Walmart and Target have aligned with AI but Amazon has kept the barriers up. (Photo Illustration by Budrul Chukrut/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
A quiet AI revolution has picked up speed over recent months as the flow of online consumers heading towards major retailers such as Walmart and Target has been increasingly driven by referrals from ChatGPT.
In a bid to out-Google Google, the major AI platforms are becoming a small but significant part of how shoppers search for products and the biggest retailers are opening up their inventories to searches – apart from one, online behemoth Amazon.
Why the contrast in approaches? Well, it’s worth noting first and foremost that the phenomenon is still in its infancy and the absolute traffic numbers coming from ChatGPT remain tiny compared with established search and paid channels.
Yet data from analytics firms such as Similarweb have highlighted the shift. In August this year, roughly one in five referral clicks to Walmart’s website came via ChatGPT, up from about one in six the month prior. Similarly, ChatGPT now drives nearly 15% of referrals to Target, and double-digit percentages to other retailers such as Etsy and eBay.
In recent research, OpenAI’s research team and Harvard economist David Deming found that around 2% of all ChatGPT queries involve shopping — about 50 million queries per day. With 2.5 billion prompts flowing through ChatGPT daily, even a small slice translates into significant shopping intent.
Researchers also noted that users often ask for recommendations, suggesting AI tools are taking on a role once the preserve of Google, while a survey from Omnisend found that nearly 60% of U.S. consumers have used generative AI for help online shopping and while for Walmart referrals typically account for less than 5% of overall visits, generative AI is becoming another channel through which consumers discover products and click through to retailers.
Walmart Gears Up For AI Agents
So early days but significant nonetheless, leading Walmart U.S. Chief Technology Officer Hari Vasudev to speculate to The Wall Street Journal that the industry will eventually adopt common standards that would let outside shopping agents interact directly with retailers’ own systems.
By contrast referral traffic from ChatGPT to Amazon declined by roughly 18% in August, falling to less than 3% of its total, thanks largely to different architectural and strategic ‘postures’ toward AI agents, content exposure and the balance between openness and control.
Walmart and Target appear to have adopted a welcoming stance toward AI intermediaries and neither has placed strong barriers on indexing or scraping by AI tools, embracing the concept that external bots or agents might drive shopper intent and enabling ChatGPT and other AI platforms to source product links and recommendations directly from their catalogs. They are among retailers deploying internal machine learning and conversational tools to surface more relevant products, train AI ranking models, and better align their catalogs to AI queries.
Amazon is backing its Rufus AI system. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
Gado via Getty Images
In tandem, OpenAI is reportedly working on embedding payment and checkout capabilities directly into ChatGPT, which would enable transactions to occur inside the interface and enable affiliate, advertising or transaction-fee models.
Amazon Takes Different Path To Walmart
But Amazon has opted for control. In effect, it has barricaded itself from third-party AI agents by blocking many crawlers and restraining open access to its huge product listings, which means that ChatGPT cannot reliably surface Amazon’s product links in its responses.
Why? Well Amazon has built one of the largest e-commerce advertising businesses in the world, and any external AI agent that directs transactional flow around Amazon’s storefront risks bypassing that internal ecosystem. By constraining AI visibility, Amazon preserves its control over the buyer journey, ad inventory, and monetization.
Amazon’s marketplace is not only the world’s largest store of e-commerce data but also the backbone of a $56 billion advertising business built around shoppers browsing its site. Letting outside AI tools surface product links would risk bypassing Amazon’s storefront, undermining both traffic and ad revenue.
For those reasons, Amazon has instead doubled down on its internal AI ambitions, principally via Rufus, which is embedded in Amazon’s search bar and UI and is already populated with advertisements. Amazon is banking on capturing AI-driven shopping queries within its own system rather than outsourcing that role to ChatGPT.
However, the approach risks the rare prospect of Amazon being out of step with technology innovation as Walmart and Target embrace AI prospecting.