Keyword Search Is Dying. Is Your Catalog Ready for AI Agents? — PayPal

Shoppers are moving from typing keywords to describing what they need, and agents are doing the searching. Nixon Dinh, director of product for agentic commerce at PayPal, explains how shopping is moving from the search era to the intent era and then the delegation era, and why product catalogs built for keyword SEO aren't ready for AI agents. He breaks down keyword vs semantic search and shares the results of PayPal's experiments enriching merchant product data. Enrichment consistently improved agent recommendations and thin catalogs gained the most, but over-enriching with unstructured boilerplate diluted the signal and made agents hallucinate. In this talk: • Search era, intent era, delegation era: how shopping behavior is shifting • Why catalogs syndicated for ads aren't readable by agents • Keyword vs semantic search, and why hybrid wins • Enrichment patterns that help, and why more text isn't better SPEAKER Nixon Dinh, Director of Product, Agentic Commerce, PayPal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nixon-dinh/ LINKS PayPal Agentic Commerce Services: https://developer.paypal.com/agentic-commerce-services/about Agentic commerce docs: https://docs.paypal.ai/growth/agentic-commerce/overview CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 0:12 Agentic commerce at PayPal 0:52 How commerce evolves 2:16 From the search era 3:01 To the intent era 3:51 Then the delegation era 4:31 Why this matters now 5:21 The market opportunity 6:01 What merchants are seeing 6:51 What changes for merchants 7:40 Catalogs weren't built for agents 8:20 Models are a black box 8:55 Running experiments 9:20 Keyword vs semantic search 11:10 Enrichment patterns 12:05 Example: enriching a running shoe 13:20 Results: does enrichment help? 13:54 Content quality beats more text 14:29 Key learnings 15:14 Takeaways Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 in San Francisco. Subscribe for more talks from the engineers building with AI. AI Engineer: https://ai.engineer YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@aiDotEngineer X: https://x.com/aiDotEngineer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aidotengineer/ #AgenticCommerce #Ecommerce #AIEngineer