Oct 17, 2025
Written by
CJ
Buying with Large Language Models (LLMs) is fast becoming a reality. Most of us are aware that this is an important development, and we developed this post to help both advertisers and publishers/creators better understand what’s happening.
The ability to transact is being incorporated into ChatGPT. Here’s an excerpt from the announcement on the OpenAI website:
More than 700 million people turn to ChatGPT each week for help with everyday tasks, including finding products they love. [We’re] taking the first steps toward ChatGPT helping people buy them too—beginning with Instant Checkout, powered by the Agentic Commerce Protocol, built with Stripe.
U.S. ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Free users can now buy directly from U.S. Etsy sellers right in chat, with over a million Shopify merchants, like Glossier, SKIMS, Spanx, and Vuori, coming soon. Today, Instant Checkout supports single-item purchases. Next, we’ll add multi-item carts and expand merchants and regions.
While the announcement leaves many questions unanswered, here are some important points that the partnerships industry should know.
Affiliate’s value has always gone far beyond the click. It is the trusted layer that helps people make confident choices: from expert reviews that explain how products differ, to comparisons that guide decisions, to cashback and coupon platforms that show the full landscape of what’s available and how those options stack up. This content goes beyond just answering questions; it helps people decide what to buy, where to buy it, and how to buy it best.
Additionally, affiliate is already deeply woven into how AI operates. Internal CJ analysis indicates that most of the sources that ChatGPT references for product information are affiliate publishers. Affiliate content - whether a detailed review, a model comparison or a price-led guide - is powering the decision-making layer of AI commerce today.
Historically, the customer journey has unfolded across multiple steps and surfaces: discovery, research, comparison, and finally checkout. Affiliate has always thrived in that mid-funnel space, shaping intent and guiding choices.
Open-source frameworks such as the Agentic Commerce Protocols (ACP) and partnerships like OpenAI and Stripe are uniting those steps into a single interface. The same surface that introduces a product can now complete the sale. That doesn’t make affiliate less relevant; it makes its role broader. Trusted content, reviews, price intelligence and cashback opportunities will still help shape the decision, but now there’s a new imperative: linking that influence directly into the transaction flow, even if no click ever occurs.
Shoppers have never stopped at a single source, no matter how authoritative and there’s little reason to expect that they’ll start now. Many commerce industry studies show most people consult 3–7 sources before a purchase, and often 10 or more for higher-consideration products. A 2025 Equativ study found 66% of consumers double-check AI answers before purchasing even when they’ve used an AI tool.
Affiliate data tells the same story: the majority of conversions influenced by publishers involve multiple interactions across the journey, often before the final conversion event. All this evidence points to one conclusion: AI will become part of the journey, but not the whole journey. It may shape discovery, but shoppers will still seek trusted, human-authored information before they commit. Affiliate remains central to that process.
And AI won’t just reallocate existing sales. Like every other digital innovation before it, LLMs are likely to expand the total volume of online shopping. Easier discovery and faster decisions reduce friction and can bring new shoppers into the funnel and increase how often existing ones buy. And because most journeys still involve multiple touchpoints, that additional demand can benefit the whole digital ecosystem. In other words, the growth AI drives could outweigh the share it captures, with trusted affiliate content continuing to influence what people buy and where they buy it.
Even as checkout begins to move upstream into AI environments, affiliate’s fundamentals still apply. If AI is one of several touchpoints in a shopper’s journey–and all evidence suggests it usually is–then publishers that played earlier roles in that path will still have generated measurable clicks. Those Event IDs can continue to flow through the merchant’s system and fire CJ’s server-side conversion tag at the point of purchase, even if the final transaction happens entirely inside a conversational interface. All of this measurement is conducted within a privacy-compliant framework in line with industry privacy standards.
CJ’s advanced measurement methodologies offer robust programmatic ways for advertisers to pass information about conversion events to the platform, so that upstream touches can be credited for their roles in a conversion. This is true whether the conversion happens on the advertiser’s site or somewhere else.
Looking ahead, open-source frameworks such as the emerging Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) may expand that opportunity. Its open-source framework means new types of data can be integrated into commerce flows. That creates the potential for affiliate networks and AI platforms to work together to determine which trusted sources informed a recommendation and how that influence should be recognized. By embedding source information alongside product and transaction data, affiliate can help connect the decision-making layer directly to the point of sale - ensuring publishers remain visible and rewardable even when the purchase happens entirely inside an AI interface.
CJ is already building the tools brands need to do this today. Our Customer Journey Reporting reveals how influence builds across multiple touchpoints - not just the last click - while CJ Influence connects advertisers with authoritative creators and measures the contribution of their content across channels. These capabilities enable brands to see and reward the real drivers of decision-making, even as journeys evolve and checkout moves upstream.
This evolution aligns with Publicis Groupe’s Connected Commerce vision. Connected Commerce is built on the idea that discovery, influence and purchase are no longer separate moments but part of one continuous experience. Publicis Groupe solves for this complexity by creating the world’s leading connected commerce solution, allowing clients to plan and activate through the full marketing funnel and increase sales at the point of purchase.
AI accelerates that shift to continuous experience by collapsing steps that once happened across multiple platforms into a single surface. Affiliate plays a critical role in that model, acting as the connective tissue between trusted information and new transaction points, no matter which channel or checkout a user goes through. It ensures that the content guiding decisions is still visible, valued, and compensated even as checkout moves upstream.
As AI becomes both a touchpoint and a transaction point, but continues to draw on affiliate as a key layer for trusted information, the opportunity is to measure that influence no matter where the transaction happens - rewarding partners for the decisions they influence, and ensuring that the content and experiences guiding decisions remain visible, valued, and compensated in the next era of digital commerce.
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