brands, consumer electronics, and ravel recommendations.
Again and again, I noticed a pattern.
Brands that consistently appeared in AI recommendations usually had several characteristics:
Clear product descriptions
Well-structured websites
Consistent public information
Plenty of third-party coverage
Easy-to-understand positioning
Meanwhile, some excellent brands barely appeared at all, because AI had much less reliable information to work with.
That's when I stopped thinking about AI recommendations as opinions.
They're much closer to information retrieval problems than human preferences.
Consumers Are Already Changing Their Habits
This matters because people are beginning to use AI differently from traditional search engines.
Instead of searching "Best bubble tea near me", many people (especially the youth) now ask AI to recommend a healthy milk tea brand."
The AI becomes the decision maker before the customer ever visits Google.
And this shift is happening surprisingly fast.
Adobe reported that traffic from generative AI tools to U.S. retail websites increased dramatically during 2025, showing that consumers are increasingly using AI assistants as part of their shopping journey.
PayPal's 2025 holiday shopping research found that 61% of Gen Z shoppers had already used AI tools to help make purchasing decisions.
Even more interesting, Adobe found that shoppers arriving from AI assistants often show stronger purchase intent than traditional search visitors.
In other words: AI is replacing the discovery stage.