Emerging Traffic Source: ChatGPT Sessions Across Shopify Stores

@Rahul-FoundGPT
Sat, 25 Apr 2026 09:44:21 +0000

Hi @Peter_Datma, this is the most concrete data I have seen shared publicly on this topic and it validates what several of us have been seeing in individual store audits.

A few things from the on-store side that add context to your numbers:

The Jan to Sep growth curve you are showing is not random. March 2025 is when ChatGPT started citing live web sources more aggressively with newer models, and May to August tracks closely with the Shopify Agentic Storefront rollout in the US. The stores seeing the highest ChatGPT referral share in that window tend to share a few characteristics: attribute-rich product descriptions, complete schema markup, and in some cases an llms.txt file giving the model a structured brief on the store.

On your three questions: merchants who adapt fastest will be those treating product data quality as a discovery asset, not just a checkout asset. The stores with thin descriptions and broken schema are invisible to AI regardless of how much SEO work they have done. The “AI optimization” parallel to SEO is real and the gap between prepared and unprepared stores is already showing in referral data like yours.

On analytics: the utm_source=chatgpt sessions you are tracking are only the visible tip. Older GPT model sessions and any session where the user did not click a direct link shows as direct traffic. So the real ChatGPT influence is likely 2 to 3x what the tagged sessions show.

Would be really useful to see a breakdown by product category in a future post if your data allows. My hypothesis from auditing stores is that the ChatGPT referral share is highly skewed toward niches where the query is specific and researched rather than brand-led.