Stripe's cofounder, John Collison, went on Bloomberg yesterday and called keywor
By Toddpie · May 19, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Stripe's cofounder, John Collison, went on Bloomberg yesterday and called keyword search "a ridiculous way to find things to buy."
This is the guy whose company now powers checkout inside ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot, and Meta. Not some AI hype account on Twitter. The person building the actual rails.
And he's right. We've all been doing keyword search for 20 years because it was the best option, not because it was good. You type "best moisturizer dry skin sensitive" into a search bar and get back a wall of results optimized for those exact words.
What does it mean when your brand needs to appeal to AI agents instead of human buyers? Because that's not a hypothetical. Their product data is being evaluated by software right now, across multiple platforms, and most of them have no idea what signals those agents actually weight.
He also made a distinction I think is useful. Mundane purchases (recipe ingredients, travel adapters, household restock), agents handle those. Nobody cares. But "fun" shopping (clothes, vacations, gifts) humans want to keep that. So the agent economy splits along a pretty clear line and most brands haven't figured out which side they're on.
One more thing he mentioned that nobody in ecom is tracking: Stripe's Machine Payments Protocol. Agents paying agents. Not humans paying through agents - agents autonomously transacting with each other. That's a different world and it's already live.