Brands and retailers are struggling to keep up with changes to the shopper experience as consumers adopt genAI-powered “click-less journeys.”

• 62% of worldwide marketers believe click-less journeys will become a standard within the next year or are already a norm, according to an October 2025 Optimizely survey.
• Yet, only 27% of marketers “feel well prepared for this reality,” per the same survey.

These numbers expose a gap between the evolving shopper journey and retailer readiness.

Confidence in agentic commerce

In September, OpenAI announced Instant Checkout for ChatGPT, and since then, retailers like Walmart and Sam’s Club have partnered with the program to allow shoppers to make purchases directly through the chatbot.

For many shoppers, having the option to buy with the help of genAI has reduced the reliance on a retailer's online store. Forty-two percent of worldwide shoppers said they would trust an AI-generated summary of a product without ever visiting the brand’s website, according to Optimizely’s survey.

Shoppers aren't just trusting agentic commerce; they’ve also started using it.

• 29% of consumers said they have already made a purchase based solely on an AI-generated response, per the Optimizely study.
• 87% of those who had made a purchase in this way said they were satisfied with what they purchased.

Retailer woes

While marketers acknowledge that the shopper journey is changing, they are concerned with how their brands are represented in the genAI chats.

Only 25% of marketers said they were “very confident” about how the brand is represented in AI-generated summaries, according to the Optimizely survey.

• Meanwhile, 42% of consumers said they’d likely trust an AI summary and wouldn’t have to visit a brand's website.

Marketers have a laundry list of concerns about the various ways that AI surfaces their brands to consumers.

• 25% of marketers said they are worried about legal and compliance risks, per Optimizely’s survey.
• Other big concerns are outdated or incorrect content (20%) and the loss of message control (19%).

Retailer and brand traffic

Beyond brand safety and accurate information, marketers are also anxious about what this agentic shift in the shopper journey will mean for site traffic and campaign measurement.

• 20% of marketers are nervous about reduced site traffic due to AI usage, per Optimizely, and 18% are worried about difficulty measuring performance.

It’s still early in this shift toward agentic commerce, and how it will affect traffic is still up for debate.

For example, traffic from AI-generated chats grew 119% YoY in H1 2025, according to a September 2025 report from Salesforce.

Retailers and retail marketers can meet this changing shopper journey landscape by adapting in real time to how the technology and consumer behavior landscapes evolve. This can include deploying in-house AI assistants, forming new partnerships to assure brand safety, and optimizing product listings to make them AI-friendly so consumers receive accurate information.

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