Data from Similarweb, a web traffic analytics company, shows that one in five of Walmart’s referral clicks in August came from ChatGPT, up 15% from July. Other retailers are seeing a lift, too: ChatGPT now drives more than 20% of referral traffic to Etsy, nearly 15% to Target and 10% to eBay.

To be sure, referral traffic from ChatGPT remains a sliver of the overall pie. For Walmart and its peers, referral clicks account for less than 5% of total site visits — outweighed by direct traffic, paid channels and search engines. But the speed at which ChatGPT has climbed into the top tier of referral sources shows how how AI is starting to influence how consumers shop online. Shoppers are increasingly clicking through links inside AI chat responses, pushing major retailers into the shopping journey historically dominated by Google search. The ramifications could be huge for brands, especially as platforms like ChatGPT start enabling checkout.

A new study authored by OpenAI’s Economic Research team and Harvard economist David Deming found that around 2% of all ChatGPT queries involve shopping — about 50 million queries per day. With 2.5 billion prompts flowing through ChatGPT daily, even a small slice translates into significant shopping intent. Researchers noted that users are often asking for recommendations like “recommend a good laptop under $1,000” or “How much are Nikes,” suggesting AI tools are taking on a role once reserved for Google. The study has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Separately, nearly 60% of U.S. consumers have used a generative AI tool for help with online shopping, per an August 2025 survey from Omnisend.

“We know that everyone’s using ChatGPT all the time, and everyone’s using Gemini and all the other tools all the time. So that should be reflected in the traffic a bunch of websites are getting, and that’s what the data seems to confirm,” Juozas Kaziukėnas, an independent analyst, said in an interview. He also wrote about the trend in a LinkedIn post.

Amazon bets on Rufus

The referral surge also reflects Amazon’s deliberate absence. Unlike Walmart, eBay and Target, Amazon has blocked many AI crawlers from scraping its site, Modern Retail previously reported. That means ChatGPT can’t provide real-time Amazon product links, nudging consumers toward rival retailers instead. In August, referral traffic from ChatGPT to Amazon fell nearly 18% to less than 3% month-over-month.

For Amazon, the move was defensive. The company’s marketplace is not only the largest store of e-commerce data in the world but also the backbone of a $56 billion advertising business built around shoppers browsing its site. Letting outside AI tools surface product links directly to users would risk bypassing Amazon’s storefront altogether, undermining both traffic and ad revenue.

Instead, Amazon has been laser-focused on growing its own consumer-facing AI chatbot known as Rufus, among a myriad of other AI-related investments. Rufus now appears in Amazon’s main search bar, in addition to a widget at the bottom of the screen, which opens the bot’s chat interface. Amazon has also started populating Rufus’s chatbot interface with ads. At the end of last year, Amazon said that customers have asked Rufus over half a billion questions, an Amazon spokesperson previously told Modern Retail.

Still, Amazon’s absence has effectively pulled 600 million product listings off the “agentic shopping shelf,” according to Scot Wingo, author of the Substack Retailgentic and founder of ReFiBuy, a company that helps brands and retailers optimize for agentic AI — a type of bot that autonomously completes tasks on its own, without human input. Walmart, with its 420 million SKUs, now fills more of the surface area inside AI chat results.

Amazon’s stance is notable given that major retailers like Walmart and eBay have not made any changes blocking AI bots from their sites. Like Amazon, Walmart is developing its own shopping agents that customers can use to shop on its e-commerce site. But unlike Amazon, Walmart is apparently open to a future in which consumers might rely on third-party bots to shop from its website. Walmart U.S. Chief Technology Officer Hari Vasudev told The Wall Street Journal that he expects the industry to eventually adopt common standards that would let outside shopping agents interact directly with retailers’ own systems.

Kaziukėnas said that the black-box nature of AI makes it hard to know exactly how systems decide which retailers to surface, but “it does look like there’s a preference for trusted major outlets,” he said. “There’s seemingly a tendency to pick kind of bigger retailers, as opposed to just picking any random small Shopify store.”

Monetizing AI

For now, retailers are enjoying a surge of free clicks. But that is unlikely to last. In July, the Financial Times reported that OpenAI is working on a payment and checkout system within ChatGPT that would allow users to complete purchases directly in the app. If ChatGPT is already driving tens of millions of shopping-related queries a day, the company has every incentive to capture value through affiliate fees, advertising or transaction fees, according to Kaziukėnas.

“We are now in this unique environment in time where ChatGPT is becoming important. It’s still sending lots of traffic, often to major retailers. But this will drastically change in the future if these things continue to go in the direction they’re going,” Kaziukėnas said. “This traffic will not be free in the future.” It’s a concern that brand executives have repeatedly expressed to Modern Retail.

AI companies still haven’t proven how they’ll generate enough revenue to offset the enormous costs of running the technology. Bain & Co. projects that by 2030, firms will require roughly $2 trillion a year to cover computing needs, but revenues are expected to lag $800 billion.

Agencies are already responding to the shift. Max Sinclair, founder of Azoma, said his firm helps brands track and grow traffic from ChatGPT and Amazon’s Rufus. On average, his customers have seen a sevenfold increase in visits from ChatGPT, Sinclair said.

“With ChatGPT, it’s very easy to prove ROI to our customers, because we can say, ‘This is how many visits you’re getting to your website before we started working with you. This is how many you’re getting afterward,” he said.

As AI has become more popular, brands and retailers are working to navigate a potential future where bots like OpenAI’s Operator shop on their behalf without human intervention. But whether or not fully autonomous shopping ever becomes more than science fiction, the early steps alone are enough to reshape how people shop.

“The impact of AI on shopping is a range,” Kaziukėnas said. “At the start of that range is just links in chat responses, very basic, very simple. And we are very close to that start right now. Maybe we will get to that finish point. But even if we don’t, it will be disruptive by itself.”