Generative AI Search: What E-commerce CMOs Need to Know
How can E-commerce teams prepare for a rapidly changing digital landscape of "online information discovery"?
About the Author:
Co-founder of Datacop, agency that fulfils marketing operation roles in large eCommerce companies such as OluKai, Melin, Roark, Visual Comfort and Company, Dedoles and others.
The search landscape is undergoing a fundamental shift. Search engines like Google and Bing have established themselves over the past 20 years as the gateway to the rest of the internet. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) became a core competency of digital marketing teams in ecommerce companies. However, SEO, Google traffic and generally customer behaviour when “searching information online” is likely to experience major changes in the foreseeable future.
Why?
The advent of generative AI (GenAI) search tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and DeepSeek are emerging as new channels for consumers to discover products and services online. A few months after their release, these platforms added the functionality to connect to “current up to date internet”.
For customers who are shopping online, this functionality enabled searching the web with more complex and specific queries compared to tradidional keyword-based searches. This is offering a new method for online customers to find what they are looking for - with more refined and intent-browsing experience.
This is opening new opportunities and challenges for e-commerce companies and their digital marketing teams. As a result CMOs are starting to ask themselves and their teams the following critical questions:
Are users using Search GenAI platforms to discover e-commerce products?
Are users finding our products via Search GenAI platforms?
If these users come to our site from a Search GenAI platform, do they convert?
How do we make sure our website is listed in GenAI Search results?
Are there UX implications on the site for users who discover the shop from a GenAI search tool?
What implications does this have for CMOs and e-commerce marketing team?
In the article below we’re going to outline 4 activities CMOs and e-commerce marketing teams can do answer the questions above and prepare for the changes ahead.
1. Identify and Monitor GenAI Search Traffic
Recently, GenAI search platforms are starting to tag their external links with UTM tags so they are becoming possible to measure.
The first step to prepare is to identify and monitor GenAI search traffic on your e-shop. This requires the setting up new traffic groups in Traffic Sources definitions. In Bloomreach this is done via an Event Segmentation.
With the help of the above traffic definitons build a dashboard that allows you to see:
Count of GenAI Search Session_starts over time (per week / per month)
What type of pages are they landing on? (Homepages, PDP, PLP, etc.) Which of our categories are receiving traffic and which are not?
What % of those sessions arrived for the 1st time to the site?
Conversion funnel - what % of GenAI Search ends up purchasing? If so, which products?
At Datacop we are monitoring GenAI traffic for our clients and we share the following insights:
Traffic from these platforms still represents less than < 1 % in all cases, however it is growing fast.
Traffic from these platforms are converting at a similar or better rate as the average of the “normal” traffic.
Customers who visit via Perplexity, while being a relatively minor platform; tend to have a higher rate of conversion to purchase than average traffic sources
2. E-commerce: Preparing to Adapt
As GenAI search tools become more prevalent, e-commerce teams need to proactively ensure their content is discoverable. Their adoption is growing quickly. It took ChatGPT just 5 days to reach 1 million users. For comparison, it took Instagram 2.5 months to reach 1 million users. By January 2023, just 3 months after the launch, ChatGPT counted 100 million users. For comparison, it took TikTok 9 months to reach 100 million users and it took Instagram 2.5 years to reach 100 million. By February 2025, OpenAI has reported over 400 million weekly active users of ChatGPT (reference).
With such strong growth and proliferation of GenAI-Powered solutions, it is not hard to foresee that while GenAI Search traffic in e-commerce is still more of a curiosity, it could soon represent a considerable % of “Organic Search” of traditional search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo. Their growth is underpinned by the fact that it offers truly new and revolutionary ways of interacting with the vast amount of information available to “surf” on the web. Additionally, when consumers were surveyed for which use-cases consumers would consider using search engines with “AI-generated results”, the most common answer was “Online Shopping”.
In how many years will this traffic become a significant portion of your website’s traffic? In one, two maybe three years? The answer to this questions, is the amount of time your team has to adapt to these changes.
ChatGPT and the like offers online shoppers a great way to find specific products on the wide web quickly. These are more likely to be considered purchases, rather than impulsive ones; as the shopper needs to have an intent in mind to find your site via these platforms. As a result At Datacop, we believe that e-commerce verticals that have 1) high AOV 2) high product specificity 3) lots of choices available on the market are at high risk of disruption caused by GenAI Search platforms.
CMOs of these verticals should start considering the following:
Who on my team is responsible for GenAI SEO?
What needs to be done so that our site is listed in GenAI Search platform results?
What prompts do we want to “be listed for”?
Are there any UX implications for our own search capabilities?
What does this mean for our web / product content and structure?
3. SEO for your e-commerce pages
As GenAI search tools become a growing source of online discovery, optimizing your e-commerce pages for AI-driven search is essential. While traditional SEO principles still apply, adapting to the way AI platforms process and retrieve information will be key to maintaining visibility and relevance.
Use Comprehensive Schema Markup – Mark up every product with details like name, price, availability, description, brand, SKU, and especially aggregate ratings and reviews. AI engines depend on this structured data for precise answers. For example, if a user asks “What’s the price of Acme Smartwatch X?”, a search AI can confidently answer if it sees structured data with your price. Include Review schema to feed the AI with average rating and review count – generative answers often highlight “Rated 4.5 stars based on 200 reviews” if they have that info. (reference)
Write Descriptive, In-Depth Product Descriptions – Unlike keyword-focused SEO, GenAI tools prioritize content that provides context and detail. Ensure product descriptions are rich, informative, and written in natural language to align with how AI models process information. Including detailed use cases, comparisons, and specifications can improve visibility. (reference)
Leverage Customer Reviews and Ratings – Showcase customer review content on the page (and not just in a carousel that’s hidden to crawlers). For instance, highlight a “top review” that discusses the product’s use. AI models integrate data from reviews when forming answers. A question like “Is the battery life good on this smartwatch?” could be answered by the AI quoting a common sentiment from reviews (“Many users report the battery lasts 2 days on a single charge”). By having reviews text accessible, you increase the chance the AI extracts positive attributes of your product from real users. (reference)
Incorporate FAQs or Q&A Sections – Many product pages now include an FAQ section (“Q: Is this compatible with iPhone? A: Yes, via Bluetooth.”). This is excellent for AI SEO. It provides clear question-and-answer pairs that an AI can directly grab for voice search or chat responses. Consider adding a small FAQ under each product with 3-5 common questions about the item (compatibility, materials, warranty, etc.) and concise answers. Mark these up with FAQPage schema for bonus points. This structured Q&A content makes the AI’s job easy when a user asks a similar question. (reference)
As search behavior evolves, e-commerce brands that proactively adapt their SEO strategies for AI-powered discovery will gain a competitive edge. By tracking GenAI search traffic, engaging with AI-referred visitors, and optimizing content for AI-driven indexing, CMOs and digital marketing teams can position their brands for success in this rapidly changing landscape.
4. Ask Visitors for Their AI Prompts
If your techstack contains Bloomreach Engagement, you can do more than just identify and monitor the traffic on your site and beginning to prepare a plan for GenAI SEO for your site.
With Bloomreach Engagement’s website targetting capabilities, we recommend to target users that have started their session via a link from ChatGPT and others with a weblayer asking them to share the prompts used that led them to the site.
Understanding what prompts are leading the GenAI platforms to link to your site is valuable information to better understand how users are discovering your site and what their shopping intent is. If you find that users are not sharing the prompts in large enough quantities, consider A/B testing a discount offering to incentivise users to sharing their prompts at higher rates. The prompts will be valuable information that could allow you to have a competitive edge over your competitors for visibility in results on these platforms. They will provide valuable feedback on the GenAI SEO needs of your site:
What kind of Questions do we need to answer on our product pages?
What information is important to contain within the product descriptions?
Additionally, if you have a customer services team, you could send the prompt responses with the customer’s contact information via a Scenario webhook to further assist these potential high value customers in their shopping journey via a phone call.
Similar to how we recommend to set up the Scenario webhook alerts in this article below, except for B2B customers, target users who have a session_start which arrived from one of the GenAI Search platforms.
If you found this article useful
If you’d like to discuss the changes in GenAI Search and what you can do to prepare with Bloomreach with us or any other questions related, feel free to book a free 30 minute meeting at the link below.
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This is a huge shift, search is no longer just about keywords, but about intent and context-driven discovery through AI.