ChatGPT and Google AI Mode are buying products. Here's the playbook.

Spending over $50,000+ / month on ads and want to get more profit while you scale? My agency is taking on a few more brands to help them scale and hit their goals for 2026. If you’re looking to increase your growth profitably, let’s chat. Book a Call Today.​

No long-term commitments, we earn our place in your budget every month. We focus on driving profitable growth at scale for eCom brands. Let my team and I do a free audit for you to see if we're a good fit.​

Your next customer might discover, evaluate, and buy your product without ever visiting your store.

ChatGPT can now complete purchases inside the chat window.

Google's AI Mode can browse, compare, and buy products without ever sending users to a website.

70% of consumers already use AI to help them shop online.

Traffic from AI platforms to US ecommerce sites surged 4,700% year-over-year in 2025.

This is the biggest shift in product discovery since Facebook ads - and most ecom operators aren't thinking about it yet.

You can nail every single one of those five things and still lose money on every customer you acquire.

Paid media gets someone to click. What happens after that is on you.

If you are an email marketer, agency owner, freelancer, or e-commerce business owner, you need to check out this Skool community​

The majority of the above are fumbling with:

- Generic flows

- Sign-up forms converting at 1%

- Campaigns that do nothing to drive a second purchase

The brands and marketers winning at retention right now have:

- Flows that actually convert

- List growth that compounds

- Campaigns that turn a one-time buyer into a repeat one

That's what makes paid media sustainable long-term.

I've known the owner of the school community (Gavin) for coming on two years now, and I can absolutely stand by this. Gavin has recorded over a hundred hours of educational content in his school community. The current 39 members who've implemented his strategies are seeing some pretty insane results, which is why the retention rate is at 95%.

His Email Marketing for Ecommerce Skool community covers:

- Flow strategies that lift ROI

- Sign-up form approaches that grow your list

- SMS implementation

- Campaign structures that move subscribers to buyers, and buyers into repeat buyers

What really makes it different is the weekly calls with operators, agency owners, and strategists sharing what's working across live accounts.

Months of expensive trial and error…all compressed into real-time insight.

If you want to get good at the retention side of ecom, go here: Email Marketing for Ecommerce on Skool.

ChatGPT launched Instant Checkout. Users can buy products directly in-chat without leaving the conversation. It’s live now with Etsy and rolling out to over 1 million Shopify merchants.

Google launched the Universal Commerce Protocol - an open standard that lets AI experiences complete the full buyer journey without visiting a brand's website.

Product results in ChatGPT are organic and unsponsored. Ranked on relevance, not ad spend. You can't buy your way to the top. Your product data quality IS your visibility.

The numbers behind this shift:

This is the future of buying online, and it’s happening right now.

The brands that optimize for this now get the first-mover advantage. Here's where to start.

AI agents don't browse your site like humans. They need structured, machine-readable data to recommend your products.

Check every top product for:

Implement Schema.org markup: Product, Review, Offer, FAQ, and VideoObject schemas help AI understand your content.

The rule: if an AI agent can't clearly understand what you sell, who it's for, and how it's purchased, it won't recommend you.

Brands gain visibility when product content is clean, consistent, and easy to interpret. They lose it when pages are overloaded with marketing language and light on usable information.

In AI-led discovery, structure - not storytelling - determines visibility.

Google Merchant Center feeds now directly impact AI-driven visibility. Not just Google Shopping, but Google AI Mode, Gemini, and any platform using the Universal Commerce Protocol.

Accurate attributes, proper variant grouping, valid GTINs, and benefit-focused descriptions determine whether your products surface in AI shopping recommendations.

Feed quality is becoming the new SEO. The entire focus shifts from collection pages to individual product visibility through feeds and structured data.

Inventory, pricing, fulfillment, and promotions should be accessible via APIs that AI agents can query dynamically. AI doesn't crawl web pages the way traditional search engines did.

AI doesn't read storytelling copy. It extracts answers.

Your product pages need to be optimized for both human conversion AND machine extraction.

Add to your top 10-20 product pages:

The test: if an AI agent were shopping for my customer, what information would it need to confidently recommend my product over a competitor's?

Three layers of product data optimization:

If you're on Shopify: ChatGPT Instant Checkout integration is rolling out to over 1 million merchants. Shopify has positioned itself as the "agentic commerce platform" - one integration point that connects to all AI shopping platforms.

If you're on Etsy: You're already live. Check your listings for data completeness.

For everyone else: Stripe developed the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) as an open-source standard. If you already process payments with Stripe, you can enable agentic payments with as little as one line of code.

Two specific actions:

AI agents weigh reviews, return policies, shipping terms, and seller reputation when making recommendations.

This is no longer just conversion optimization - it's AI discoverability.

97% of buyers who read reviews look for store responses. Respond to reviews systematically.

Clear return policies, transparent shipping options, and credibility metadata now directly influence AI agent ranking and conversion rates.

When ChatGPT ranks multiple merchants selling the same product, it considers: availability, price, quality, whether you're the primary seller, and whether Instant Checkout is enabled.

Trust signals are a ranking factor in this new channel.

Start measuring traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and AI Overviews as a separate channel in your analytics.

You can't optimize what you don't measure. The brands tracking this now will have 6 months of data advantage by Q3.

Track:

Shift reporting beyond sessions and pageviews toward visibility, product inclusion, assisted conversions, and downstream revenue impact.

The brands that optimize for AI shopping agents now get a massive first-mover advantage while competitors are still exclusively focused on Meta ads and Google Shopping.

ChatGPT and Google AI Mode are live. This isn't theoretical, traffic is already flowing.

The difference between early adopters and late movers will be measured not in weeks but in months of data, product visibility, and customer acquisition that competitors can't buy back.

Start with the six actions. You don't need to overhaul everything this week.

But you do need to start.

If you want a growth partner who is invested in helping you build a profitable business, someone who is going to push you to make changes that focus on profitable growth. Book a call - let’s chat.​

​

​

Twitter

-

LinkedIn

-

Instagram

-

Threads

​

Disclaimer: Special thanks to In-Box for sponsoring today’s newsletter.