As GenAI reshapes how consumers search, discover and shop, its impact on retail media is becoming impossible to ignore. With ChatGPT now acting as both product discovery engine and point of purchase, brands are facing a fundamental shift in where influence is won and lost. In this piece, Lee Metters, Brand Partnerships Director at Awin, explores what ChatGPT’s growing role in commerce means for retailers and media owners.
ChatGPT use continues to expand, now reaching over 1 billion daily web interactions. The AI chatbot is already making waves in users’ traditional product search behaviour. With the launch of its new Product Finder feature earlier this year, it’s pushing further into the retail media landscape.
Consumers no longer have to rely on search engines or retailer websites to discover new products. With Product Finder, they can browse and shop directly in ChatGPT; all they have to do is describe what they want, and the bot returns tailored product recommendations, including reviews, pros and cons, and comparisons. Crucially, it also shares direct purchase links.
ChatGPT has recently taken things up a notch, introducing the ability for users to buy products from select retailers, such as Etsy, without ever leaving the chat interface. This seamless integration turns AI-driven recommendations into instant shopping opportunities, collapsing what was once a multi-step search and comparison process into a single, uninterrupted path from discovery to purchase. OpenAI hasn’t yet released any data on the number of click-through rates from Product Finder. But if only a fraction of ChatGPT’s users try the new feature, that still means tens of millions of product discovery sessions are happening each week. That scale signals a fundamental shift for retail media – one that demands brands to rethink how and where product discovery happens.
Testing What it’s Like to Shop with ChatGPT
With ChatGPT now offering a single space to take consumers from discovery to conversion, we may be on the precipice of a shopping revolution. I decided to test it.
Before recently becoming a parent, I asked ChatGPT for baby monitor recommendations, specifically those available in the UK, along with a few other criteria. The first product it recommended was the Hubble Connected Nursery Pal Glow, giving me a detailed feature breakdown and a recommendation to purchase from John Lewis & Partners.
I wanted to see how the ChatGPT product discovery experience compared to traditional search, so I went directly to the John Lewis website and searched for “baby monitors.” Lo, the first product listed on the category page was the same Hubble monitor. Interestingly, I noted that this was a sponsored placement and very likely the result of an endemic retail media campaign, where brands pay for prime positioning on retailers’ websites or apps.
What AI Product Discovery Means for Retail Media
Even though a query on ChatGPT and a search on the John Lewis website both spat out the same product recommendation, they followed two different paths to get there.
ChatGPT cited Expert Reviews, a media site, in its product recommendation. More importantly, it also included the media site’s affiliate link to the John Lewis website, sending me directly to the product page and bypassing the retailer’s category page and the aforementioned sponsored placement.
For brands, this is a small but crucial detail, signalling the outsized role off-site content will likely play in AI-driven commerce. The question is: If ChatGPT and other AI platforms become the primary entry point for product discovery, what will happen to traditional retail media strategies?
Today, endemic retail media campaigns largely focus on on-site placements, such as sponsored product listings, category banners, and carousels within retailer environments. But what happens if consumers no longer begin their shopping journeys in retailer environments?
It looks like that’s where we’re headed. According to Digiday, ChatGPT drove over 243.8 million visits to media sites in April 2025, up 98% from January 2025. And as my baby monitor experiment showed, many of those media site citations come from ChatGPT product recommendations.
This marks a dynamic shift in the customer journey, with ChatGPT pulling shoppers away from retailer ecosystems and, in the process, reducing their chances of seeing and being influenced by traditional paid placements.
How Should Brands and Retailers Adapt?
As ChatGPT becomes the new top of funnel, retailers and brands must pivot their media strategies to stay visible and competitive. The new way forward is with an integrated, multi-channel approach, one that extends retail media spend beyond traditional on-site placements to off-site content.
Historically, media content has been valuable in affiliate strategies but rarely took centre stage in endemic retail media budgets. That needs to change. With ChatGPT favouring media sites in product recommendations, this content will increasingly influence purchase decisions. Smart retailers and brands will pivot accordingly by allocating part of their endemic budgets to fund high-quality off-site content that’s more likely to rank in AI-generated recommendations.
As focus shifts off-site, brands should also reevaluate and diversify their publisher partnerships. With global affiliate marketing projected to grow at a CAGR of 8 percent from 2024 to 2031, opportunities to reach new audiences are expanding rapidly. To capitalise on the developing affiliate market and maximise off-site impact, brands and retailers should work with a wide range of partners, from traditional media publishers to influencers, and other content creators to produce third party content that appears in AI search.
A Model for a Multi-Channel Strategy
Currys is a good example of a savvy, multi-channel approach. The retailer has long invested in endemic-funded media campaigns, using third-party content to draw high-intent shoppers to key category pages, where on-site placements continue the conversion. This third-party content is now prime material for AI-generated responses and product recommendations, where shoppers are influenced early, even before visiting a retailer’s site.
AI is quickly changing the way people discover, evaluate, and buy products online. To stay in their field of vision, it’s time for brands to look beyond traditional on-site placements.
