Marketplace Briefing: AI traffic is poised to reshape the Amazon funnel
Like many agencies, Envision Horizons has been trying to get a better sense of how referral traffic from generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini is starting to influence purchases.
Last week, the full-service Amazon agency released an AI visibility tracker in beta to get a better sense of how much its clients may be benefiting from this type of traffic. It has also commissioned two surveys within the past year to examine how people are using AI in their shopping journey — and how much that may be changing.
As Laura Meyer, founder and CEO of Envision Horizons, put it in an interview with me, she doesn’t know exactly how much traffic her clients may have received from AI platforms during Prime Day, Amazon’s most recent big sales event. But this year, Amazon did run ads in ChatGPT promoting Prime Day. So it probably played a bigger role, even if she can’t exactly quantify it. And it is only poised to play a bigger role in tentpole shopping events like Prime Day and Black Friday going forward.
In turn, she wants to get a better sense of how her clients — and their products — are showing up on these AI platforms. That’s why her agency built its AI visibility tracker. And many Amazon agencies are going through a similar calculus right now.
Even as Amazon itself has limited how third-party AI shopping agents can scrape its site, it has made clear that it expects them to play a greater role in purchasing decisions going forward. That’s evidenced by recent decisions like buying ads on ChatGPT promoting Prime Day and integrating its own AI shopping agent, Alexa for Shopping, more prominently into the main search bar.
The challenge is that, right now, Amazon sellers have little to no data to go off of to quantify exactly how much traffic they are getting from AI shopping agents — both from Alexa for Shopping and from third-party agents like ChatGPT.
The hope for Envision Horizons is that the AI visibility tracker will provide the agency with more data, enabling it to optimize copywriting for Alexa for Shopping. In the meantime, when asked by clients how to best optimize their product listings for AI, she says that a lot of it boils down to the fundamentals, like “making sure your data infrastructure is consistent across channels and that it’s accurate” so that LLMs have accurate information to pull from. Since reviews also play an important role in feeding LLMs, she advises brands to go back to the “marketing fundamentals of making sure that how you’re positioning your product is aligned with how it actually performs.”
And in the meantime, she’s taking pages from Amazon’s playbook. During the fall Prime Day event, her firm will also likely run ads in ChatGPT, and potentially other LLMs. “At the last minute, we were actually trying to set up [ad] accounts on ChatGPT for some clients [for Prime Day], but unfortunately it takes like five business days to get your account approved,” she said.
“Until Amazon actually shows me the data of the consumer behavior, it’s hard for me to jump to any conclusions,” said Will Haire, co-founder and CEO of marketplace management agency BellaVix. In the search query reports he gets from Amazon, he’s starting to see more long-tail searches being performed, like people searching for “best coffee maker under $100,” rather than simply searching for “best coffee maker,” as one example. He believes this may be because people are interacting with AI search agents more and becoming accustomed to longer prompts. But it’s hard to prove out.
In the meantime, he’s advising clients not to put the cart before the horse. Yes, AI is going to play a bigger role in traffic going forward, but “I remind them that a majority of [traditional] search is still happening.”
Additionally, “direct traffic is not painting the whole story,” said Victoria Mauriello, head of advisory services, North America at digital market intelligence company Similarweb. Similarweb estimates indicate that AI-driven traffic to Amazon has more than doubled over the past six months, driving about 13.9 million visits to Amazon in the month of June. That would only account for about 1% of Amazon’s traffic.
But that also doesn’t account for people who perhaps go to Reddit first to read reviews about different models of coffee makers. Then, they pick their top three models and go to ChatGPT to weigh the pros and cons of each. Then, they search once again for the product on Google, and do price comparisons across different sites, before finally checking out.
So in the first quarter of this year, Similarweb commissioned a study to try and get a better sense of what indirect role AI may be playing in traffic. In its study of MacBook buyers across Apple.com, Amazon, Walmart, Target and Best Buy, direct AI-attributed traffic was about 2%. But the percentage of buyers who had a category-relevant AI chat session in the 30 minutes prior to purchasing was much larger, at about 28.53%.
“Consumers are using [AI agents] at some point during their journey to do research and eventually landing on Amazon,” Mauriello said.
The thesis driving Meyer’s strategy at Envision Horizons is that “discovery is happening everywhere, but transactions are taking place on Amazon.”
“We have seen a huge shift in how and what drives success on Amazon,” Meyer said.
“Historically, you could really capture a lot of the demand that lived on Amazon,” she added. “But as the platform has become more competitive, brands have had to evolve.”
There are three pillars driving what she calls the “Amazon funnel 2.0.” She believes that TikTok Shop and affiliates are having a growing halo effect on Amazon sales — and that AI is poised to be the third pillar.
“AI is [going to be] kind of the authority of who’s ultimately going to win the purchase,” she said. “It just allows consumers to be so much more informed.”
What I’m reading
- Amazon aims to raise $25 billion from bond sale (Reuters)
- Walmart cuts prices on groceries and other goods (Retail Dive)
- Amazon documents reveal a costly new Alexa AI project (Business Insider)