If ChatGPT Becomes the Storefront, Brands Become the Supplier

At MAICON last week, the Walmart news was very topical: America's largest employer with 2.1 million workers just froze its headcount for 3 years. That workforce equals nearly 8% of Australia's entire population. They're betting AI will transform every role while they hand their shopping experience to ChatGPT as a pilot.

Starting November: browse, compare, checkout. All inside ChatGPT. OpenAI takes a cut of every transaction. The world's largest retailer now pays a toll to reach its own customers.

Walmart isn't every company. But you'd be naive to think what happens to the world's biggest retailer stays with the world's biggest retailer.

🚀 The Zero Moment of Truth is Moving Again

Walking around the US this week, ChatGPT billboards are everywhere. Not selling a product. Selling a behaviour change. Excuse the glare... a human with imperfections took the photo (me, I am the human).

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Google called this the "Zero Moment of Truth" in 2011, a book that Iain Calvert gave me 15 years ago. When people stopped browsing shelves and started searching online first. Now that moment's moving again. From Google to LLMs. From searching to asking. Same disruption, new middleman.

This isn’t coming, it’s already here. The same playbook that took Google over a decade is now unfolding in two years, driven by OpenAI. The infrastructure of online discovery is being rewritten in real time.

• Already Happening (✅)
• Emerging (⚡)
• Predictions/Shower Thoughts (🔮)

Sam Altman said in 2023 "people hate searching." He bet they would just ask instead. He was right.

Want to predict what's coming? Rewind to 2010-2020. Watch how Google reshaped commerce. The playbook's repeating: featured snippets becoming AI summaries, SEO becoming AEO, paid search becomes conversation placement/sponsored prompts/sponsored answers (soon...). Every evolution from that decade is getting a sequel, just faster and more concentrated.

💼 How AI Rewrites the Commerce Playbook

The shift isn't subtle. Here's what's changing:

🎯 Discovery moves upstream: ChatGPT recommends what to buy before brands get a word in.
💬 Transaction vanishes into conversation: Purchase becomes a chat feature.
🔐 Customer intelligence shifts hands: AI platforms know intent before retailers. Chat memory means more (and is 10x more valuable) than a cookie.
📊 Brand building beats performance marketing: When people ask by name, recall is everything.
🏪 Websites become content libraries: Training AI to know you, not selling to humans.

Traditional brand building never went away, but it kinda just got its revenge tour. When people ask instead of search, they ask for what they already know. The brands living rent-free in their heads.

People can only ask for what they remember. They remember what they see & hear that cuts through - typically from mass media push channels.

🔍 The Google Playbook Runs Again at 10x Speed

Remember when comparison shopping sites got squeezed out by Google Shopping? When review sites lost traffic to featured snippets? That's happening again to every specialised marketplace and aggregator. Just faster.

The difference this time? The aggregator can transact. It doesn't just send traffic. It keeps the customer, takes the margin, owns the relationship. If you thought Google was powerful when it could only point, wait until you see what happens when the middleman can actually close the deal and the user never goes to your site (and is being trained NOT to).

Your brand gets them there. Your AEO strategy keeps you in the conversation when AI explains the category.

🎨 What This Means for Your Brand

For the bulk of society who won't change their settings or be on a premium plan, ChatGPT’s memory doesn’t forget. Every conversation it has about you, your product, or your category compounds into a behavioural profile that’s worth more than any cookie ever was.

The brands that win next won’t be optimising for algorithms - they’ll be optimising for memory. Not search memory. Human memory. The kind that makes someone ask for you by name when they talk to their AI.

That means the rules of the game change:

• Push harder on brand recall. People can only ask for what they remember. If your name doesn’t live rent-free in their heads, you’re invisible when they ask the question that matters.
• Feed the models. AI systems learn from what’s available. Every time you post, publish, explain, or answer publicly, you’re training the machines to know your brand exists and what it stands for. Take anything that has digital dust growing on it that might not be on the open web (that should be) and turn it in to a blog article for a quick win!
• Build mental availability, not keyword lists. Shit-hot creative, distinctive assets, consistent brand codes, and mass reach - the things traditional marketers already knew worked, but the algorithm era made them forget.
• Reframe success. Clicks and conversions are lagging indicators. In an AI-first world, the leading indicators are mentions, citations, and how often you show up in the model’s reasoning.

None of these ideas are new. What’s new is the infrastructure. We’re moving from optimising for algorithms to being remembered by reasoning systems.
The fundamentals of great creative, reach, consistency are back on top. They just have a new audience: machines that think like people.

Marketers will need to unlearn a decade of chasing and gaming an algorithm style that is dying. The work that converts tomorrow won’t be “human work optimised for Google.” It’ll be human work memorable enough for machines to recall.

You used to fight for clicks. Now you’re fighting for recall.

🎯 The Future of AI-First Commerce

We're sprinting through a decade of platform shifts in two years. The winners won't be stuck optimising yesterday's channels. They'll be taking strategies from 2010-15 and applying them to 2025's infrastructure.

Mass market/traditional advertising (in whatever context that applies to your business) plus answer engine optimisation. That's the combination I would be investing in right now (and LLM advertising once is becomes widely available). One without the other is playing half the game.

History doesn't repeat, but it sure does rhyme.

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Need help planning your AEO strategy or getting ahead of the next wave of changes? Reach out!