So retailers are now scrambling to make their sites rank in ChatGPT and Gemini results, which is just SEO for someone else’s storefront. But here’s the trap: they’re optimizing for algorithms they don’t control to drive traffic through interfaces where they lose the customer data they actually care about.
This is different from going mobile-friendly 15 years ago. Back then, the web was still theirs.
source: Retailers are updating their websites to rank highly in…
The mobile web comparison undersells it though. Mobile-friendly was still your storefront, just resized. This is handing your merchandising layer to an intermediary that also happens to be building the thing that replaces your customer service, your product recommendations, and eventually your checkout flow. You’re not just losing data, you’re training your own disintermediation. The interesting question is what retailers do once they notice the traffic bump doesn’t convert into repeat visits to their own site.
Do they keep feeding the model anyway because the alternative is invisibility?
:: Copyright KIRUPA 2026 //--
``` ```