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Ecom Growth Insider: ChatGPT Is Recommending Your Competitor
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Hey, Quick one today, and it starts with homework. Open ChatGPT and ask it for the best product in your category, phrased the way your customer would. “Best standing desk setup for a home office.” If your brand came up, congratulations, and now check whether it came up first. If it didn’t come up at all, that recommendation just went to a competitor, and it’ll go to them again every time someone asks. This stopped being hypothetical this year. A growing share of buyers ask AI assistants what to buy the same way they used to ask Google, and the big commerce platforms are busy wiring assistants directly into checkout. The answer engines have become a shelf. Most brands have never once checked whether they’re on it. Here’s the part that should get your attention: your ad budget buys you nothing there (yet). AI answers get assembled from reviews, comparison articles, community threads, and editorial mentions. A brand with a thin third-party footprint is invisible in those answers no matter how good the product is or how much it spends on Meta. And it compounds. Recommended brands get bought, buyers leave reviews, reviews earn citations, citations earn the next recommendation. The earlier you show up, the harder you are to displace. Think of it as page 2 of Google, except the results are spoken with total confidence and nobody ever scrolls. You don’t get a second listing on this shelf either. There’s one answer, and it’s delivered as fact. The 15-Minute Visibility Test
You can’t buy your way onto this shelf yet, and that’s the opportunity. Winning organic Google took a decade and serious budgets. This channel is young enough that a focused brand at your size can outrank companies ten times bigger, simply because almost nobody is doing the work on purpose. I talked more about AI search and what it means for DTC brands in these two podcast episodes: Run the test this quarter, every quarter. The brands that treat AI answers as a channel now will look like geniuses in two years. Talk soon, |
Andrej Tumachowitsch
Join my newsletter for up-to-date ecom growth plays from the trenches. Ads, offers, CRO and everything in-between. So you can finally scale profitably.
Hey, Quick one, and it's worth doing before you close your laptop today. Three of your Meta reports have been empty since August 6th. And nobody sent you an email about it. Because on that date, Meta made 3 reporting breakdowns opt-in per ad account: device, hourly by audience time zone, and frequency. If your account hasn't opted in, those breakdowns return nada. And that's the part that makes it dangerous. They don't fail. There's no error, no warning, no red banner. It just comes back...
Hey, Quick one today. Picture two brands. Same $60 CAC, same $80 first order. On every dashboard you normally look at, they're twins. One of them should double spend going into Q4. The other one is slowly dying, and the difference lives in a number most founders have never pulled: what a new customer is worth by day 90. If you read the scorecard email two weeks ago, this is one of the two numbers the question marks always cluster on. Brand one's customers come back. By day 90, the average new...
I have to show you an embarrassing number from my own dashboard. In June, my email list grew by exactly one subscriber. One. The whole month. And I only noticed because I was in the data for a different reason. The irony wasn't lost on me. A few weeks earlier I'd audited a skincare brand and found their ad account had stopped acquiring new customers while every dashboard glowed green. I wrote a whole newsletter about it. Meanwhile my own list was doing the same thing: totals holding steady,...