Amazon agencies are scrambling to measure and optimize for AI-driven traffic as generative AI chatbots reshape how consumers discover products. Envision Horizons, a full-service Amazon agency, released an AI visibility tracker in beta to help clients understand how much traffic they receive from AI platforms (Modern Retail). The challenge is acute: Amazon sellers currently have little to no data to quantify exactly how much traffic they receive from AI shopping agents, both from Amazon's own Alexa for Shopping and third-party agents like ChatGPT (Modern Retail).
AI-driven traffic to Amazon has more than doubled over the past six months, driving approximately 13.9 million visits in June alone, though this represents only about 1% of Amazon's total traffic (Modern Retail). However, direct attribution understates AI's influence: a study of MacBook buyers found that while direct AI-attributed traffic was about 2%, approximately 28.53% of buyers had engaged in a category-relevant AI chat session in the 30 minutes before purchasing (Modern Retail). Envision Horizons' CEO advises brands to focus on fundamentals: maintaining consistent and accurate product data across channels so LLMs pull correct information, and ensuring product positioning aligns with actual performance and customer reviews (Modern Retail).
Amazon itself is doubling down on AI commerce, running ads in ChatGPT to promote Prime Day and integrating Alexa for Shopping more prominently into the main search bar (Modern Retail). The emerging consensus among agencies is that discovery is happening everywhere—across TikTok Shop, affiliates, Reddit, and AI agents—but transactions remain concentrated on Amazon, making optimization for AI visibility a critical third pillar of the "Amazon funnel 2.0."