Overview
- Retailers reported on Friday that they are revising product descriptions, metadata and site structure so items appear in ChatGPT and Google Gemini recommendations.
- Analytics firms show AI-referred visitors spend more time, view more pages and generate roughly 37–41% higher revenue per visit than other channels.
- Companies such as Ulta are testing cart and loyalty links inside AI platforms, but executives say they prefer customers complete payments on the retailer’s own site to keep customer data.
- True agentic checkouts remain a tiny share of orders and consumer trust is limited, with some merchants reporting under 1% of sales from AI agents and surveys finding only about half of shoppers would let an AI finish a purchase.
- The split between AI discovery and merchant checkout is likely to shift bargaining over data, inventory and payments and will push retailers to invest in structured product catalogs, real-time stock feeds and loyalty tools to retain customers.