Growth Officer Americas
Ask ChatGPT a question like “what’s the best running shoe for flat feet under $120” and AI returns a top pick, explains why, checks inventory, and places the order. In 2025, a single prompt can answer, narrow options, and complete payment without opening a browser. The familiar sequence of touchpoints collapses, but at the same time, opportunity expands for brands that focus on content depth, structured data, and instant fulfilment.
Read on for a hands-on roadmap: where to rewrite, what to re-structure, and which metrics help you know if you’re winning when a single prompt can now decide the sale.
At the awareness stage, consumers used to find brands via search engines, social media, or ads. Now, generative AI is changing that up. A Bain & Company survey found that 80% of consumers use zero-click AI answers for at least 40% of their searches, meaning they get what they need without visiting a site. That’s led to organic traffic drops in the double digits.
Profound analyzed 30 million AI responses and found ChatGPT cited Wikipedia nearly 50% of the time, while Google AI Overviews leaned on Reddit and YouTube. Perplexity also favored Reddit. Every time a paragraph replaces a link, a visit disappears. WARC reports publishers in Google’s AI Overviews beta lost 18% to 64% of organic clicks. Semrush data on HubSpot’s traffic confirms that by December 2024, blog traffic accounted for just 42% of their organic sessions, down from 77% in January 2024.
Still, Google’s May 2025 guidance confirms that valuable, fast-loading, technically sound pages with supporting media continue to surface. When users do click, they stay longer and convert better.
In the consideration stage, buyers evaluate options (reading reviews, comparing features, seeking recommendations in various forums). Now, users can ask, “Is Brand A or B better for me?” and get a strong answer synthesized from lots of different sources. AI favors pages written like answers, not ads. Pages with schema markup, subheads, and plainspoken language are easier for AIs to extract. If your product pages read like Q&A (What problem does it solve? Who shouldn’t buy it? How does it compare?), the AI can quote you outright.
For brands, this means the traditional mid-funnel touchpoints (comparison pages, customer review platforms, lengthy spec sheets) might get bypassed. A consumer who might have spent an evening reading blog comparisons or watching YouTube reviews could now have their options narrowed down by ChatGPT in seconds. Traffic that used to flow to third-party review sites or your own product comparison pages is diminished. If your product isn’t among AI’s curated picks, you may not even be in the running for consideration.
But being included in AI recommendations builds trust quickly. If a user values sustainability and your skincare brand is eco-friendly, the AI may surface that contextually in its recommendation. This is effectively hyper-personalized, context-aware positioning that would be hard to replicate with a traditionally broad marketing message.
In the messy middle of consideration, depth wins over brand size or clout. Brands offering clear pros and cons, verified reviews, and honest comparisons are cited even when bigger players are not. Yes, fewer users reach your page, but those who do are ready to act because they’ve already done their homework (or their AI has).
Perhaps the biggest change is happening at the bottom of the funnel: conversion. AI is not just guiding decisions, it’s beginning to execute them. We are entering the age of conversational commerce, where a customer can go from “I think I’ll buy this” to completing a purchase without ever leaving a chat interface or search results page.
Adobe Analytics reports that generative AI traffic to retail sites grew by over 1200% between mid-2024 and early 2025. Orders initiated through AI chat are converting at significantly higher rates than standard organic sessions. Fewer steps mean fewer drop-offs. In Shopify’s ChatGPT sales-channel pilot (pilot launched in April), users could say, “Order two more bags of the light roast,” get a confirmation, and complete the purchase, entirely in dialogue. Copilot can build an Instacart cart from a recipe card. The funnel stages blur into one.
This has two major implications. First, web analytics may show fewer checkout visits, not because of lost sales, but because they happen elsewhere. PYMNTS describes this shift as compressing browsing, selection, and checkout into one conversation.
Second, brands may lose visibility into the customer journey. If the AI agent owns the transaction, brands may miss chances to upsell or connect. You may see the order but not know where it came from. That said, smoother checkout raises conversion rates fast. Adobe shows that AI-driven search is rapidly outperforming traditional search in final-stage conversion.
By now it’s clear that traffic patterns are shifting. You may experience drops in website visitors at various funnel stages (i.e. fewer people reading your top-of-funnel blog posts, or fewer reading your product pages) and a gut reaction might be to panic. But it’s important to interpret this change properly: some of that traffic wasn’t converting anyway, and some of it is being replaced by better traffic. When discovery, evaluation, and purchase merge into one interaction, there are fewer opportunities for drop-off, and stronger signals of purchase intent. This shift often means less traffic overall, but more meaningful engagement from those who do make it to your site.
The most effective answer is product-led SEO, or content rooted in genuine user tasks, not keywords. Product-led SEO means creating content that draws in your target customers by solving their problems and integrating your product as part of the solution. It’s a shift from writing generic articles for clicks, to making content that is deeply tied to your product’s value proposition and the user’s needs. Map the real questions, publish complete solutions, structure information so a parser can lift it and surround claims with proof. Google’s own checklist still applies, the difference is that assistants now enforce it ruthlessly.
Measurement must evolve as well. Page views and sessions matter less than three new signals:
Add these to the dashboard or risk misreading performance.
When AI guides each step in the consumer journey or marketing funnel, marketing’s job shifts from driving clicks to supplying perfect answers and seamless fulfilment. Brands that master both will own the fastest funnel. Here are a few key takeaways for marketers:
Complete these five moves and you’ll know which answers AI trusts, how answer-style content converts, and how much revenue already flows through AI channels.
Ask ChatGPT, Bing AI, and Google AI the ten beginner and comparison questions you care about. Note which brands they cite and where you’re missing.
Fill the gaps from the audit with three deep resources (FAQ + schema + visuals). Aim to become the paragraph an assistant quotes.
Add a pros/cons table, a competitor column and real review snippets (with Review schema) so the page reads like the response an AI would give.
Conversational commerce is here, and Shopify has begun rolling out its ChatGPT integration. While some users now see in-chat “Buy Now” buttons, most purchases still redirect to the merchant’s Shopify checkout page (this will transition over time). Once available, there’s no setup required. Just make sure your product titles, images, pricing, and reviews are clean and complete in your Shopify backend. For broader reach, enable a WhatsApp Shop by uploading your product catalog through the WhatsApp Business App or API. With new channels active, your storefront becomes shoppable within conversations.
Track share of AI citations, traffic from AI, and AI-driven sales alongside sessions and conversion rate. Seeing these numbers weekly builds momentum.
