Amazon Rufus has reached 300 million users and generated $12 billion in incremental sales, and AI-referred retail traffic is up 693%. Here is why e-commerce businesses need to invest in AISEO now, and how to do it.
The traditional purchase flow (browsing, filtering, comparing, and clicking through multiple pages) is becoming optional. Customers tell an AI agent what they want in natural language, the AI narrows down the right products by asking questions, and the purchase is completed right inside the chat. This is conversational commerce.
Definition: Conversational commerce means buying through dialogue with AI agents, voice assistants, and messaging apps. Natural-language back-and-forth replaces the old click-based flow of searching, navigating between pages, choosing categories, and filtering.
Rufus has reached 300 million users and generated roughly $12 billion in incremental sales in 2025. Monthly active users grew 149% year over year, and data shows that Rufus users are about 60% more likely to complete a purchase.
Offered on Vertex AI, the agent has been built into the apps of Albertsons, Macy's, and Hanes. At Albertsons, more than 85% of conversations with Ask AI begin with open-ended, exploratory questions.
ChatGPT Shopping launched in November 2025, built on GPT-5 mini and trained with reinforcement learning. Perplexity Shopping entered the market a few days later. OpenAI has also opened up "apps in ChatGPT," through which Little Caesars, Starbucks, Burger King, Walmart, Target, and Sephora are building branded experiences.
"When customers describe what they want in natural language and AI selects the product, shelf placement is no longer something the brand directly controls." This is the most fundamental change that conversational commerce brings to e-commerce businesses.
On-site AI agents draw on product catalogs, attributes, reviews, and Q&A content. Off-site AI agents (ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini) pull information from review sites, forums, comparison articles, Reddit threads, YouTube videos, and third-party mentions.
(1) Set up structured data: Use schema.org/Product markup to put your product information in a format AI can read. (2) Enrich product descriptions: Rewrite them to answer conversational queries such as "What is it made of?" and "Who is it best for?" (3) Build up reviews and Q&A: AI actively cites user-generated content (UGC), so collect customer feedback and expand your official answers to frequently asked questions. (4) Get featured in third-party media: Earn more placements in comparison articles and on review sites to get into AI's "source graph."
The shopping cart itself won't disappear. Instead, it will become "the last quiet step of the buying journey." AI will handle most of the discovery, comparison, and recommendation, and the cart will become a final confirmation just before the finish line. E-commerce brands that put an AISEO strategy in place now will be the ones that benefit most from this new buying behavior.
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