If a Shopper Asked ChatGPT What to Buy, Would Your Brand Even Come Up?
You can improve every inch of your product page and still wonder whether a shopper will ever reach it. If their first question goes to an assistant instead of a search bar, what would make your brand part of the answer? Nobody knows the full answer yet. But one part of it is a question you can act on this year.
Two things founders are saying at the same time, and both are true.
One wrote: "I am getting orders from ChatGPT. It is still few but it is clearly growing." Another, looking at the analytics: "Wave of AI. chatgpt referrals are now #2 after direct visits."
And another, looking at the same kind of answers from the other side: "it's like my shop doesn't even exist." With the question underneath: "what happens when we lose control of the shopper's shopping experience because it's all on the ai platform?"
These are separate observations from separate businesses. They don't add up to a formula, and anyone who tells you they've cracked how assistants pick brands is selling you a course. What they add up to is a fair worry: a growing number of shoppers are starting somewhere other than your store or a search results page, and you can't buy your way into that answer the way you buy your way into an auction.
What you can't control, and what you can
Be honest about the first part. How an assistant decides what to recommend isn't published, it changes, and it isn't something a brand can optimise with a plugin. Assistants do read the web, including your own site. What weight they give to anything is not yours to set.
So set that aside, and look at the part of the question you can actually act on. Whatever an assistant reads, it's reading the same internet a shopper reads: your site, yes, and also everything else that mentions your product. Reviews. Comparison pieces. Listings. Creators who've used it. Partners who promote it.
Which raises the question this page is really about, and it was a good question before AI made it urgent: who recommends your product when you're not paying for the ad?
If the answer is "nobody but us," that's a distribution question, not an AI question. It was already costing you in a world of auctions and rising CPMs. The assistant just makes it visible in a new place.
The people who put products in front of audiences
There is a whole side of ecommerce built around exactly that: partners who introduce a product to their audience and are paid for it. Not "independent people vouching for you", because they're compensated, and pretending otherwise is how founders get burned. Commercial partners, with an incentive tied to sales.
The mechanism, once: a partner funds the promotion, using their own money or their own audience, and earns an agreed commission on qualifying sales. You pay after the sale, out of the sale, and your job is to make sure the sale still leaves enough margin to be worth having.
What that gives you, beyond orders, is presence: your product mentioned, reviewed, listed and linked by people who aren't you, in places you don't pay rent. Whether any of that reaches an assistant's answer is not something anyone can promise you. Whether it reaches shoppers is something partners can show you in their numbers.
Where those partners are, with the limit stated
Affiliate Grand Slam is in Rome from 2 to 5 November at Fiera Roma. It's a performance-marketing event, built around partner-funded promotion and the companies that connect partners to brands.
Three examples of what's confirmed, and what each is for. ClickBank and Digistore are marketplaces where a brand lists an offer with its terms and affiliates choose what to run. MaxWeb and TerraLeads are networks that take consumer offers to their own traffic and partners. MGID and Outbrain sell native advertising, which is a different way of appearing in front of readers than a social feed. TikTok, Meta and Google are exhibiting with staff. On stage, founders who've built brands on mixed acquisition, Nick Shackelford of Brez among them.
Here's the limit, in plain words. Nobody in that building can get your brand into a ChatGPT answer. There's no AI-visibility clinic, no specialist stand for it, and this page won't pretend there is. What the room offers is the chance to investigate, in four days, several partners who might introduce your product to audiences beyond your own ads, and to compare what each of them needs from you. That's the part of the discovery question you can act on. The rest, you watch.
The conversation, and the numbers
The opening with a partner is ten minutes: average order value, margin after cost of goods and fulfilment, cold-traffic conversion, the product on the table. What follows, terms, refunds, category fit, is follow-up. The kit has the checklist.
Read the AGS Rome 2026 Welcome Kit with one question: which of these could put my product in front of people I'm not reaching? Shortlist. Use the Best Value for Money Guide to work out which pass the shortlist needs and what the trip costs. Once you hold a pass, the Match App opens; you request; they accept or decline; accepted requests are meetings to prepare for.
You can't set what the assistant reads. You can change how much there is to read, and who wrote it.
Get your AGS Rome 2026 Welcome Kit
Before you pay for a pass or book a flight, see who's relevant to your brand, what you can put in front of them, and what a trip worth the cost looks like.
Who's confirmed and why they matter to a brand. The list by role: marketplaces where brands list offers, networks that run consumer offers, native and platform advertising, payments, and the founders on stage. Updated as confirmations land.
What you bring to the conversation. The three numbers and the checklist for presenting your product and offer, plus every way a brand can take part at AGS, from a pass to a stand, with inclusions and costs made clear.
The Best Value for Money Guide. Compare the passes, see when an upgrade is unnecessary, budget the whole trip, and plan the conversations you'll request once you hold a pass.
Brand attendance is paid. Requesting the kit does not book a pass.
Are you also an affiliate? If you promote offers or work with affiliate networks, your invitation to apply for a complimentary Affiliate Pass is inside the kit.