The product recommendation has found a new home: the chatbot. As shoppers increasingly ask ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini what to buy, retailers are racing to appear inside those answers.
The discovery layer of fashion is shifting from search engines to conversational interfaces, where a single answer can decide a season’s silhouette.
Customer data has long underpinned online sales, feeding the algorithms that suggest, retarget, and convert. Ceding it to a third-party assistant loosens that grip.
But the race comes with a contradiction. The same retailers courting AI traffic are resisting the data-sharing that makes those recommendations personal.
Whoever controls the answer box controls the first impression, and that is a position no retailer wants to surrender quietly.
The standoff is familiar to anyone who watched the death of the third-party cookie, only this time the intermediary is a reasoning engine rather than a trackers network.
