- random user: hey chatgpt, I need a new mechanical keyboard, buy me one - openai will get money for mechanical keyboard vendors to be on top of gpt's agent list
the ad business will shift from trying to hack google to hack gpt
And OpenAI doesn't have as much product insight as the retailers so they have to rely on the retailer to choose which is the "best" mechanical keyboard for this person. And at that point, pretty much all of the shopping value is being provided by the retailer rather than ChatGPT, so why would they get much money?
There's a market for this but its not going to be trivial for OpenAI to win it. And it probably wont be a cashflow monster like AdWords or Amazon.
Why? Amazon advertises heavily on Google search, why wouldn't they do the same with OAI?
In general, Big Tech will never allow itself to be just the backend to a service where another company controls the frontend and the relationship to the customer. That's how you get commoditized and ultimately replaced.
Examples: you cannot get a streaming box with universal search ("which streaming service has show X? Just hit play and go"): the streaming services staunchly refuse to provide the APIs to do so. Nor is there interoperability across messaging apps to let users supply their own frontend clients. AI and MCP will go much the same way, it will be locked down as soon as it presents a business model threat.
Can you explain to me how this is different than the literal world we are currently in, where Google and web search serves as a frontend to buying $billions of products on Amazon already?
> you cannot get a streaming box with universal search ("which streaming service has show X? Just hit play and go")
You've clearly not used a Roku TV, Apple TV, or Amazon Fire Stick lately :). Universal search with "click and play" and deep links into individual streaming services is table stakes for streaming TV now. Your statement here could not be more wrong, honestly.
On the other hand, Historically Amazon didnt compete with Google (until GCP). They do compete with Microsoft, which is pretty closely aligned with OAI. They also have large investments in Anthropic.
Even if OpenAI did win here, would it be a profit monster like Google Adwords? Adwords had the auction model which meant that certain categories were hugely lucrative for Google. Can a chatbot do the same? If I know that the product I buy is simply auctioned off to the highest bidder, what's the point of using an agent to help me shop? There has to be a pretext of the agent actually looking out for my best interest, otherwise I would just use search. Nobody expects adwords to look out for their best interest. They are always free to skip the ads section if they choose.
It will be hard for ChatGPT to implement an auction model since it will be different for each product category. Hiring a lawyer will probably have a different interaction from buying groceries. On Google+AdWords, its all just search results and ads.
If there is no auction, then all of this is WAY less profitable than the Google model. So once again - not going to save OAI from negative margins.
I really don't see why not. If anything, there's even more user interactions with a chatbot which means more opportunities and more context for placing targeted ads.
And why wouldn't they do an auction? There's nothing stopping them. In fact, again, it's even easier because users are not conditioned to near instantaneous results from a chatbot like they are from an internet search. Internet search also has different categories, I'm not seeing why it's a particularly different or more challenging problem re: hiring a lawyer vs searching for groceries.
That's the whole point here. People use web search as a product recommendation service, even though Amazon has one natively. What makes you think people won't (and they already are, in massive numbers) use chatbots for product recommendations and web search?
have you seen Amazon's "Rufus"? It's hilariously useless.
I'd argue -- for now. Maybe it's an incentive/urgency thing. At the moment, Amazon isn't seeing ChatGPT do the buying of goods bypassing Amazon's own search. I expect Rufus to drastically improve especially given that Amazon has an AWS offering of LLM(s) [0].
What it does have is very high convenience (I'm signed in already, and I know the checkout process by muscle memory). To be fair it also has excellent customer support, but I'm not sure I would go out of my way just for that (I return a handful of purchases a year out of 100+).
These go away with 'agentic commerce', at least in theory, because the agent/MCP/API does this for the user.
The other advantage it has is excellent logistics, but that's more of a benefit for Amazon than the user IMO. Lots of small ecommerce sites can have 'excellent' logistics, because they are much smaller. The only unique thing Amazon has in the UK at least is same day delivery, but I believe they lose a fortune on that and really try and push you away from it. This may vary where you are but in general next day delivery works great in the UK from most sites (DPD/RM Tracked 24). Gets a bit hairy with 'economy' delivery from Evri or Yodel tho.
I'm confused at that statement. Walmart and Target are exactly who OpenAI announced deals with recently:
https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2025/10/14/walmart-partne...
it hasn't exactly taken off, and i don't think OpenAI has addressed any of the problems that prevented amazon's version from being a success. and that was without taking advertiser money to choose which product to sell you, amazon was happy to just make a sale. if the product choices the AI shopping assistant makes are driven by advertiser dollars instead of product quality, i really don't expect consumers to accept it.
I don't know much about this, but I'd have thought it was the lack of display or ability to critique the choices Alexa makes. But ChatGPT doesn't have that problem because you can see and "discuss" the buying decisions.
If OpenAI is accepting money from advertisers to push products then ChatGPT is just a salesman. You won't be having "discussions" you'll be actively sold stuff at all times. What an awful yet banal dystopia.
Also, I would never discuss something I am buying with an LLM, the moment advertising starts being used to influence its output it will be the same as discussing the product with the product page (which of course is only positive) and ignoring negative reviews.
If I, a consumer, want to buy a car, I need to do research. Where do I go? Online, across many websites. I talk to my friends. I talk to my coworkers.
Where do I NOT go? To the car salesman, and ask him for help. Because of course he will lie - he's a car salesman, he wants to sell cars that he sells.
Even with Google we see this being the case. Nobody is clicking the Google ads at the top because they know those are ads, not research. They only do it accidentally, which is evidenced by Google making it more difficult over time to tell what is or is not an ad.
I could see a majority of non tech (non HN) people take that deal.
I think you're evaluation of how many people click on Google ads and for what reasons is quite off. I'm sure you and most of the people in your circle are like that, but that's not how the vast majority of internet users behave. Google isn't generating $200 billion annually of accidental clicks.
Consumers don't know what they're clicking on is an ad, that's the only reason they clicked on it. They googled something for an answer - and oh look, the top results are what I want! Except those aren't results, they're ads. Here, put on your reading glasses - there's 8pt font there that says it's an ad.
It's the same thing with YouTube. Maybe half of the ads are just outright scams, and consumers know that. It's not like TV. So they don't click them, because you're playing Russian roulette if you do that. They only click them accidentally.
The main problem with online ads is that Google and Meta are dumb as rocks. They've decided to sell ad space to anyone with a pulse for a quick buck. The problem with that is that, over time, it devalues the ad space as consumers are trained to ignore it. We're quickly approaching the point where these ads only work on people born yesterday.
The ad space is grossly, grossly overvalued. Shh, nobody tell advertisers teehee!
It was a total failure. I know lots of people-- both technical and non-technical-- who have Alexa devices, and not one of them has ever bought anything with it. You can read various comments from Amazon insiders confirming that the rate of buying things with Alexa was close to zero. And why not? It's the shittiest possible way to shop, like buying a lottery ticket except where the RNG is knowingly gamed. This is why Amazon is writing off Alexa entirely.
I've commented to this effect before, but "what if people could shop sight unseen" is a PM fantasy, not a thing anybody actually wants. LLMs might be useful for helping with research and comparison shopping, but the "one-click [or one-prompt] buying" workflow is not gonna happen.
Or purchases where I know exactly what I want but don’t want to search and add to cart manually: “buy a new 3 foot USB-C braided cable from Anker”.
But this is exactly what Amazon can't do. Basically all Crocs (crocss, croks, crox) on Amazon are counterfeit, and they don't even have a record of which ones they pulled out of the bin last year to send to you so they can try to grab the same countefeits; and the company that listed them a year ago is probably on their fifty-second name change since then, and the "Satan's anus green" that you chose because it was half the price of the other colors is now "Satin Annux Green" at 2x the price of the other colors…
Their real moonshot should be search and ads. They're already taking big chunks from Google, they're just not monetizing at all (yet).
I already use chatgpt constantly for product research.
It's a huge market but who will it be a profitable business for?
Likely a company or multiple who own some sort of platform that people are already on, so not OpenAI.
What they have right now is the strong ChatGPT brand and that does mean a lot. But how long will it last?
They're not the technology leader anymore, and that spells a lot of trouble.
They are at a stage where they need to dominate the market and then leverage the data that gives them, plus the brand, plus the tech advantage to establish a durable near monopoly, but it looks like it's not working.
It's a bit as if in 1999 3 equally strong Google competitors had popped up, with some pulling ahead.
You mean like Yahoo, Lycos, Altavista, etc?