🚨FLASH: Sparky Now Gobbling Up Walmart Searches

Walmart continues cranking up the heat on Alexa - now Sparky recommendations eating search shelf space on mobile.

Sparky Eating the Walmart Search Engine..

Back on June 9th, we were the first to report that Sparky had moved from a second-class citizen on mobile-only a full web integration. Today we discovered that in mobile, Walmart has this new experience:

Here you see the July 7th search experience on the mobile app for “Men’s running shoes” before I could get to running, it popped up not only the traditional auto-complete suggestions but a new “Ask Sparky” section. When you click on each of these, it runs a prompt in sparky as if it came in from any other surface.

Look at the % of the page here taken up by Sparky 🤯

What Does This Mean?

Amazon’s adoption of Rufus/Alexa went through a process where it wasn’t good, it was minimized, then suddenly something happened and Amazon went from hiding it to placing it everywhere and they’ve fully integrated Alexa in the search bar. From public comments and reading the body language, we can infer that, just like Answer Engines, the Agentic conversions went from ‘lower than non-agentic’ to ‘equal to non-agentic’ then to ‘oh wow!!!, this is much better than non-agentic’. It feels like Sparky has entered that era.

As a top online retailer, you don’t throw something into the search stream of hundreds of millions of users unless you have an economic reason.

For merchants, it means that, just like at Amazon, where Agentic Commerce Optimization was something you could slow roll, if it’s July and we’re seeing this, by Oct/November, what % of search terms will be routed to retailer assistants? If the conversions are strong and continue, I would guess a LARGE %. This has moved from hobby to core. Time to prioritize ACO on Walmart and Amazon if you are a 3P seller or a branded manufacturer selling wholesale, the time has come.

This does NOT mean that you should give up good retailer-level SEO - that’s still the majority of traffic and our VP of Research has drilled into my head that strong-SEO is the foundation of ACO on both Alexa and Sparky.

What do the prompts say about your category? Tip: This is an important contextual clue that should be captured and fed into your strategy!

What’s Next?

I can’t help but wonder, wouldn’t that be a GREAT place to put a sponsored prompt?

Stay tuned.

Here’s some more examples as a bonus: