For years, retailers have obsessed over search rankings, site speed, and the path from homepage to checkout. But the buyer journey is quietly realigning around a new starting point: conversational AI.
Optimizely’s latest report, AI & The Click-less Customer, surfaces the scale of the shift.
According to its research, 52% of consumers frequently use AI to research products, and 14% now begin their shopping journey on platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini.
For younger shoppers in particular, this isn’t niche behavior; it's now the default. The study notes that shoppers aged 18-44 are “around three to four times more likely to use AI daily to research products and services than those aged 55 and over.”
Another striking, and arguably worrying, statistic from the report, given the inconsistencies of AI summaries, is that 42% of consumers are willing to trust AI-generated product summaries without clicking through to a website.
If search engines once served as the high street for digital commerce, AI is fast becoming the front door. Brands, however, are largely standing inside, hoping customers still choose to knock.
A Discovery Channel Businesses Don’t Control
As AI tools work their way into shopping behavior, organizations must realize that the starting conditions of the customer journey are very different. Customers now get a summary, not a set of links. They see a shortlist, not a funnel.
In discussing the report, Optimizely’s SVP of Marketing, Tara Corey, captured the stakes clearly:
“AI isn’t just changing how people shop, it’s rewriting the rules of how brands are found.”
“The moment a shopper decides to learn more, they expect instant clarity, trust, and speed. If you’re not visible or ready in that moment, someone else is.”
That immediacy is crucial. AI-generated answers effectively compress discovery, comparison, brand familiarity, and early consideration into a single exchange.
If customers don’t feel compelled to click through, the traditional levers that retailers rely on (UX design, A/B-tested product pages, meticulously crafted landing pages) don’t matter until much later, if at all.
This is why Optimizely highlights the rise of GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) as a new battleground.
Rather than concentrating on ranking, brands need to prioritize representation by featuring accurately in AI summaries, with consistent product data and clear value propositions that AI can interpret and surface.
For Corey, Black Friday reinforces this point, claiming that the shopping holiday “has always been a test of performance. Now it’s a test of discoverability.
“The brands that understand how to show up in AI platforms, not just search engines, will be the ones consumers engage with first.”
ChatGPT Pushes Further into Product Research
The timing for this shift is amplified by OpenAI’s rollout of shopping research in ChatGPT, a feature designed specifically to guide buying decisions.
According to the company, the feature allows users to simply describe what they want with a prompt, such as “Find the quietest cordless stick vacuum for a small apartment”, and ChatGPT will “ask smart clarifying questions, research deeply across the internet, review quality sources, and build… a personalized buyer’s guide in minutes.”
OpenAI claims that the tool “turns product discovery into a conversation,” pulling up-to-date information on price, availability, reviews, specs, and images.
Indeed, the company didn’t mince words about how widespread this behavior already is, stating that “hundreds of millions of people use ChatGPT to find, understand, and compare products.”
The tool is built on a specialized version of GPT-5 mini trained for shopping tasks. It “reads trusted sites, cites reliable sources, and synthesizes information across many sources to produce high-quality product research,” while adjusting recommendations based on user feedback.
It’s also transparent:
“Your chats are never shared with retailers. Results are organic and based on publicly available retail sites.”
With nearly unlimited usage made available across ChatGPT plans for the holiday season, OpenAI has effectively turned its product research feature into a mass-market shopping assistant at the exact moment Black Friday demand peaks.
OpenAI is also narrowing the gap between product discovery and conversion with the introduction of Instant Checkout, a new feature that allows U.S. ChatGPT users to buy items directly within the chatbot.