Something shifted in how people find products online, and most store owners haven't clocked it yet, because it doesn't show up as a tidy line in their analytics the way Google or Meta does. Over the 2025 holiday season, traffic to retail sites from AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity grew close to 700% over the year before. Small base, granted. But by March 2026 that traffic was converting better than paid search and email, the channels you actually pay for. So the question worth asking now is a plain one: when a shopper asks ChatGPT to recommend a product you sell, does it mention you?
For most stores the answer is no. Not because the product is wrong, but because the AI can't read it.
Be honest about the size first. AI-referred traffic is still a fraction of what Google sends you. If your position is "wake me when it's my biggest channel," that's defensible on the numbers.
It's also the wrong call, and here's why. The shoppers arriving from an AI assistant don't behave like the average visitor. They've already had a conversation about what they need. They land more informed, browse deeper, and leave less often. Adobe, which tracks over a trillion visits to US retail sites, found AI referrals bouncing less and converting higher than traditional sources. The conversion gap didn't just narrow over the past year, it flipped: in early 2025 AI traffic converted worse than search, and by March 2026 it converted roughly 42% better. That's a big move in a short window, and it points one way.
Small but high-intent, growing fast, and cheap to win right now because your competitors are mostly ignoring it. That combination doesn't come around often.
This is where owners who treat it as "SEO for AI" go wrong. It isn't that.
Google hands a shopper ten blue links and lets them pick. An AI assistant does something else: it reads the product data it has, chooses a few options, and recommends them by name. There's no page two. If your product isn't in the set it considers, you're absent from that conversation entirely.
And what it considers comes largely from structured product data, the clean and machine-readable version of your catalog. OpenAI, for one, asks merchants to supply a structured product feed so ChatGPT can index items with accurate price and availability instead of guessing from your pages. Google feeds Gemini and its AI shopping surfaces through Merchant Center. Same pattern everywhere: the assistant recommends from a feed and from pages it can actually parse, not from how polished your site looks to a person.
The consequence is uncomfortable but useful to know. Between two similar products, the one with more complete, accurate data usually wins the recommendation. Not the better product. The better-described one.
Here's the part most owners miss. Adobe also looked at how machine-readable retail sites actually are, and product pages scored worst of all: the single most important page type for selling, and the least legible to the systems now doing the recommending.
A few common reasons a Magento product page reads poorly to an AI:
The important details load through JavaScript after the page opens. A human waits half a second and sees the price. Plenty of AI systems don't wait, so they see a page with no price, no stock status, nothing to act on.
The structured data is thin or missing. A product name and a photo won't cut it. The assistant wants the brand, a unique product ID (a GTIN, essentially a barcode), current availability, real pricing, variants, reviews, return terms. Gaps get you skipped, because these systems have close to zero tolerance for a half-filled record.
The feed, where one exists at all, is stale. Prices and stock that don't match reality get a product quietly deprioritized or dropped. Freshness is a ranking signal, not a nicety.
None of this is exotic. It's catalog hygiene. But it's exactly the kind of unglamorous data work that never reaches a roadmap, because it doesn't demo well in a meeting.
Strip out the acronyms and four things matter, roughly in this order.
Get your catalog into the AI channels directly. A product feed submitted to the AI shopping programs (OpenAI's merchant feed, Google Merchant Center) beats hoping the models scrape you correctly. A feed you control means accurate price and stock, which is precisely what the assistants reward.
Make your product pages readable by a machine, not only a browser. The key product facts should sit in the page as structured data that loads without waiting on scripts. On Magento, making pages machine-readable and wiring them to the AI channels is a normal piece of AI integration work; it's just rarely prioritized over the next feature.
Fill in the attributes you're missing. Barcodes, materials, dimensions, honest availability, return policy. Every field you complete is one more reason for the assistant to pick you and one fewer reason to pass. This is where most of the real effort goes, and it pays back across every channel, not just AI.
Keep it fresh. A feed that updates daily beats a richer feed that's a week old. Let price and inventory drift from reality and the recommendations dry up.
One more input feeds this: reviews and third-party mentions. These assistants lean on outside sources to decide who to trust, so the reputation you've built on review platforms isn't only social proof now. It's data the model reads.
Set expectations honestly. This won't double your revenue next quarter. AI traffic is still a modest slice of the whole.
What it does is stake an early claim on a channel that's growing fast and converting better than the ones you already pay for, at a moment when almost nobody in your category has bothered. The work is mostly one-time: fix how product data is rendered, complete the catalog, wire up the feeds, set them to refresh. Weeks of focused effort for most stores, not a storefront rebuild. And because that same clean, structured product data also sharpens ordinary search and on-site discovery, you're not making a single-channel bet. You're repairing a foundation that opens the AI channel as a bonus.
The stores that sort this out over the next few months will sit as the default recommendation in their categories while everyone else is still debating whether AI shopping is real. That kind of head start is hard to claw back.
If getting your Magento catalog into these AI channels cleanly is the project sitting at the bottom of your list, it's the sort of work we do at Encomage. Our AI integration projects usually start by looking at how your product data is actually structured and rendered, before anything gets connected, because that's where the recommendations are won or lost.
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