Zero-Click Shopping Comes To ChatGPT

[MUSIC] It's going to accelerate the zero click movement. Tom and I from a team came up as number two in the recommendation in the chat GPT overview as to information around threads. It's going to be the new Link equity SEO approach of trying to figure out what are the signals that Google used to look at. Welcome back to Digital Horizons. Today we are talking about the instant checkout experience that is going to be introduced by open AI on chat GPT. Yeah, we're going to uncover what this can mean for merchants, for users, and what does it actually mean for Google and their product listing ads and the grass cutting that open AI is going to do in that space? What this is is the ability for users who have an chat on chat GPT to be able to push a single button and be able to purchase the product that has been recommended to them by open AI. Yeah, open AI and chat GPT is really becoming a thorn in Google's side. Google has product listing ads and the shopping page and its search results page and its summaries are getting a direct competitor in open AI's ability to research the internet and provide you answers effectively replicating the search results page. And now taking over the shopping page by if they're suggesting products in your research having a button right there that you can just check out. This is a circle. Yeah, I think it's really cool seeing I couldn't have imagined a competitor to Google until AI has come along this far and started delivering these sorts of tools. So how does a work for users when researching products in chat GPT instead of just having reference links, there will be pictures, descriptions and by now links. Yep, and they'll directly integrate with Shopify to start with and Etsy. Yes, open AI will take a small commission or markup from the transaction. Yep, and that's from the merchant side. So nothing on the user side. So it doesn't cost anything to actual purchase but if the merchant's want to be featured on there, you'd be paying a percentage but I think that percentage will be on top of your Shopify and Etsy fees as well. Yeah, and they're using a new protocol, the agentic commerce protocol, which is what's enabling this connection for e-commerce between Shopify and open AI. So for merchants, it should be as easy as connecting to open AI. With your Shopify account, it says that there will be a Stripe integration as well. I'm not sure if that's the only payment method that they're going to be integrating but I presume it will add more. Well, I mean, if the integration is through Shopify, you would expect that it would just plug into your Shopify checkout, which would then have all your Shopify payment options. But I guess and potentially the Stripe integration may just be for people who aren't even on Shopify, they just want to be able to sell digital products or whatever through a Stripe payment gateway. Well, it says Stripe integration of businesses already using Stripe can enable payments with a single line of code while others can connect via shared payment token API or delegated payments. So yeah, you can use anything that Stripe has a simple integration. Yeah, and it's simple and perfect. I mean, we talked about it on an episode recently where I went through the process of buying a washing machine without even going to Google Search. Like the entire process was researching product on chat Gbt, I even found coupons and best place to buy and all that kind of stuff. And then I made a purchase without ever using Google, which was the first time I ever did this. This takes it another step further where I don't even know how to need to go to the Supply's website. I could just gotten done that whole process through chat Gbt from Discovery. Well, I mean, I knew I needed a dishwasher machine, but I didn't know which one I wanted. So going through the whole research stage, going through it all, finding coupons, finding the best deals, so that whole final of the process and then purchasing without a single Google Search. Yeah, it's or even trip to a website. It's becoming wild. And I think having more than just text in your chat Gbt, conversationless, and it's certain to spill over into the other large language models as well. It's going to accelerate the zero-click movement, and we will spend some time talking about this in a full episode. What this means for websites, for advertisers, for brands. What will your website become if not just a home for content that's read by other platforms and served within their network within their platform? And where does it leave Google Shopping and Search as well? Because if this, I think we've obviously seen a lot of traffic not no longer getting clicked to the website because of the AI overviews. But then if people are now not using Google Shopping for Search intent, because we're always looking at, oh, commercial intent keywords. Normally for those kind of searches, you're going to go use Google because you want to be able to compare all the pricing, you want to be able to see the shopping ad, you want to be able to do all this kind of stuff in your research. But if that's taken away from that, it's really going to, I guess, move and shift the way that people are using these platforms in for the purchase decisions and really shift people away from, I guess, make Google ads a less valuable marketing tool as what it has been. It has always been for e-commerce brands. It's always been such a key driver for revenue. We were talking earlier off-camera about the likelihood of open AI introducing ads within its platform over time as well. They've introduced, well, we can talk about this in another brand news, but the Pulse tool, which is their opportunity to push and proactively serve content you'd find interesting. Maybe it's about products you've been researching. I am certain ads will find their way in there over time. 100%. I'd love to be able to put that into the screen. But I was talking to someone about this and they were like, no, Sam, I opened hate ads and I'm like, I don't know who your source is on this. Maybe that's a thing that has been opened the against ads. I'm like, so was Zuckerberg. Yeah. Facebook like. Yeah, like they had ad tools. Get your users and then start selling shit. Yeah, until they need to find a value other than investment to drive the company. So I'm sure we will see some sort of advertiser placement become available in open AI. But I also think yes, they might be cutting Google's grass, but Google's already transitioning to a lot of AI summaries over 60% of searches are resulting in a zero click path to the answer. There's not much more of a leap for Google to introduce its product listing ads into the search engine AI summary that it serves on its own page. They've already got all of that infrastructure there. Being able to pull the products in that people have already connected in via their ads, it would diminish the unbiased view that I have of chat GPs, answers or research. But I think what we're going to see over time is people gaming the AI platforms and the summaries with ways of serving their content as the right possible answer. And then if there is ad platforms available, we're going to have a lot of trust in these AI summaries. And then just like everything else when there's spun up SEO articles to make things like the top 10 batteries to get for your car and in 2025 or the top 10 laptops on CNET, we're going to start realizing all this stuff is kind of sponsored and paid for. And I don't think it's there yet. I still think it's trusted content that you know it's going and finding this content somewhere. Yeah. But over time, I think Google's big battle will be copying what OpenAI is doing and improving its experience so they get less people leaking out to OpenAI. Yeah, for sure. Speaking of getting found on thing, I got featured recently on a one of our team we're doing some research on meta threads, the platform. And I just asking some information about it. And Tom and I from a team came up as number two in the recommendation in the chat GPT overview as to information around threads. And I was like at that time, we'd only done about a handful of episodes on our thing. So I'm wondering how did that get ranked? We've got a brand new website. We've got a new YouTube channel. But there was either that few people talking about threads. And it was like John Luma who's like Facebook ads everywhere. Like he's been a resource. I've been following that guy for like 10 years on Facebook ads. And then me and Tom. And I was like, "Where is this coming from?" There's like no interesting threads or somehow we've done something that we didn't know that got us found and fed back into the results in chat GPT, which was great. It got posted to our wins channel. But I have no idea how that happened. So it'd be great to be able to work out how to come up in these lists. And I'm sure there's people, I mean there are people that they're working this out right now. Because there's going to be so much value, especially when the commercial side of things, when people are purchasing through their AI platforms, that's where it's going to be so valuable to be started to show up there. Yeah, it's going to be the new Linkekritty SEO approach of trying to figure out what are the signals that Google used to look at to determine whether your website was the most relevant. We'll be now, what does chat GPT look at to determine what answer is the most appropriate and then trying to manage those signals so that we're, you know, "Oh, if it's the most references in answers, or is it the most engaged with answer or is it threads in different platforms?" Yeah, it's a whole new world and it's going to be a whole lot of work. So that's digital horizons for this week. Really excited to see how this progresses and as soon as it's available, we'll be connecting our clients accounts up to see whether we get sales and conversions through it. We'll report back to you. Thanks for watching.