By Lauren Newman, CRO at Button
Two of retail’s biggest names just made a strategic leap: Target and Walmart are bringing their catalogs, checkout flows and shopping experiences directly into ChatGPT and other OpenAI-powered surfaces. Target launched a curated shopping app inside ChatGPT that lets users browse, build multi-item baskets and check out with omnichannel fulfillment options. Walmart’s partnership similarly enables customers to shop and complete purchases from within ChatGPT via Instant Checkout. Both moves are explicit attempts to meet consumers inside conversational AI, not merely at a website or a search engine.
The new integrations mark a turning point in retail: the storefront is becoming the search engine. By bringing their catalogs and checkout flows directly into ChatGPT, these retailers are rewiring the retail funnel and redefining where product discovery happens. By plugging their catalogs and checkout flows directly into OpenAI, they turned ChatGPT into a storefront. And when the storefront becomes the search engine, the rest of the ecosystem needs to pay attention.
That shift has major consequences for publishers and creators whose traffic has long depended on traditional search, affiliate models and the open web.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Every product search that starts inside an AI assistant is one less opportunity for a publisher or creator to influence the shopper.
If retailers go all-in on AI-native discovery, a huge portion of commerce intent may never touch the open web again.
Here’s what publishers and creators should understand and do right now.
AI isn’t Killing Search. It’s Replacing it
When shopping begins inside a conversational AI, and ends there, the classic “search → research → click → buy” journey gets compressed into a single interaction. So instead of consumers asking Google for “best winter boots under $80,” they are asking an AI platform for advice. The assistant recommends, compares, and transacts without sending a shopper back out to the publisher pages or creator content that once fueled intent. No scrolling. No ten-tab research. No affiliate clicks.
That’s a great experience for the shopper, but it reduces the chance that they’ll click through to a publisher’s long-form review or creator video, which is the very content that previously captured high-intent traffic and monetization. Early indicators from the rollout of these retailer apps show the clear intent to remove friction and keep the user in the assistant.
For publishers and creators, that means one thing: the middle of the funnel just collapsed.
If retailers increasingly integrate directly with AI platforms, the click-through disappears, and with it, a meaningful source of traffic and revenue for the publisher-and-creator economy.
AI Still Needs Someone to Trust
This shift matters to publishers and creators for one big reason: a core pipeline of traffic and intent – the search result or the referral click that used to send someone to a publisher’s review, comparison or product round-up – is at risk of being absorbed by the retailer-AI interaction itself. In other words, more commerce journeys may start and end inside an AI assistant that recommends and transacts on behalf of the shopper, and that changes the economics of referral traffic, affiliate commissions and SEO-driven discovery.
But there’s one thing that everyone is missing: AI still needs trusted signals. Even as AI surfaces become the place where decisions get made, they still need authoritative inputs like structured product data, validated reviews, comparative scoring and real-world testing. AI doesn’t magically know which stroller turns into a wobbly mess on uneven pavement. Someone has to prove it.
That creates an opportunity: publishers and creators who structure their content for machine consumption can still shape (and be credited within) the AI’s recommendations.
In other words, the “answer” may live inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, etc., but the authority behind the answer can still come from trusted content creators and publishers, if they optimize for it. That “someone” can still be publishers and creators if they evolve fast enough.
Structured Signals are Now Currency
If AI shopping leans on retailer catalogs and structured product APIs, publishers that supply clean, authoritative product data and semantic signals will still influence outcomes. AI models consume structured inputs (product attributes, availability, delivery windows, return policies) easily. Publishers who adapt their content to include machine-readable signals, including schema markup, standardized product feeds, crisp pros/cons metadata and clear review scoring, can remain visible in the AI’s decision layer even when the click disappears.
So What Can be Done Now?
- Make content machine-digestible. Add or strengthen schema.org markup, ensure product pages have normalized attributes (size, color, UPC/SKU) and push product feeds that are easy to ingest. Conversational agents will favor data they can parse reliably.
- Own the micro-moment, not just the full article. Draft short, scannable answer cards or “TL;DR” summaries at the top of long reviews which are optimized for an AI to extract and cite.
- Shift toward API partnerships and catalogs. Negotiate to be a data or content partner for retailer AI layers, supplying authoritative specs, test results or creator-verified imagery. If retailers are building apps inside platforms like ChatGPT, there’s an opportunity to be the trusted third-party content source.
- Monetize diversification: affiliate + direct integrations. If referral clicks decline, pursue revenue from API access, sponsored data feeds, co-branded conversational experiences and revenue share inside the retailer’s app rather than just on your site.
- Double down on unique, experiential content. AI can summarize features. It can’t (yet) replicate an authentic hands-on video or a creator’s narrative. Make long-form, demonstrative content that adds demonstrable value beyond facts the model can regurgitate.
- Explore Gen AI blocks for websites. Consider AI crawlers and content blockers as both a defensive and revenue-generating strategy. InspiredTaste recently blocked OpenAI from freely crawling its site, then structured a paid agreement to license its content, effectively turning what could have been lost traffic into a new revenue stream. For publishers concerned about AI siphoning audience and value, this approach offers a way to protect intellectual property while recapturing monetization opportunities in the AI ecosystem.
For creators specifically, be conversational-first. Conversational commerce wants authentic, fast, trust-building proof, exactly what creators excel at. Creators should design short-form, answerable assets, including product demos, one-minute pros/cons clips and voice-friendly summaries, which an assistant could surface as a concise recommendation. Also consider making “creator packs” (30-90 second clips + a short structured transcript + metadata) that retailers or platforms can license for use inside a shopping chat.
Final Thoughts: Attention Shifts, but Value Does Not Disappear
Yes, the path between curiosity and checkout is changing. But value, true expertise, verifiable testing, emotionally resonant storytelling and trustworthy product data still matters. Retailers have already made their move. AI is now a first stop, not a last-mile add-on. Now it’s on to the publishers and creators.
Those who reorganize around this reality will own the signals that feed the models. The players who win are the ones who translate their authority into formats that conversational AI amplifies like structured feeds, concise answers, licensed creator content and integrated APIs. Yes, retailer-AI integrations will siphon off a portion of the open web’s search-driven traffic. But publishers and creators who move early can reposition themselves from downstream monetizers to upstream data partners, a far more durable place to be as AI becomes the first step in the shopping journey. If publishers and creators move quickly to become the data and content partners these new shopping agents rely on, they won’t just survive this transition, they’ll be central to how commerce conversations are curated and decided in the age of AI. Those who don’t will be invisible in a world where discovery channels begin to influence the click.
