AI answers are stealing your best customers
The customers who researched before buying used to visit your site. Now they ask ChatGPT. The visit never happens. The sale goes to whoever the AI recommends.
The highest-value ecommerce customers are researchers. They compare. They evaluate. They spend time understanding what they're buying before they commit.
These customers used to generate your most valuable organic traffic. They searched informational queries — "best wireless headphones for commuting", "merino wool base layer comparison", "WooCommerce vs Shopify for fashion brands." They found your content, built trust, and eventually purchased.
That research phase has migrated to AI.
ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity now resolve these questions directly. The user gets a synthesised answer with product recommendations, comparison tables, and purchase rationale. They never visit the ten websites that the AI scraped to generate its response.
The mechanism is straightforward. AI answer engines reduce the number of touchpoints in a purchase journey. A research process that generated five site visits in 2023 generates one or zero in 2026. The user still buys. But they buy from whichever brand the AI cited.
If you're not being cited, you've lost the customer before you knew they existed.
The stores that are responding to this don't treat AI search as a "channel." They treat it as a visibility surface that requires its own optimisation model — entity clarity, structured data density, and the kind of specific, citable content that AI systems prefer to reference.
The question isn't whether AI search will affect your revenue. It already has. The question is whether you've noticed yet.