Discover in AI, Buy on Your Site: Why AI Checkout Stalled and What to Do

In late 2025 the promise was clear: shoppers would ask an AI assistant for a product and buy it without leaving the chat. A year later, the picture is more nuanced. Shoppers do use AI to research products, but many still complete the purchase on the store’s website. For stores, that changes what to optimize.

What happened

• OpenAI launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT in September 2025. By early 2026, reports said far fewer merchants were live than announced, and OpenAI was reported to be moving the feature into apps.
• Walmart was reported in March 2026 to see in-chat checkout convert at about a third of the rate of sending shoppers to its own site, while ChatGPT brought a higher share of new customers.
• Google, Microsoft and Shopify kept building: Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol and Microsoft’s Copilot Checkout launched in January 2026.

Why in-chat checkout struggled

1. Data quality. Agents working with scraped or outdated product data showed wrong stock, delivery dates and shipping costs.
2. Transactions are hard. Payments, taxes, returns and customer accounts are complex to move into a chat.
3. Shopper habits. A survey by Semrush in December 2025 found that half of respondents had bought after researching with AI, but far fewer had bought directly inside an AI tool.

What it means for your store

AI assistants are, for now, mostly a discovery channel. The goal is to be recommended, then to convert the visit on your site. That means:

• Feed the assistants accurate data. Structured, real-time catalogs beat scraped pages. See the product data AI shopping agents read.
• Make the landing experience match. The price, stock and delivery the assistant promised must be what the shopper sees.
• Measure AI as discovery. Track visits and new customers from AI assistants, not only purchases completed in chat.
• Keep the customer relationship. Checkout and customer data stay with you.

Don’t ignore in-chat checkout either

Protocols are still developing, and some will stick. Read Google UCP vs OpenAI ACP to understand where they are going, and ChatGPT vs Gemini vs Copilot for how each assistant works today.

For the basics, start with agentic commerce explained and the readiness checklist. Our Google Merchant Center agency prepares the catalog data that assistants rely on.

FAQs

Is AI shopping overhyped?

In-chat checkout grew slower than announced, but AI research before buying is already common. The opportunity is real; it just looks different.

What should I measure?

Traffic and new customers from AI assistants, and the conversion of those visits on your site.

¿Por qué elegimos a Avafa Consulting como nuestra agencia SEO? Tuvimos la oportunidad de trabajar anteriormente con Víctor García y su equipo en otro proyecto, y la experiencia fue muy positiva tanto por su profesionalismo como por los resultados obtenidos.

Ruben Albardias Idiarte
Communication & Digital Marketing Manager

Elegimos a Avafa Consulting por su enfoque estratégico del SEO como eje central de crecimiento digital... Su experiencia en eCommerce y Marketplaces es bien sabida.

Laia Valero
CEO de DESKandSITm