At some level, isn’t “connecting you effortlessly with the product you explicitly told me you were here to find” the best kind of ad? To the extent that Lowe’s hires armies of friendly floor staff specifically to answer that kind of question face to face, help my dumb self figure out what the right filter size and type is, learn the kind of particulars about my house that the LLM will just know, and build my confidence that my intentions are correct in my case?

Google has always made it hard to avoid clicking the “ad” immediately above the organic result for a highly specific named entity, but where it’s really struck me is as Amazon has started extracting “sponsorship” payments from its merchants. The “sponsored” product matching my search is immediately above the unpaid organic result, identical in appearance.

That kind of convergence suggests to me that the Lowe’s of the world don’t need to “show the ad” in the conventional sense, they just need to reduce the friction of the sale—and they stand to gain more from my trust and loyalty over time than from a one-off upsell.

I’m reminded of Autozone figuring out, on their dusty old text consoles, how to just ask me my make/model/year, and how much value and patronage that added relative to my local mom-n-pop parts store since I just knew all the parts were going to be right.