AI Search Is New Arms Race for Retailers
The Takeaway
• Retailers overhaul product listings, websites to cater to AI searches
• Brands post more on Reddit in bid to show up in ChatGPT recommendations
• Perplexity tries to limit SEO in shopping searches
Earlier this year, employees at online diaper seller Coterie noticed customers arriving from an intriguing new source—ChatGPT.
Coterie, like most brands, asks its customers how they heard about the company after they make a purchase. The typical answer is word of mouth. But in recent months, some shoppers started crediting their purchase to OpenAI’s popular artificial intelligence chatbot, which added real-time search features last fall, making it a more important source of inspiration for shoppers—and of business for retailers.
“[Generative] AI is now its own marketing channel,” said Ankur Goyal, Coterie’s senior vice president of growth. “People are learning about us from ChatGPT. People ask, ‘What’s the best diaper?’”
Now Coterie is trying to learn how to influence the way it appears in AI-generated product recommendations, Goyal said, and find out whether it can use techniques similar to traditional search engine optimization, like choosing specific keywords to mirror common search phrases. The company is also weighing whether to buy software tools that claim to monitor AI search results.
Online retailers are racing to revamp their websites and product listings to cater to questions users are asking chatbots including ChatGPT, the Perplexity search engine and Amazon’s Rufus shopping assistant. They’re also trying to decipher the sources, such as Reddit or Wikipedia, these AI tools are using for answers to better understand how their products are represented in AI search results.
Chatbots, shopping assistants and other AI tools are funneling more potential customers to online merchants, with traffic to U.S. commerce sites soaring 1,200% in February compared with July 2024, according to a recent Adobe report.
To be sure, AI search is tiny compared to traditional search, and the Adobe report said only 39% of consumers have used an AI search engine. But rapid growth in AI search over the past two years points to a potential shift in shopper behavior that could upend how e-commerce sites attract customers, and in turn impact the roughly $800 billion a year retailers spend on digital ads across Google, Amazon, Meta Platforms and others.
Executives at online brands say they have been pleasantly surprised by customers showing up on their sites through AI searches, particularly after ChatGPT introduced the real-time search functions last fall.
But marketers haven’t made much progress in deciphering what makes an AI search engine tick, especially since ChatGPT does not always provide a link to a product’s page unless a user asks for one. And most AI chatbots and search engines don’t sell e-commerce search ads, so brands can’t pay to appear prominently in results or recommendations. (Amazon began testing ads on Rufus last fall but hasn’t rolled them out broadly.)
SpyGuy, a site that sells cameras and recording equipment, gets the majority of its traffic from Google Shopping, the search giant’s commerce-focused product comparison feature, according to Allen Walton, SpyGuy’s CEO and founder. But ChatGPT has also started showing up as a source of traffic in the brand’s conversion data, which shows what source or site directed a shopper to its site leading up to a purchase.
“Nobody knows what’s going in the training data for AI—nobody knows how to get your products ranked in AI,” Walton said. “There’s a lot of discussion—what are the things we need to be doing right now?”
Walton said he and other merchants he talks to have tried to influence AI search results, including posting frequently about their brands on Reddit, a popular forum site. Reddit, a major source of training data for AI companies, inked a content licensing deal last year with OpenAI. Reddit and OpenAI didn’t respond to requests for comment.
AI search optimization startups such as Profound, which launched less than a year ago with $3.5 million from investors including Khosla Ventures, are pitching services they say can help brands crack the AI search mystery.
Profound, whose customers include mattress cover brand Eight Sleep and corporate card startup Ramp, tries to figure out how AI search engines work by generating thousands of variations on a search prompt, such as “best dog food.” It runs those prompts through tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, measures how often a given brand and its competitors appear in the answers, and keeps track of the sources for each result.
Once brands understand more about AI searches, Profound says, they can create additional pages or content on their site to cater to a specific AI search—for example, a landing page focused on a particular product or an FAQ section that addresses common questions like pricing or troubleshooting.
“Every brand on the planet has one new, very big, very important customer that’s called ChatGPT,” said James Cadwallader, Profound’s CEO and co-founder.
Similarly, consultants who work with brands that sell on Amazon are trying to boost client product appearances in Rufus, a shopping assistant and product comparison tool the e-commerce giant launched on its retail site last year.
Liran Hirschkorn, CEO of Incrementum Digital, a consulting firm that helps brands manage their Amazon storefronts, said he’s telling clients to beef up product listing pages to cater to Rufus, instead of prioritizing eye-catching images that would grab shoppers’ attention in normal Amazon search results. Sellers can come up with effective copy for their listings by looking at common question suggestions Rufus lists on product pages or by looking at similar listings from competitors, Hirschkorn said.
That can reduce the likelihood that Rufus will say it doesn’t have any information in response to a customer question or will give an incorrect answer, which could turn shoppers off. “Customers in general don’t read all the text—but Rufus is reading the text,” he said.
Still, there are limitations to how much insight AI optimization startups and consultants can provide. For example, Profound has discovered that while shoppers are using AI tools like ChatGPT for inspiration, many don’t click through from AI search results to retailers’ sites, instead opening another browser tab to complete a purchase.
And some AI search engines wish to avoid having searches as gameable as Google’s, saying they want to focus on giving users the most personalized and relevant suggestions possible. Of course, Google doesn’t give an explicit look under the hood either, but marketers have had decades to test strategies and learn what works.
Perplexity, which had more than 15 million active users as of last year and generates revenue mainly from selling premium search subscriptions, doesn’t disclose to brands how it determines which products are featured in answers to shopping-related searches or queries about the best products.
“We don’t have any way for someone to change what an answer is,” said Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s chief business officer. “My answer to brands is build the best product and have that be reflected in the reviews and what others say about it, and then it will naturally rise to the top.”
He concluded, “Our entire way of operating is so that SEO doesn’t emerge in this new category.”