ChatGPT Just Became Walmart's Best Unpaid Sales Rep

Okay, we need to talk about something that's been happening while we were all busy arguing about whether AI would steal our jobs. Turns out, ChatGPT has quietly become the internet's most enthusiastic window shopper, and it's sending actual paying customers to online stores. Like, a lot of them.

I've been digging into the latest traffic data, and what I found made me do that thing where you stare at your screen and slowly whisper "what the actual hell" to your empty home office. ChatGPT is now responsible for ONE IN FIVE of Walmart's referral clicks. Twenty percent! That's not a typo. That's not me misreading the data after my third coffee. That's real.

The Numbers That Made Me Question Reality

According to Similarweb (these are the data nerds who track where internet traffic comes from), ChatGPT has become a top-tier traffic source practically overnight:

• Walmart: 20% of referral traffic (up 15% from July to August alone)

• Etsy: Over 20% (craft sellers, your AI overlord has arrived)

• Target: Nearly 15% (bullseye indeed)

• eBay: 10% (still hanging in there!)

Now, before you start planning your yacht purchase, let me bring you back to earth: referral traffic is still less than 5% of these retailers' total traffic. Most people still type "walmart.com" directly into their browser like it's 2010. But here's the thing—the velocity of this change is what's making me lose sleep.

We're talking about 50 million shopping queries hitting ChatGPT every single day. FIFTY. MILLION. That's roughly 2% of ChatGPT's 2.5 billion daily prompts, according to OpenAI's own economists (yes, they have economists now, because of course they do).

Amazon's Power Move (Or Is It a Massive Miscalculation?)

Here's where things get genuinely fascinating in a "watching-a-slow-motion-car-crash-or-maybe-a-genius-chess-move" kind of way. While everyone else is riding the ChatGPT referral traffic wave, Amazon has essentially built a giant wall around its 600 million product listings and put up a sign saying "NO AI ALLOWED."

They've actively blocked ChatGPT from crawling their site. The result? ChatGPT referrals to Amazon dropped 18% month-over-month, now sitting at a pathetic sub-3%.

At first, I thought Bezos's successor Andy Jassy had lost it. Then I did the math (badly, but I tried), and it started making sense. Amazon's advertising business—you know, the one that makes them $56 BILLION a year—depends entirely on people browsing inside Amazon's digital walls. Every product ChatGPT recommends directly is potentially a lost advertising opportunity.

So what's Amazon doing instead? They're pushing Rufus, their own AI shopping assistant that nobody asked for but half a billion questions have been posed to anyway. And get this—Rufus is already showing ads. Because of course it is. It's like Amazon looked at ChatGPT and said, "That's cute, but what if we made our own AI assistant that also tries to sell you stuff you don't need?"

The Walmart Revenge Arc Nobody Saw Coming

Remember when we all thought Walmart was going to get absolutely demolished by Amazon? Well, plot twist: while Amazon's building walls, Walmart's building bridges.

Walmart's CTO Hari Vasudev is out here talking about "common standards" and "third-party shopping agents" like it's the future of commerce. Which, honestly, it might be. With their 420 million SKUs now accessible to AI crawlers, Walmart is basically saying "Come on in, ChatGPT, the water's fine!"

This is the retail equivalent of that moment in high school when the quiet kid suddenly becomes cool and the former popular kid is eating lunch alone. I'm here for it.

The Free Lunch Is About to End (Obviously)

If you're currently enjoying this tsunami of free ChatGPT traffic, I have bad news: OpenAI isn't running a charity. They're reportedly developing payment and checkout capabilities directly within ChatGPT.

Think about it—tens of millions of shopping queries daily, and OpenAI's just... giving that traffic away? In this economy? Please. They're going to monetize this faster than you can say "affiliate commission."

Bain & Co. (the consulting firm that charges more per hour than most people make in a month) projects that by 2030, AI companies will need $2 trillion annually just to keep the servers running. Meanwhile, they're only expected to make $1.2 trillion. That $800 billion gap? Yeah, that's coming from somewhere, and that somewhere is probably your marketing budget.

What This Actually Means for Your Store

So here's where I put on my serious hat for exactly 47 seconds. If you're selling online, you need to understand what's happening here:

If you're on Amazon exclusively: You're basically invisible to the AI shopping revolution. It's like having a store in a mall that banned GPS. Good luck with that.

If you're on Walmart, Target, Etsy, etc.: Congratulations, you're accidentally winning. But you should probably figure out how to optimize for AI discovery before everyone else catches on.

If you're running your own Shopify store: This is your moment. While Amazon's having an existential crisis and everyone else is figuring out what's happening, you could be optimizing your product descriptions for natural language queries.

The Bottom Line (Because This Newsletter Is Already Too Long)

ChatGPT has gone from "cute parlor trick" to "significant traffic driver" in about the same time it takes Amazon to deliver a package. Whether you think this is the beginning of the AI shopping revolution or just another tech bubble, one thing's clear: ignoring it is no longer an option.

Amazon's betting they're too big to need ChatGPT. Everyone else is betting that open beats closed. And somewhere in the middle, millions of consumers are asking ChatGPT "what's the best coffee maker under $200?" and actually buying what it suggests.

We're living through the messiest, weirdest transformation of online shopping since someone first thought "what if we sold books... but on the internet?" And honestly? I can't wait to see how spectacularly wrong all our predictions turn out to be.

P.S. - If you're reading this and thinking "I should probably figure out how to optimize for ChatGPT," you're about six months behind the curve. But don't worry, so is everyone else.

• New study finds light buyers drive about half of online sales, so widen your targeting and don’t overfixate on bottom-funnel tweaks.

• When does Creative fatigue on Meta hit?

• AI search is booming yet under 1% of traffic.

• Airlines and Ai, or how to find cheap flights in 8 prompts.

  

• Understanding AI’s effects on the economy

• Meet the Gen Marketer who blends strategy, creative and growth with AI. Generalists win as specialization becomes software assisted.

• Google defends AI Overviews as users want contextual summaries while promising to keep the classic links amid publisher traffic concerns.

• Ray3 debuts as a story-smart video model with strong physics, 16-bit HDR and Draft Mode for rapid concepting in pro pipelines.

• The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Human Thought

• ChatGPT prompts everyone should know!

⚙️ Agora - The search engine for e-commerce products.

🎨 Easy branding - Visually consistent personal branding.

🌐 Respell - Combine no-code workflows, agent chat, and AI suggestions to automate work.

📝 Fanfuel - A tool to create YouTube content, thumbnails, scripts and analyze audience.

🤖 Top GPTs - Access the best OpenAI GPTs without a Plus subscription

😍It was great, all I needed

🙂Good, not great

🙄It sucked