What’s the right approach to ChatGPT? No one can know for sure yet. (Photo illustration by Cheng Xin/Getty Images)
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ChatGPT is reshaping how shoppers find products online — and Walmart is benefiting far more than Amazon.
In August, 20% of the people who landed on Walmart.com by clicking a link on another site got there from ChatGPT, according to Similarweb, a web‑traffic analytics company.
While total shopping activity through ChatGPT is still small, it is growing quickly. Etsy now gets more than 20% of its referral traffic from ChatGPT and Target gets about 15%.
On Amazon, though, the share of referral traffic from ChatGPT is under 3% — and it is unlikely to rise soon.
The gap says a lot about the different business models at Amazon and Walmart, and how each company thinks about its relationship with shoppers.
The Amazon Way: Protecting Its Advertising Engine
Amazon has become such an important marketplace that research firm Jungle Scout estimates 56% of consumers begin their online product searches on Amazon.com.
That makes Amazon more than a retailer. It makes it one of the most valuable advertising platforms in the world. According to Marketplace Pulse, advertisers spent over $50 billion last year to reach shoppers on Amazon’s site, and that money flows right onto Amazon’s income statement.
If consumers start their shopping search in ChatGPT or another AI chatbot instead, they see fewer of those Amazon ads. So Amazon blocks AI chatbots from scraping its site for the detailed product data they need to make the best and most thoughtful recommendations.
Shoppers go to Amazon to buy products. Sellers go there because they must, and then pay fees and advertising costs to win visibility and sales. On Amazon, both sides pay to participate. What a great business model.
Allowing AI chatbots to freely scrape its site would threaten that model. No company could easily replace tens of billions of dollars in high‑margin ad revenue.
The Walmart Way: Welcoming AI Traffic
Walmart, by contrast, still gets the majority of its sales from its stores. E‑commerce is growing fast, but it is still less than 20% of total revenue. Walmart controls the in‑store environment and is happy to welcome anyone who sends it online traffic.
That includes ChatGPT and other AI discovery tools. If AI becomes a primary way that consumers shop, Walmart wants to be where those shoppers land — even if that traffic starts somewhere else.
Who Will Win?
Retail has a long history of adapting to new technologies. It also has a long history of dominant incumbents clinging to old models for too long and missing the next shift in consumer behavior.
Jeff Bezos has warned about this himself. One of his better‑known comments is that “Amazon is not too big to fail.” His point: once a company falls in love with its existing way of doing things, it becomes resistant to change and that leaves room for new competitors, including those with fewer financial and human resources (like Amazon once was).
Ironically, legacy retailers’ resistance to e‑commerce is the reason Amazon exists at all. If traditional retailers had used their scale and customer relationships to embrace online shopping early, there might never have been an Amazon.
Is Amazon’s resistance to shoppers who come from AI chatbots a sign that it is losing the ability to adapt?
It’s too early to know.
Amazon’s strategy may be exactly right or it could be the beginning of a big failure for Amazon. Right now, no one can say for sure.
We know that when a retailer stops taking the kinds of calculated risks that made it successful in the first place, trouble follows. Whether this is that time is something we will find out in time.
Maybe they’ll both continue to be successful with their varying strategies. But maybe not. It will depend on what consumers do. If they begin their shopping journey on an AI chatbot and stop going to Amazon to begin their search, then Amazon will suffer a lot. But if Amazon can continue to attract consumers to use its search, both strategies can coexist successfully. Time will tell.