GPT Search vs Google: How Webshops Should Position Themselves
TL;DR
OpenAI’s SearchGPT is revolutionizing search and e-commerce by delivering conversational, context-aware, and hyper-personalized product recommendations, challenging Google’s traditional link-based dominance and contributing to its declining market share. This shift demands webshops to pivot from classic SEO to optimizing for AI-driven summaries and embrace emerging standards like llms.txt to enhance discoverability by large language models. Early adoption of these AI-powered search capabilities offers webshops a critical competitive advantage in the rapidly evolving digital commerce landscape.
Intro
Currently, OpenAI has 8,5 million search queries per day while Google has 3,5 billion. So it should be a clear answer, right?
It's not that simple. Even Google must admit that they themselves devalued their traditional search result as Gemini takes the most valuable spot on the results page. Now, OpenAI provides ChatGPT with the capabilities to search the internet and directly shop for products similar to Google.
The very fabric of how users discover information and how webshops attract customers is being rewritten by the rise of AI-driven search and commerce platforms. Within this blogpost we provide an outlook from our perspective and a suggested guide on what webshops should do in order to stay relevant in this new generation of search.
Why Google is losing market share
For years, Google’s business model was clear: rank links, drive traffic, and monetize through ads and SEO. But the introduction of AI-powered features like Gemini and AI Overviews is fundamentally changing this paradigm. The most valuable real estate on Google’s results page is no longer reserved for organic links; instead, users are increasingly presented with direct, synthesized answers, often without ever clicking through to a website.
Google is losing market share
Google's market share of the most used search engines on the desktop by page views, worldwide in percent, Handelsblatt 28.04.2025
This shift has profound implications for e-commerce. Traditional SEO strategies-focused on backlinks, keyword density, and technical optimization, are losing their singular effectiveness. The game is moving from optimizing for link-based rankings to earning a place in AI-generated summaries and answers that are the new prime real estate on the results query.
OpenAI’s Strategic Offensive: SearchGPT and Conversational Commerce
OpenAI is not just playing catch-up; it’s launching a frontal assault on Google’s core business. With the launch of SearchGPT, ChatGPT now offers real-time web search and even the ability to shop for products directly within the interface, mimicking- and potentially surpassing- Google Shopping’s convenience. The approach is fundamentally different:
Conversational Search: Instead of presenting a list of links, SearchGPT engages users in dialogue, delivering concise, personalized answers and recommendations rather than keyword-focused.
Context-Aware Search: Instead of hard facts, Search GPT understands how people are reviewing an item, evaluating, for example, pros and cons. If the customer mentioned that they prefer a specific retailer, ChatGPT will store that information in the context memory for the next time.
Hyper Personalization: By storing specific product or brand preference information in its memory and using that as context, SearchGPT is able to give recommendations and suggestions that align with your taste. In the long run, this approach might be an even more valuable addition to Google’s approach to extrapolate from different users’ search patterns.
How can my webshop rank on SearchGPT?
Currently, OpenAI has not announced a standard for website ranking, thus leaving e-commerce shops in the dark. At AgentReady, we conducted a test that suggests that SearchGPT is currently relying on Bing and Google Search. But we saw that OpenAI is also accessing the robots.txt on a website, see screenshot.
OpenAI accessing the robots.txt of a given website is pretty useless as there I no significant information stored. However, this suggests that there is a necessity for another standard similar to robots.txt with useful information for large language models or AI agents. One standard that is emerging in the AI community is llms.txt.
In the next weeks, we are testing further whether standards such as llms.txt have a positive impact on search rankings. Stay tuned for that.
Why Early Adoption Matters for Webshops
History shows that when a new platform disrupts the flow of online traffic, those who adapt fastest reap the greatest rewards. As Tarek Müller, CEO of About You, notes:
“Whenever there was a new platform disrupting online shopping traffic, the players who could adopt the fastest were the ones winning because they could make their move before the market matures and before best practices are established.”
In the current upheaval, securing early visibility in AI-powered search before the rules are fully set and competition intensifies can provide a lasting competitive advantage.
The Road Ahead
The future of search is conversational, contextual, and AI-driven. Webshops that recognize this shift and act decisively will not only survive but thrive as the next generation of search platforms reshapes the e-commerce landscape. The window of opportunity for early adopters is open now. Those who move quickly to optimize for AI-driven discovery will secure their place at the forefront of agentic commerce.
At AgentReady, we empower webshops to become LLM and AI agent ready. Thus, we help you be discoverable for LLMs and enable your webshop to interact with the new generative AI traffic. Contact us at: https://www.agent-ready.ai/contact
FAQ
What is the llms.txt?
An llms.txt is a standardized file designed to be vital for a website's agentic infrastructure as it offers structured summaries and prioritized links to machine- readable resources. This allows LLMs to efficiently retrieve key information while improving accuracy, reducing clutter, and preventing misinterpretation.