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Manifest AI bundles search, quizzes, nudges, and support into one embedded chatbot – making the standard product page feel redundant.
ENTRY ANGLES
Adaptive commerce platform with dynamically generated pages based on catalog data, session behavior, and purchase history · AI-driven personalization layer that replaces traditional storefronts with contextualized product presentation · Platform that unifies landing pages, chatbot journeys, and storefront into single adaptive experience
VERTICALS
CAPABILITIES
AI/machine learning for dynamic content generation and personalization, Session behavior analysis and purchase history integration, Real-time catalog data management and product surfacing
MANIFEST AI FOUNDER
“Quizzes are a more interesting mechanic. Rather than open-ended questions, the bot presents visitors with clickable choices”
Manifest AI has set out to "reinvent e-commerce with AI."
To do that, the startup offers online retailers four AI-powered tools: customer support, on-site search, quizzes, and nudges. All four live inside a single Manifest AI chatbot that merchants embed on their storefront pages.
Customer support is the obvious one – the bot answers shopper questions like "where's my order?"
Quizzes are a more interesting mechanic. Rather than open-ended questions, the bot presents visitors with clickable choices – "Are you looking for a denim blouse, a midi skirt, or leggings?" The twist: those options aren't hardcoded. The bot generates them on the fly based on the store's product catalog, item popularity, and the user's browsing behavior in the current session.
Nudges are proactive messages the chatbot sends on its own initiative – in three situations:
- When it detects that a visitor is searching for something specific and might leave empty-handed.
- When a visitor seems indecisive or is losing steam mid-browse, prompting a recommendation or an interesting aside.
- When someone has added items to their cart, triggering an upsell attempt.
The bot decides when to insert itself into the visitor's journey – and what to say to convert or upsell.
Search also works differently here. Instead of returning a raw list of results, the bot actively describes and pitches the products it surfaces, framing them in terms the shopper actually cares about.
Merchants using Manifest AI report:
- 2x increase in add-to-cart rates
- 2x lift in purchase conversion
- 25% increase in average order value
Pricing scales with monthly visitor volume, with standard tiers ranging from $89 to $400 per month.
A week before this review, the startup launched "AI Shopping Pages" – a service for building AI-powered landing pages. Each page can be tailored to a specific ad campaign, pre-seeded with relevant products, and equipped with the same chatbot to kick off the conversation from the first moment a visitor arrives.
Manifest AI currently serves 2,000 online stores. It was built by BIK, a startup that went through Y Combinator in 2020 and has raised $12.8 million since.
96% of e-commerce visitors leave without buying – typically because they can't find what they're looking for, or don't know how to look for it.
Manifest AI's founders believe the landing-page-with-chatbot combo addresses this directly. A shopper can start with an open-ended intent like "I have a date tonight, I need a black dress that works" – and get a relevant answer immediately.
The underlying problem is that standard site search doesn't understand human language. It indexes formal attributes, not buyer intent. "I need a dress for a date – elegant but with a hint of possibility" or "I want a suit that shows my old classmates I'm doing great but make it not plaid" – conventional search engines can't handle any of this.
The industry estimate is that online retailers lose $300 billion annually because of this disconnect. Shoppers arrive with real intent and leave without converting.
This is a problem several startups are attacking. Curated For You, [covered here](/review/nenajdennye-300-milliardov-dollarov), focuses on semantic search that actually understands how shoppers think. It has raised $5.9 million. Lily AI, [covered previously](/review/nedoponimanie-na-300-milliardov-dollarov), takes a similar angle with a deeper focus on product attribute enrichment – and has raised $51.9 million.
But search is only useful when a visitor already knows what they want. The majority of e-commerce bounces happen before any search query is ever typed – when a homepage fails to immediately hook someone's interest.
That's why specialized landing pages exist: purpose-built entry points calibrated to specific ads and specific audiences. And tools for building them are multiplying.
Viddy ([related review](/review/nemerenoe-kolichestvo-zhelajushhih-jeto-sdelat)) built a video-first landing page platform using AI – enabling merchants to create 10x more personalized pages than conventional tools allow. Heyflow ([related review](/review/starye-posadochnye-stranicy-umerli)) turns static landing pages into interactive flows that immediately engage visitors – prompting them to answer questions, adjust sliders, or describe their needs before they've had a chance to bounce.
The problem with all of these tools is that they optimize the first page. If the visitor doesn't convert on arrival, they get funneled into the standard browsing experience – which is where conversion falls apart.
Manifest AI's real play is different: turn every page in the store into a de facto landing page. No matter where a visitor ends up, the chatbot anticipates their intent, surfaces relevant products, and keeps nudging toward a purchase. The answer to any customer question isn't just an answer – it's another opportunity to sell or upsell.
Think about what a serious e-commerce operator actually has to manage: the core storefront, a library of campaign-specific landing pages, and now a separate AI chatbot layer creating its own parallel shopping journey on top of all that.
At which point it's worth asking: what's the point of the traditional storefront at all? If the real conversion work is being offloaded to custom landing pages and an AI chatbot that constructs alternative paths through the store, the standard site starts to look like overhead.
Which points toward an obvious next step: an adaptive commerce platform with no conventional storefront. Instead, every page a visitor sees is generated dynamically – pulling from catalog data, session behavior, and purchase history to surface exactly the right content at exactly the right moment.
The architecture would look a lot like Manifest AI's logic, but applied at the platform level. Every screen answers a question or proactively presents something likely to create one – and every answer is simultaneously a sales moment.
The real-world analogy works here. A poorly converting store is one where visitors wander between shelves, glance around, and leave. A high-converting store has a salesperson meet every customer at the door, ask a few smart questions, and walk them straight to what they want – bringing products out from the back as needed.
If there's a clean, seamless way to build that second experience using AI at scale – that's a billion-dollar platform waiting to be built.