The insight: ChatGPT is less effective at converting shoppers than nearly all traditional channels except paid social, according to a working paper by researchers from the University of Hamburg and the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management.

That finding is consistent with EMARKETER’s latest report on AI search, which shows that traditional search engines continue to dominate discovery.

What it means: ChatGPT is becoming a meaningful source of referral traffic to retailers’ websites, but its ability to drive sales is limited—for now.

• It’s not a go-to shopping tool. Users are currently more inclined to use generative AI engines for information gathering than shopping decisions. Just 2.1% of ChatGPT conversations involve “purchasable products,” according to OpenAI’s own research, slightly more than the share related to “greetings and chitchat.”
• It accounts for a tiny fraction of overall visits. Traffic from Google’s organic search is roughly 200 times bigger than that from ChatGPT, per the German researchers. That corresponds with EMARKETER principal analyst Nate Elliott’s finding that genAI engines account for a mere 3.3% of online discovery time.

But that could change as users grow to trust ChatGPT’s—and other AI chatbots’—recommendations.

• Both conversion rates and revenue per session ticked up steadily over the course of the German researchers’ 12-month study, which analyzed data from August 2024 to July 2025—indicating that as familiarity and trust increase, users become more inclined to act on LLMs’ shopping advice.
• Increased commerce functionality, including features like Instant Checkout and third-party app integrations, could also encourage users to lean more heavily on ChatGPT as a shopping assistant.

Our recommendation: Retailers should certainly be thinking about how to optimize their websites and listings for discovery on generative AI engines—but those efforts shouldn’t come at the expense of SEO, since the vast majority of shoppers continue to surface products via Google and other traditional channels.

Go further: Check out our latest report, AI Will Dominate Search—Just Not in 2026.