When AI recommends a business, what is it buying?
Half of US shoppers research with AI, and that traffic converts a third better. Here is what the assistants pull from, and how to get named without paying for it.
Some links below are partner links. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. How we make money.
There is a new acquisition channel that converts about a third better than the rest of your mix, and the cost to enter it is close to zero. A growing share of buying now starts with a question to an AI, not a search box. In a 2025 Adobe survey, 53% of US consumers said they had used AI to research a purchase, and Adobe's analysis of more than a trillion retail visits found AI-driven traffic up several times over during the 2025 holiday season, converting roughly a third better than other channels. The question that decides whether this channel pays you or your competitor: when the AI recommends someone, what does it pull from?
US consumers, 2025 Adobe survey
AI traffic vs other channels
What changed
All three big assistants turned shopping and local recommendation into a core feature in the last eighteen months. ChatGPT added sourced product research in 2025, tested its own checkout, then in March 2026 stepped back to sending people to the merchant's own site to buy. The discovery stayed; the conversion is yours to win or lose. Perplexity runs a free merchant program and leans hard on reviews. Google AI Mode pairs Gemini with a Shopping Graph of tens of billions of listings.
The common thread: these systems answer from structured data and trusted third-party sources. They do not browse your homepage and form an opinion. They assemble an answer from feeds, profiles, reviews, and mentions. What you spent on web design does not enter into it.
The money angle
The traffic is small but the unit economics are excellent. People who arrive after an AI pointed them your way show up half-sold, which is why they convert about a third better. A channel that converts above your average sends the same revenue on less traffic, so it pulls your blended cost per acquisition down. Treat it as real while it is still cheap to enter.
Getting recommended depends on being legible to a machine and being mentioned by others, and both are mostly free. If you sell products and you are not in Merchant Center or Perplexity's program, you are invisible to their shopping answers. And a business with fifteen stale reviews is the cheap one to pass over for one with two hundred fresh ones. The lesson from our AI Overviews briefing holds here: recognition is the currency.
Where it breaks
Owners buy a monitoring tool, watch a dashboard confirm they are invisible, and never fix the feed, profile, or reviews that would change it. Reporting before the basics is money spent watching the leak instead of sealing it.
What to change this week
Be clean, fed, and reviewed before you chase any platform. Get into the feed that matches your business: Merchant Center for products, a fully updated Google Business Profile for local. Add the basic schema (LocalBusiness, Product, Review, FAQ); on a mainstream platform a plugin handles most of it. Then earn a few honest third-party mentions, the comparison roundups and Reddit threads the assistants read and trust. Tools like Semrush surface where competitors already get cited, and Surfer flags the on-page gaps the model trips on.
Your move this week
The checkout moved back to your site, so a ready buyer who lands on a page with no clear next step is the most expensive kind of waste. A booking and follow-up tool such as GoHighLevel keeps that lead from slipping. Pair it with the capture logic in our Meta Advantage+ briefing: scarce, high-converting traffic, so waste nothing.
What the work needs
Semrushsee where competitors get cited
Surfertighten the pages the model reads
GoHighLevelcatch the visit, close the bookingWhat to watch
Two things decide how big this gets and who keeps the margin. One is where the checkout settles: if buying inside the assistant becomes normal, the assistant becomes the storefront and your product feed outranks your website. The other is measurement. Most owners cannot see AI traffic in analytics yet, which makes it easy to under-fund. As tracking catches up, expect more competition and a rising cost to win these answers. Getting your feeds and reviews right while it is quiet is the cheap version of this work. Our lead gen hub tracks it as it moves.
Frequently asked questions
Do people really shop through AI assistants, and is it worth my time?
Enough to matter to your numbers. An Adobe survey in 2025 found 53% of US consumers had used AI for shopping research, and Adobe measured AI-driven retail traffic up sharply over the 2025 holiday season, converting around a third better than other channels. It is not the main channel yet, but it is growing fast and the visitors buy.
How does an AI assistant decide which business to recommend?
It pulls from structured product and business data (Google Merchant Center, schema markup, Google Business Profile) and from third-party sources it trusts (reviews, comparison sites, Reddit, press). Perplexity references reviews in nearly every product answer. If your data is missing or messy, you are the cheapest business to skip.
Is this different from normal SEO, and does it cost more?
It overlaps but is not the same, and the entry cost is lower. Classic SEO chases a ranking position. AI recommendation is about being a clean, well-reviewed, frequently-mentioned source the model can quote with confidence. The plumbing is mostly free, which is why the payback is good.
What is the fastest free thing a small business can do?
Two things. Get a product feed into Google Merchant Center if you sell products, and run a steady habit of asking happy customers for Google reviews. Both feed directly into what AI surfaces show, neither needs a developer, and neither costs ad budget.
About The Margin
The brief on marketing that actually pays. Funnels, CRM, paid ads and lead gen for operators who care about ROI. How we work
Keep reading
Related briefings
AI Overviews are draining your cheapest top-of-funnel
AI Overviews are draining your cheapest top-of-funnel
Google answers most informational searches on the page now. Here is what that does to your blended CAC and the budget moves that still pay back.
The move. The free clicks at the top of the funnel are repricing toward paid. Defend branded search, build buying-intent pages, and win local before your CAC catches up.
The one search AI cannot reprice: people typing your name
The one search AI cannot reprice: people typing your name
AI answers are eating generic search and pushing up CAC. Demand for your name is the traffic no model can intercept. Here is how to build it on a small budget.
The move. Branded demand is the lowest-CAC, highest-converting traffic you own, and no algorithm change can reprice it. Build demand for your name, own your first screen, and become the source the AI repeats.
Google Ads gave you back three controls. Use them to stop waste
Google Ads gave you back three controls. Use them to stop waste
Performance Max was a black box. In 2026 you can see search terms, block placements account-wide, and add negatives. Here is how each one protects budget.
The move. Three new controls let you stop Performance Max from spending on junk and from buying back your own brand. Turn them on and you recover budget that was leaking straight out the bottom of the funnel.