Harley Finkelstein offers new details about the explosion of AI search on the e-commerce platform.
AI search is already upending e-commerce. Over the past year, shopping suggestions from popular large language models, such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, have delivered a sizable uptick in site traffic, sales, and new customers. That’s according to Shopify.
The $140 billion e-commerce company reported first quarter results earlier today, and during the conference call, president Harley Finkelstein offered new details about just how transformative AI-powered search has been for the millions of merchants on the platform. AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores has skyrocketed by 8x, compared to the first quarter of last year. Over that same period, orders that originated with AI-powered search have spiked by nearly 13x. LLMs have also been helping companies source new customers.
“New buyer orders from AI searches are actually occurring at nearly 2x the rate of traditional organic search,” said Finkelstein during the earrings call. “These merchants are now discovering new buyers on these agentic services that they may not otherwise have seen.”
More than three-quarters of e-commerce companies have already started rethinking their marketing plans to account for AI search, according to a survey conducted by the financial technology company Mercury last fall. This tide shift has spurned an entirely new industry of generative engine optimization, often abbreviated as GEO. This strategy, which has supplanted its digital forefather search engine optimization: starts with a straightforward question: How do I get this agent to recommend my company?
While startups are still very much in the experimental stage of answering that question, founders have told Inc. that they have found success so far by expanding their digital footprint, so that their name and their company name is included in as much AI training data as possible. In practice, that means blanketing the internet: talking with journalists, going on podcasts, posting on LinkedIn, hosting webinars, publishing case studies, conducting original research, producing highly-specific educational content, and engaging in thought leadership as a founder.
When in doubt, go straight to the source and prompt the LLM itself. “The trick is to ask. Ask Google in AI mode, or ask ChatGPT,” Andy Crestodina, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Orbit Media Studios, a Chicago-based digital agency that focuses on web development and website optimization, told Inc. last year. “Very few people have had a conversation with AI about why it would or wouldn’t recommend them.”
The three-time Inc. 5000 founder says the goal is “about training the AI to believe that you’re the best option.”
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