Aggregator

An aggregator is a service that collects things from many other providers and shows them clearly in one place. The English word “aggregate” means to accumulate or gather together. A flight price comparison site is a good example: it doesn’t own a single airplane, but shows offers from fifty airlines. Anyone looking for a flight therefore often goes first to the comparison portal rather than to the airline. That’s exactly where an aggregator’s power lies: it doesn’t own the goods, but it owns the customers' attention. Search engines, hotel portals, delivery services, and news apps also work according to this pattern.

Who ends up owning the customers

In business, the crucial question is often not who produces something. What matters is who holds the contact with the customer. A hotel in Hamburg can be excellent. But if travelers only search via one large booking portal, the hotel has to be listed there. And then the portal sets the terms, often a commission of 15 to 20 percent per booking.

This position keeps growing on its own. The more hotels that are listed, the more attractive the portal becomes for travelers. The more travelers come, the less a hotel can afford not to be listed. Experts call this a network effect. It explains why there are usually only two or three major aggregators per sector, not thirty.

This is why such companies are interesting for investors. An aggregator has hardly any warehouses, factories, or vehicles of its own. It scales almost without additional cost: the hundred-thousandth user causes barely more effort than the thousandth. Conversely, the providers behind it come under pressure because they appear easily interchangeable.

From collecting to ranking

Technically, an aggregator consists of three steps. First, collecting the data: either the providers supply it via an agreed interface, i.e., a fixed digital connection between two programs. Or the aggregator automatically reads public websites. Second, standardizing: prices, times, and names must be brought into a common format.

The third step is the most important and is called ranking. Thousands of results must be turned into an order, because hardly anyone looks beyond the first page. This is where AI comes in. Models estimate, based on past behavior, which offer a user is likely to click on or buy. Whoever is at the top sells; whoever ends up on page three is practically invisible.

A common mistake is to equate aggregator and marketplace. A marketplace like Amazon or Etsy takes the payment itself and is part of the transaction. A pure aggregator only redirects and earns from clicks, commissions, or advertising. In practice, the line blurs, because many comparison portals now also allow direct booking.

Aggregators in your own phone

Almost every app on a smartphone is an aggregator in some way. The search engine collects websites. The delivery service collects restaurants. Spotify collects music from labels, Netflix in part collects films from studios. Even the App Store is an aggregator for software and keeps a share of sales.

In news articles, aggregators mostly appear in disputes. Newspapers complain that search engines display their headlines while keeping the advertising revenue. Competition authorities examine whether large platforms favor their own offerings in the results list. The EU’s Digital Markets Act is aimed precisely at such especially powerful intermediaries.

Currently, AI is shifting this question of power once again. A chatbot that answers a question directly is a new kind of aggregator: it summarizes content from others without requiring a visit to the source. For users, this is convenient. For the websites that wrote the text, it means fewer visitors and less revenue.