If you build it, they will come. Shopify built commerce into AI agents, and the shoppers came.

Pay ChatGPT to bring them, though, and most just come to watch.

Shopify had a quarter: Q3 revenue grew 32% on $119 billion in GMV.

AI shoppers came to buy: Shopify’s investor slides show AI traffic to stores up 2.6x year over year, and orders from AI searches up 3.3x.

AI-referred sessions converted 64% better than organic search.

Organic search got some breathing room: On desktop, Google moved AI Overviews, its AI-written answers, to the right-hand column for many brand searches.

Paying for AI clicks is another story: A working paper by Maximilian Kaiser and Christian Schulze compared paid ChatGPT and Google search visits on 102 advertiser sites. In US traffic:

• A ChatGPT ad visit brought in $0.89, against $2.45 for a search ad visit.
• Of the 87 advertisers buying both, 73 got zero sales from ChatGPT ads.
• To match search’s revenue per ad dollar, a ChatGPT click would need to cost about $0.26. The largest publicly known account paid $1.72.

The data stops in August, so it’s an early read.

How we’d play BFCM: Think twice before moving search budget into ChatGPT ads. If you test anyway:

• Set your max CPC from your own revenue per visit, not OpenAI’s suggested $3 to $5 starting bids.
• OpenAI’s creative enhancements rewrite your ad for each conversation, sight unseen. They’ve been on by default since Oct 30, even in existing self-serve campaigns. Opt out for a clean read.

Either way, put your AI effort into product feeds, reviews and pages AI agents can cite.