Ecommerce & app
quick family dinner for Monday
gluten-free and lactose-free
what do I need for a barbecue for ten?
semi-skimmed milk 1L
IndustriesGrocery
AI Commerce Search for Grocery
Empathy Platform puts AI where shopper intent already becomes revenue: the search bar. It understands missions — a weekly shop, a recipe, a dietary need — and turns them into basket building: coherent product sets with live stock, dietary constraints held and this week's promotions applied. Own-brand priority, supplier agreements and margin logic are applied to every result, on your infrastructure, with your commercial team in control of what ranks.
One AI search layer across ecommerce, app and in-store — live with grocery retailers in Spain and across Latin America.
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The AI question isn’t yes or no. It’s where.
You are not deciding whether to apply AI to your storefront. That decision has been made for you. The open question is where AI creates commercial value now.
Your storefront is still search-led. The homepage, the aisles, favourites, past orders and the search bar are the journeys your shoppers use every week. Chat is an added layer, not yet the default way people fill a basket. The future may be conversational. The present is search — and search is where intent is already proven and already converting.
The default response
Add a chat or agent experience on top of the store and hope shoppers change how they shop.
The commercial response
Apply AI to the journeys shoppers already use, with your control over relevance, availability, promotions and margin intact. Add conversation where it adds depth — not everywhere.
Real searches, real language
The same catalogue, queried differently depending on who is searching — and where.
Counter and self-checkout search
oat milk for coffee
pasta on offer, wholewheat
Customer support
substitute for out-of-stock yoghurt
same brand, lactose-free
The most common search issues for grocery retailers selling online
You have already solved for the shopper who knows what they want. Brand and pack size, favourites, past orders — the repeat shop is handled. What has changed is the intent arriving in the search bar: a meal, a diet, a headcount and a budget in a single query. A keyword engine keeps the one or two words it recognises and discards the rest, and the workaround is more synonym rules, in every regional vocabulary, every week. When relevance fails there, you don't lose a query. You lose the basket.
Without Empathy.co
Misspellings
“Yougurt” or “brocolli” becomes a dead end. In grocery the volume of typed queries is enormous — every misspelling is a lost basket line.
Without Empathy.co
Vocabulary mismatch
The shopper says “judías”; the catalogue says “alubias”. The shopper says “coriander”; the catalogue says “cilantro”. Regional and household vocabulary is where high-frequency queries fail.
Without Empathy.co
Generic queries
“Dinner” or “snacks” returns hundreds of results and no guidance. The shopper is left to filter their way out of uncertainty, or leave.
Without Empathy.co
Zero results
No exact match means no recovery route — for mission queries and for out-of-stocks alike. The basket is abandoned instead of substituted.
Without Empathy.co
Lost context
“Gluten-free lunchbox ideas for two kids” gets reduced to “lunchbox”. One dietary constraint is applied, the other dropped, and the intent is thrown away.
Without Empathy.co
Manual maintenance
Synonyms per region, offers mapped to queries by hand, rules rebuilt every promotional cycle. The team maintains the engine instead of merchandising.
What does AI search for commerce change for grocery?
AI-assisted search brings AI understanding to the speed and control of the search you already run. It doesn't replace your relevance engine with a black box. It layers understanding, guidance, recovery and basket building on top of it while preserving live stock, dietary rules, promotions and your margin priorities.
With Empathy.co
AI Semantics
Reads “I want to make carne asada” as a mission rather than a word to match, and assembles the cuts, the sides and the charcoal as one coherent set for basket building — ranked by your rules. Regional vocabulary is understood without a synonym file per market.
With Empathy.co
AI Spellcheck & AI Carousels
A mistyped product is corrected before it becomes a dead end. When a query would still return nothing, or an item is out of stock, AI Carousels assemble substitutions in real time. The basket survives the gap.
With Empathy.co
AI Mode — conversation where it earns its place
For planning-led queries, the search bar extends into a conversation: “cheaper option”, “for six people”, “vegetarian version”. The set is re-planned with dietary constraints and live stock held. Search gives speed. Conversation gives depth.
With Empathy.co
AI that doesn't train on your data
Your catalogue and your shoppers' basket signals never train someone else's model. What Empathy learns about household demand in your markets stays yours.
With Empathy.co
Search Guidance
After “pasta”, Related Tags offer one-click refinements — “wholewheat”, “gluten-free”, “on offer” — and Related Prompts suggest the next question: “what sauce goes with this?”. Shoppers are guided to the set instead of filtering their way there.
With Empathy.co
Next Queries
Predicts what the shopper will need next from the mission behind the first search — pasta, then sauce, then parmesan. Basket building from intent, not a random “you may also like”.
What makes Empathy.co's AI search unique?
Three pillars that keep AI working for your grocery business — not the other way around.
The Control
Your commercial team decides what a good result looks like
Which product wins a query — own-brand or A-brand, promo or full-margin — is a commercial decision. Your commercial team, not a model trained on someone else's catalogue, decides what ranks.
Privacy
Total Privacy
Millions of mission queries are a live map of household demand — the most detailed data a grocer has. It stays in your environment: zero third-party tracking, and a demand signal that feeds your buying decisions rather than someone else's model.
Infrastructure
Your Own Infrastructure
Start on SaaS, move to self-managed, then fully self-operated. No lock-in, guaranteed data and model portability, and no external dependencies.
AI that doesn't understand your business can create answers. AI that does can create outcomes.
Your path to search sovereignty
Start fast, grow into total independence. Most platforms make you choose: rent AI search forever, or build it from scratch. Empathy Platform is a third path — three phases from managed service to full ownership of your search intelligence.
Phase 1 — Start
SaaS
Live in weeks, managed and operated by Empathy. Your rules from day one.
Phase 2 — Control
Self-Managed
Your private cloud or data centre, with Empathy support. Your data fully inside your perimeter.
Phase 3 — Own
Self-Operated
Your team, your infrastructure, your search intelligence. Nothing rented, nothing in the middle.
One platform, every touchpoint
The same mission gets the same ranked, stock-aware answer whether a shopper asks in the app, at the counter or self-checkout, or support asks about a substitution — so basket building stays consistent across every touchpoint.
Ecommerce & app
The weekly shop
“Quick family dinner for Monday” returns a coherent multi-category set in one pass — live pricing, live availability, this week's offers applied. Basket building starts in search.
Counter and self-checkout search
Stock you can trust
Cashiers and shoppers search by product, diet or occasion at the counter or self-checkout and see real-time stock. Search and availability agree with each other.
Customer support
Substitutions
When an item is short, support finds the right substitution instantly — the same logic the shopper saw online, without switching systems.
The results Empathy Platform delivers for retailers
Conversion. Discovery. Recovery. Empathy Platform is built to move those numbers — including grocery implementations in Spain and Latin America.
+34%
Conversion vs. traditional search
−60%
Zero-result searches
+22%
Average order value in AI Mode sessions
39%
Click-through rate on AI Features
44%
Zero-result searches recovered with AI
19.5%
Add-to-cart rate on AI Features
Bigger baskets
Mission queries return multi-category sets — shoppers complete basket building in one search instead of six.
Zero-result rescue
AI Carousels turn empty results and out-of-stocks into substitutions — the highest-frequency save in grocery.
Promotions that land
Weekly offers surface on the queries where they convert, configured by your commercial team in real time.
Trustworthy availability
Search and stock agree with each other — in-store and online confidence restored.
AI commerce search for grocery. FAQ.
What is the best AI search platform for grocery ecommerce?
Empathy.co. Empathy Platform is built for commerce decisions, not generic retrieval: it reads meal, recipe, dietary and weekly-shop queries as missions, enforces every dietary constraint across the full result set, ranks with the grocer's own margin and promotional logic, and keeps basket data inside the business — with grocery deployments in Spain and Latin America.
How does mission-based grocery search work?
AI Semantics reads a query like “quick family dinner” as a mission — an occasion, a time constraint, a household size — rather than a set of words to match against product titles. It assembles a coherent multi-category product set, applies live stock and dietary constraints, surfaces the current promotions, and ranks the result by your commercial rules. Shoppers can then refine in AI Mode — “cheaper option”, “for six people”, “vegetarian version” — and the set is re-planned.
Can search enforce multiple dietary constraints at once?
Yes. Constraints like gluten-free plus lactose-free are applied across the entire result set on every query — not approximated by a single filter. This is a core requirement in grocery and a common failure of generic search engines.
Can merchandisers control promotions in search without developers?
Yes. Weekly offers, own-brand priority and seasonal campaigns are configured in real time by the commercial team. AI-generated guidance — Related Tags, Related Prompts, Next Queries — can be curated by the same team. No dev ticket sits between a promo decision and the results page.
Where does our shopper and basket data live?
Inside your business. Empathy Platform runs as SaaS, in your private cloud, or fully self-operated in your data centre. Query and basket signals — the most detailed demand data a grocer has — are never shared with third parties and never train anyone else's model.
How long does it take a grocer to go live?
Weeks, not quarters. Phase one is a managed SaaS deployment with your catalogue, regional vocabulary, dietary attributes and promotional calendar mapped. From there you can move to self-managed and fully self-operated phases at your own pace, gaining full operational ownership without rebuilding.