On Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, contestants phone a friend, then ask the audience anyway before locking in.

Shoppers now treat ChatGPT the same way.

Phone a friend, then check the work: 16% of shoppers start product searches in ChatGPT, according to a Feedvisor survey covered by Modern Retail.

Only 5% buy on the spot after an AI recommendation. PartnerCentric’s survey found that after an AI suggestion, shoppers:

• Check reviews (33%)
• Compare prices (22.3%)
• Search Amazon or another retailer (18.8%)
• Visit the brand’s site (14.8%)

They still Google you, too: Similarweb data shows 93.7% of ChatGPT.com’s visitors also visited Google.com in September.

And your reviews just landed an ad slot: Google’s review summaries are AI-written recaps of your online reviews that appear inside your Search ads.

They’re positive-only, you can’t edit them, and Google shows them only when it predicts better ad performance. They only run in English in the US, UK, Australia and India.

Small traffic, big intent: SEO consultant Marie Haynes analyzed 100 sites and found ChatGPT drove just 0.62% as many sessions as Google organic.

But on sites tracking conversions, 13.8% of ChatGPT visitors converted, vs. 3.02% from Google organic. Google organic still drove 27 times as many conversions as all LLMs combined.

What to do this holiday season:

• Read your reviews across the web and see what Google’s AI could praise, and what it couldn’t.
• Fill review gaps on Google and Amazon.
• Match shipping and returns terms on your site and every retailer listing. 33% of shoppers say these terms often or always change what they buy.
• Move part of your AI-visibility budget into a review collection.

The AI may be the friend on the line, but the audience still decides.