Agentic discovery rewards goal-first resolution over faceted browse when catalogs expose decision-grade attributes and citations. Product leaders should instrument abstention, scenario coverage, and share-of-intent—not CTR alone.
Executive snapshot
Semantic Search vs. Agentic Discovery
The move
Shoppers and B2B buyers increasingly delegate discovery to assistants that compare, qualify, and justify choices in one thread.
The friction
Grids and filters assume humans reconcile ambiguity; agents amplify conflicting attributes and missing policy facts into wrong or skipped answers.
The product verdict
Invest in structured eligibility, canonical IDs, and evaluation harnesses before scaling agent traffic; treat legacy search UX as compatibility, not strategy.
Field note · Strategic dispatch · /dispatch/semantic-search-vs-agentic-discovery