Growth Intelligence Brief #10
AI commerce, building owned audiences, display advertising + AI shifts in entertainment and finance
Welcome to another Growth Intelligence Brief, where organic growth leaders discover what matters - getting insights into the bigger picture and guidance on how to stay ahead of the competition.
As a free subscriber, you’re getting the first big story. Premium subscribers get the whole brief.
Today’s Growth Intelligence Brief went out to 478 (+13) marketing leaders.
This week, we’re examining 3 signs that the SEO monoculture is ending:
AI commerce is real: Shopify merchants see 7x traffic and 11x sales from AI platforms since January
Owned audiences are back: Major brands build direct relationships on Substack as AI eats organic traffic
Display’s decline accelerates: Advertisers cut display ad spend by 30% and shift budgets to video and streaming
I’ll also connect the dots on what this all means for you.
The impact of AI on e-commerce shows early signs
Shopify’s president, Harley Finkelstein, mentioned on an earnings call that AI traffic to Shopify merchants is up 7x and sales 11x since January.
Here’s what happened:
An analyst asked on the earnings call:
“We see that the integration with OpenAI has already begun. So just curious on the initial observations from those transactions. I guess, quickly you’d expect incremental contribution from or versus other channels, and, generally, your expectations for how volumes will originate through AI platforms would be helpful.”
To which Finkelstein responded:
“If you just look at the sheer numbers, you know, outside of even OpenAI, just around Agentic in general, since January, we’ve seen AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores up, like, 7x. And we’ve actually seen orders attributed to AI searches up, like, 11 x since that.”
Why this news matters:
These are the first numbers about agentic commerce from the merchant side.
The story of AI being an emerging channel is important for Shopify because it gets investors excited. AI sells. Just look at the stock market, which is basically propped up by AI.
Shopify’s partnership with OpenAI to power direct checkout on ChatGPT for its +2m merchants could be an opportunity to get an edge over its main rival: Amazon, which is not on ChatGPT.
For context, Walmart has also entered a partnership with OpenAI to list products directly in ChatGPT. Despite rapid growth, the channel makes up only 0.13% of total traffic to walmart.com:
My take on this:
Do these numbers mean something, or not?
On one hand, we don’t know the absolute AI referral traffic and sales numbers. There’s a decent chance these early, relative numbers are similar to the B2B data I wrote about: growing fast, but tiny in absolute terms (see Walmart above).
On the other hand, Finkelstein’s response excludes ChatGPT, by far the largest LLM by users, because of the direct checkout integration with Shopify that makes click-out redundant.
Shopify is seeing signal that AI drives incremental sales even outside of ChatGPT.
So, yes, these numbers mean something.
Now, consider the 2nd-order effects:
If ChatGPT becomes a truly meaningful channel for e-commerce and contributes, say, at least 20% of sales, the ROI would be clearly net-positive.
Right now, that ROI is unclear: Is it net-positive when I give my content to ChatGPT or net-negative?
But a strong signal from a player like Shopify could ignite a fire, leading more companies to get excited and share their product feeds and content with ChatGPT in the hopes of driving and influencing sales.
ChatGPT would make more money from transaction commissions and could finance its trillion-dollar investments.
Here’s what to do:
Start tracking AI referral traffic. Set up UTM parameters or custom segments in your analytics to isolate traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI platforms. Don’t just measure traffic volume but also conversion rates and order value to understand if it’s actually incremental.
If you’re in e-commerce, test product feed integration with ChatGPT. The barrier to entry is low for Shopify merchants, and early movers could capture disproportionate share while competition is minimal. Track the ROI carefully.
Don’t bet the farm yet. These are still early signals with uncertain absolute numbers. Allocate 5-10% of your optimization budget to AI channel testing, not 50%. Think of it as an option on future growth rather than a current revenue driver.