Australian retailers are facing a major shake-up in how consumers discover and buy products, as artificial intelligence platforms including ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Claude increasingly replace traditional search engines at the start of the shopping journey.

The shift threatens to rewrite the rules of online retail, with retailers being warned that ranking highly on Google is no longer enough. Product descriptions, pricing, specifications and even old PDFs buried on corporate websites could now determine whether an AI platform recommends one retailer over another.

Amazon and Google are already investing billions of dollars in AI and data centre infrastructure in Australia, while JB Hi-Fi management has confirmed the retailer is investing in AI-powered search as the battle for online shoppers intensifies.

Research from content management platform Storyblok claims 46% of buyer journeys are already beginning with AI rather than traditional platforms such as Google, Facebook or social media.

Storyblok chief executive and co-founder Dominik Angerer believes that figure is likely to have risen further.

“If this is not already your source of truth, and you’re not trying to compete there, you’re going to be left behind for sure, 100%,” Angerer told UK publication Retail Gazette.

The change represents a potentially significant disruption to a retail search market that Google has dominated for more than two decades.

Instead of consumers typing “best OLED TV” or “robot vacuum cleaner” into Google and working their way through links and advertisements, AI services can increasingly research the category, compare products, summarise reviews and specifications and recommend what to buy and potentially where to buy it.

That means the battle is shifting from ranking in search results to being recommended by the AI.

Google is moving rapidly to defend its position.

It introduced AI Overviews to Search in 2024, followed by AI Mode in 2025, as it sought to integrate generative AI directly into its dominant search business.

By May 2026, Google said AI Overviews had reached more than 1.5 billion users across 200 countries and territories.

Gemini has also grown rapidly. Google reported more than 400 million monthly active Gemini users in May 2025, with that figure passing 900 million by May 2026.

Google chief executive Sundar Pichai has argued that “AI can help at every step, from discovery and decision to delivery”, effectively positioning artificial intelligence at the centre of the future shopping journey.

Google also has a formidable weapon in its Shopping Graph, which contains more than 50 billion product listings, with more than two billion listings refreshed every hour. Gemini has been connected to that database to answer shopping-related questions.

OpenAI is emerging as another major threat.

ChatGPT has grown from one million users shortly after its 2022 launch to hundreds of millions of weekly active users, creating a vast new audience researching everything from televisions and appliances to smartphones, computers and household products.

The platform is increasingly important commercially because consumers can use it before visiting Google, Amazon or a retailer’s website.

OpenAI has also begun testing advertising, including product-oriented formats. The company says advertising is displayed separately from ChatGPT answers and does not influence those responses.

While there is still no authoritative audited measure of an “AI retail search market share” comparable with conventional search-engine statistics, consumer research is beginning to reveal the scale of the change.

One 2026 study asking consumers where they began a shopping or product search put Google at 56.68%, Amazon at 28.96%, ChatGPT at 7.26% and Reddit at 4.56%.

On that measure, ChatGPT was already the third-largest starting point for product discovery among the platforms measured.

The implications for retailers could be profound.

For years, businesses have spent heavily on search engine optimisation and Google advertising to ensure their products appear in front of consumers.

AI introduces a different problem.

A retailer can potentially have the cheapest product, a strong website and a large advertising budget but still miss out if an AI system cannot properly understand its product data or discovers contradictory, obsolete or poorly structured information elsewhere online.

Angerer believes the first response should therefore be surprisingly basic: clean up the website and the data behind it.

Retailers need to identify where their product and corporate information actually resides across websites, international sites, help desks, FAQs, documents and other systems.

They should then eliminate duplicate and obsolete information.

Angerer said retailers should review material created five years ago or earlier and decide whether it should be updated, redirected or removed altogether.

“I really mean delete it because wrong content is way more harmful than less content,” he said.

That clean-up also needs to extend beyond webpages.

Old PDFs, manuals, documents and other publicly accessible files can potentially be discovered by AI systems, creating situations where a retailer’s main website contains current information while older material elsewhere contradicts it.

“If you remove all your content of the websites that are publicly facing, but you still have the old PDFs online, you will still have the same issue,” Angerer said.

He also warned retailers against responding by simply pumping enormous quantities of AI-generated content onto the internet in an attempt to manipulate their visibility.

“Make sure that you’re not creating more content, but better content,” he said.

For Australian retailers already adapting to Amazon, marketplaces, TikTok and social commerce, AI represents another fundamental change in where consumers discover products.

The difference this time is potentially far more significant.

Instead of simply competing for the consumer’s click, retailers are increasingly competing to become the product or store that the AI recommends in the first place.