AI SEO is where the attention is going, with ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Google AI Overviews replacing the need for people to visit websites
Best way to get the word out about a product now is through an influencer in the space.
-- Edit:
Show of hands for anyone using ChatGPT to shop. Be honest.
People don't even use Google to shop. They try to find something either (1) by brand name, eg. "iphone" or (2) generically by category, eg. "best cold weather tent".
In the former case, Google used their enormous, antitrust flaunting power and 90% browser marketshare to turn the URL bar into a competitive trademark bidding dragnet. Apple pays out the nose for the iPhone spot. For every click. And every other major corporation selling to business or consumer does the same. This is the source of Google's enormous wealth. Google is a middle man. You cannot conceivably get to a brand or product without paying the Google tax.
In the latter case, when people try to look up blogs and reviews and Reddit posts to compare products, Google gets in the way and inserts themselves into the flow. If LLMs make this experience even shittier, there won't be upstream content to source as no reward will reach the people providing the value. It will naturally atrophy over time.
As a new sales channel, young people are buying content off of TikTok and Instagram directly now. When they see influencers using products they like, it leads to massive sales volume. New unicorn consumer businesses are being minted regularly from this.
LLMs are not limited to voice interfaces. You absolutely can use ChatGPT as a search engine if you want to: it does give you results you can compare, telling you about pros and cons of various options, and you can discuss with it what your end-goals are and have it turn a vague idea into a shopping list (that may or may not be complete for your project).
I don't have any reason to think these are the best, ChatGPT is not a storefront and OpenAI does not have a long history as a search engine, but it absolutely can be used this way.
I know people who took a photo of their car's driver side mirror cap (the thing that is on the opposite of the drivers side mirror and often colored like the rest of the car) - and asked chatGPT to search for the part. Because they were not able to navigate the respective auto parts portals.
I myself had perplexity generate a comparison report for different electric cars in a specific price range to get a first rough understanding of the used eCar market. Including links to respective models in used car sites.
Using Kagi for the few regular searches I need to do nowadays, Claude Code on the commandline for any other extended research/searches, I actually only use Google nowadays when I use the Google song detection function. Like Shazam - I just find this thing to be on my phone, so no need for an additional app.
I could give you a lot of additional examples from acquaintances and family - esp. from the not so tech people. Google is catching up, though. So - I think, with habits being hard to break, most people find Google good enough for quite a long time to come.
I do that, 10 years already, using Google, on a specific website. Website owners are just so very, very bad at making search working. Haven't even tried using ChatGPT for it.
"What is still considered a highly regarded 35mm film camera for under $400 (used)?"
Of course then I go to eBay…
Here's a use case for me last week: I'm re-organizing my bathroom sink/vanity, and I want a few counter top organizers to keep things neat and tidy. I have a low mirror, low medicine cabinets, and generally tight spaces to work with and want to maximize storage.
So, I have a 10" wide space and I can't have anything over 16". I want to find a drawer organizer as close to 16" tall without going over, and as close to 10" without going over. Given a choice between the two, I want to bias for more height.
Go to Google or Amazon and try finding that. You're going to be trying permutations of 10x16 and 9x16 and so on, and digging through pages looking for something approximate.
In theory maybe there's some filter options on Amazon that might work, but they're usually incomplete, wrong, or absent. It's a terrible experience even when it's supported.
ChatGPT (or even Amazon's kind of janky Rufus) immediately finds top near-perfect matches for me to choose from. 15-20 minutes of aggravating digging turned into 90s of letting ChatGPT think and search while I was off grabbing a coffee.
True, LLMs are quite good in things where I have limited knowledge. It shortens exploration phase considerably. Before, I would need to go to web pages, compare parameters (somewhere), think out why this, not that.
There is plenty of evidence that people are increasingly turning to AI chatbots for that too. And it's entirely possible that ChatGPT and others are already being trained to mention some products first or to present them in a more positive light.
I use Gemini to help with shopping decisions pretty frequently. It's been very effective and useful for that.
Show of hands for anyone still compiling 500 Amazon reviews by hand…
This won’t necessarily work well in a year (month?),
but up through now?
Absolutely I’ve been using assistants for some shopping purposes.
I used it for evaluating air filters. I used to for making shopping lists for food I want to cook.
I recently used ChatGPT to compare headphones before buying them, although the workflow there was a bit manual; I took some headphones that I had in mind off a cursory search off Amazon, had ChatGPT produce a summary of the differences and then picked the "best" one.
I'd assume this happens a lot more, I can easily someone doing, produce a list of [product category X] under < $Y, then use follow-up queries, etc.
> As a new sales channel, young people are buying content off of TikTok and Instagram directly now.
I assume this would only work for the things that influencers can directly sell, e.g. selling makeup to women that way is apparently a thing; for other products that are not impulse-buys, ChatGPT is a perfectly reasonable way to shop.