ChatGPT is now the second-busiest product discovery destination in the US
New market research data ranks ChatGPT as the second most-visited product discovery platform in the United States, behind only Amazon. Daily visit figures: Amazon 108.49 million, ChatGPT 52.2 million, Walmart 19.12 million, eBay 16.59 million, Apple 16.25 million, Home Depot 8.15 million, Target 7.61 million, CVS 6.64 million, Best Buy 5.1 million, Costco 3.81 million and Kroger 3.16 million. The takeaway from practitioners: answer engine optimization builds on solid traditional SEO, so fundamentals come first.
China offers a preview of where this leads. Younger consumers, weary of ad-saturated creator content, are going straight to ByteDance's Doubao assistant, now past 170 million monthly users, for product recommendations with purchase links, wired directly into Douyin Mall. In one striking case, Doubao placed a niche mask from a shop with only a few hundred followers ahead of giants like Proya and La Roche-Posay, rewarding credibility signals over brand size. Major beauty groups such as L'Oréal, Unilever and Estée Lauder have begun embedding generative AI throughout their marketing and research operations, and McKinsey pegs the annual value at stake for beauty alone at $9-10 billion.
The West caught up fast this holiday season: AI influenced $73 billion in global sales over the five days from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, 22% of all holiday shopping, per Salesforce data. New capabilities launched for the peak include Rufus remembering customer details and auto-buying at target prices, Walmart enabling ChatGPT checkout across nearly its whole catalog, Google's AI Mode calling local stores and completing purchases via Google Pay, Target's conversational gift finder, and ChatGPT instant checkout for Etsy, Shopify brands including Glossier, Skims and Spanx, and Target.
Separately, over 3,000 Chinese sellers have shifted their Amazon operations into Hong Kong since mid-2025, according to trade data, after Beijing's Order No. 810 forced platforms to report seller identities, transactions and revenue quarterly from October 31. Hong Kong's territorial tax, 8.25% up to the first two million Hong Kong dollars and 16.5% beyond it, with no VAT or capital gains tax, beats the mainland's 25% worldwide rate, but China's 'place of effective management' rules and bank-data sharing under the Common Reporting Standard limit the shelter. About 75% of the relocating sellers earn under $1 million a year, the cohort most exposed to back taxes that could erase margins, a shift that may finally level the field for US sellers.
A long-running seller podcast has aired its final episode under its longtime host, whose contract with Helium 10 ended after three and a half years and more than 180 episodes; the closing episode revisits the software company's origin story with its co-founders. Also noted: a vibe-coded tool that ingests Search Query Performance files and auto-groups thousands of search terms into a volume-versus-share bubble chart, built in an hour. One stat: 30% of TikTok Shop sales happen on live streams.
