AI is becoming a big part of online commerce. Referral traffic to retailers on Black Friday from AI chatbots and search engines jumped 800% over the same period last year, according to Adobe, meaning a lot more people are now using AI to help them with buying decisions. But where does that leave review sites who, in years past, would have been the guide for many of those purchases?
If there’s a category of media that’s most spooked by AI, it’s publishers who specialize in product recommendations, which have traditionally been reliant on search traffic. The nature of the content means it’s often purely informational, with most articles being designed to answer a question: “What’s the best robot vacuum?” “Who has the best deals on sofas?” “How do I set up my soundbar?” AI does an excellent job of answering those questions directly, eliminating the need for readers to click through to a publisher’s site.
When you actually want to buy something, though, a simple answer isn’t enough. Completing your purchase usually means going to a retailer (though buying directly from a chat window is now possible—more on that in a minute). But it also means feeling confident about what you’re buying. The big question is: Do review sites still have a part to play in that?
The incredible shrinking review site
If they do, most media companies seem to acknowledge it’s a significantly smaller one. When Business Insider announced its strategy shift earlier this year amid layoffs, it said it would move away from evergreen content and service journalism. In the past year, Future plc folded Laptop magazine, and Gannett did the same for Reviewed.com. And Ziff-Davis—which operates PCMag, Everyday Health, and several other sites focused on service journalism—sued OpenAI earlier this year for ingesting Ziff content and summarizing it for OpenAI users.
The decline of the review site is somewhat incongruous with a statistical reality: 99% of buyers look to online reviews for guidance, and reviews influence over 93% of purchase decisions, according to CapitalOne Shopping Research. That doesn’t mean buyers are always seeking out professionally written articles (there are plenty of user reviews out there), but the point is readers want credible, reliable information to guide their purchases, and well-known review sites (e.g. The Wirecutter) appearing in a summary can be a signal of that.
And it does appear that AI summaries will favor journalistic content over anything else. A recent Muck Rack report that looked at over one million AI responses found that the most commonly cited source of information was journalism, at 24.7%.
It’s nice to be needed, but does that lead to buyers actually making purchases through the media site—a necessary step for the site to receive an affiliate commission and the primary way these sites make money? Again, the buyer needs to click somewhere to buy their product, and from the AI layer they have three choices: 1) a retailer, 2) a third-party site (which includes review sites), and 3) the chat window itself.
