How CHATGPT’s new “buy feature” resets the digital shelf and requires brand content at scale

Recent enhancements to the most popular public LLMs are collapsing the intent-to-transaction journey to zero clicks.

OpenAI’s announcement in September that it was enabling free, pro, and plus ChatGPT users to buy products from certain ecommerce providers like Etsy without leaving the chat created a new dynamic and a new opportunity for LLMs.

Alongside several new models and a browser, releasing this instant checkout feature puts it one step closer to collapsing the traditional demand funnel and securing a prominent position on the digital shelf.

While they’ve encountered some recent headwinds and can always shift priorities, OpenAI has loftier goals than taking on the FAANG companies being an Amazon or a Google killer. It aims to become an all-encompassing "oracle,” besting other LLMs with agentic interfaces like Google Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude. And when that happens, it will fundamentally change how people receive information. There is not the familiar “Page 2” found on Google. There is only the answer or answers.

This announcement signals their intent: becoming billions of people’s preferred destination to get more done across their lives and careers.

If LLMs become destinations for more than just information retrieval, traditional marketing funnels (awareness, consideration, purchase) all take place, nearly instantaneously, in one destination.

One can envision a future where a consumer prompts a LLM: "Provide me with the best running shoes for someone with plantar fasciitis.” Seconds later, they buy some sneakers from a brand without ever seeing an ad or visiting a website.

Eventually, OpenAI can make the process autonomous. Imagine an agent that estimates the wear and tear of that purchased running shoe and can order the latest, best version automatically without a human clicking a button. In that case, OpenAI shifts the purchase selection truly to an algorithm, where brands suddenly become SKUs used on a digital shelf.

Brands looking to remain relevant and under consideration in this new world need a comprehensive plan to building brand memory inside LLM, and that will require  producing content at scale.

User habits are irrevocably changing

A McKinsey study found that more than half of AI-powered search users ask questions throughout the funnel. While more (73%) use it for consideration searches than decision searches (60%), customers are increasingly comfortable using LLMs for a wide variety of product conversations.

If the general population decides to trust these models as a shopping gateway, brand awareness suddenly becomes nearly worthless for any brand not in the LLM's training data, and performance marketing (e.g., paid search and retargeting) loses almost all of its relevance.

Brands need to place their story, values, and cultural positioning into the training data so the LLM understands why someone would choose them.

How brands can win in the LLM shopping era

1. Volume matters more than ever before

LLMs aim to produce a reconstituted brand identity from parsing scattered internet signals. If they become the default for shopping interfaces, brands will need to prioritize content creation on a historic scale. The best way to ensure a brand not only shows up prominently in LLMs and, just as importantly, in a way you want that brand to look, you need an incredible amount of content that was previously too expensive to create at scale.

Enterprise brands have historically struggled with creating content for every situation because of the associated costs. Or they had to hire an external agency and risk loss of quality control. With generative AI, automated content generation at scale with centralized brand governance becomes feasible.

That means they can manage coherence across every channel, from blogs to social posts and sales channels to, of course, LLMs.

2. Accounting for the universe of prompts

Consumers may ask, for example, which smart lighting system they should purchase based on precise specifications like the dimensions of an apartment.

The LLM may decide to return results with a couple of recommendations based on what is accessible online. By creating content around a vast array of concepts and situations, it potentially influences the LLMs to place your brand in results from a prompt that mirrors that situation.

3. That volume of content now has to be consistent, or it won't work.

Imagine the user prompting for plantar fasciitis shoes wants to see what they look like running up a mountain or through the rain. Companies concerned about their brands will not want to leave it up to the LLM to respond to granular queries by inventing their own images. The better solution is being able to generate thousands of different variations of company products for all reasonable scenarios, so the LLM can find the appropriate image for a request.

4. The importance of the open web for people and LLMs

Brands that sell digitally need to pursue a split-path strategy. General open web brand awareness is still important today and will factor into the consideration process for as long as people browse websites, read articles, and watch videos. Brands should continue to produce content and distribute it across the open web, which people will consume alongside LLMs. Creating content across all different types of use cases and buyer personas will improve your ability to emotionally resonate with consumers and avoid becoming a commodity in scenarios where the lowest price can become a dominant factor.

Preparing the agentic shopping future requires a partner like Grip

Grip supports this shift by helping brands adapt visual content at scale without disrupting existing workflows. Teams can work with digital twins of products and creative assets to support customization across SKUs, markets, and channels.

Grip integrates directly with digital asset management (DAM), product information management (PIM), and artwork management systems, adding automation where teams already work. This helps brands prepare ecommerce content for the full digital shelf, with consistency across surfaces, markets, and product ranges.

Learn more about how Grip can help you today.

‍