The news: AI is turning into a valuable ecommerce traffic source, delivering strong conversion rates as ChatGPT leads adoption and platforms like Microsoft Copilot and Anthropic’s Claude gain momentum.

• US ecommerce AI referral traffic for ChatGPT—or “the number of visits to ecommerce platforms from clicks generated by AI chatbots”—grew 210.5% YoY in Q1 2026 to reach 20.5 million visits, according to our Industry KPI data provided by Grips Intelligence.
• The same traffic spiked 3,918.0% for Copilot to 44,720 visits and 3,798.6% for Claude to 294,267 visits.

The top three AI platforms by referral traffic share were ChatGPT (92.2%), Gemini (5%), and Perplexity (1.9%), per Grips. Ecommerce traffic from ChatGPT converted 31% higher than non-branded organic in 2025, according to Visibility Labs data cited by Search Engine Land.

What it means: AI search tools are attracting high-intent shoppers. And while ChatGPT remains the dominant source of AI referrals by sheer scale, rapid growth from Copilot and Claude suggests consumers are using multiple AI platforms to discover products and retailers.

For brands, this shifts optimization priorities beyond traditional search and social—visibility inside AI recommendations is important as they drive more traffic. Despite this rise in visits, genAI engines still only account for 3.3% of US online discovery time, per Comscore data analyzed by EMARKETER.

The bigger picture: New pathways are being created from product discovery to purchase.

Personalized recommendations and conversational shopping experiences could accelerate product research and selection and make site visits more likely to result in a purchase.

Retailers’ investments in AI-powered shopping tools are also streamlining the process from conversation to transaction. This means the path to purchase is shortened once users find products within AI recommendations or answers.

Recommendations for brands: As AI shopping behaviors mature, brands need to ensure their content, visual assets, and product information are easily surfaced and cited by AI assistants.

Run audits on multiple assistants to see which are driving discovery and conversions to identify whether brands are appearing, what information is given to users that may affect brand opinions, how smooth the path to purchase is, and how AI engines may be changing the status quo for what platforms drive traffic.

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