Five Minute Findings

The ‘will this suit me?’ question we all have will become a moment spent in an AI chat window. If your products don’t appear in ChatGPT’s shopping results, there’s no try-on button to press. So the useful question isn’t ‘should we worry about AI?’ It’s ‘can these tools find, understand, and show our products?’ (Marketing, you can change it, but you can’t kill it!)

That comes down to unglamorous work. Complete product feeds, clean structured data, accurate titles and descriptions, and product photography good enough to be shown on a stranger’s selfie. Paid Ads in ChatGPT that reach the right audience at the right time.

Fashion first. We’d expect the same idea to reach anything people struggle to picture at home, like furniture, flooring, or even paint and wallpaper. Although for the record OpenAI hasn’t announced that (yet). If ChatGPT ads end up sitting next to these results, that’s a new place to buy customer attention. Worth watching. Not yet worth rebuilding your plan around.

If your organic traffic dropped sharply, start by checking the dates. Open Search Console and see whether the fall lines up with 25 to 27 September or with 30 September to 1 October. If it does, this update is a likely suspect. If it started earlier or later, look elsewhere first.

Then check you’re not mistaking the season for a penalty. Early Christmas trading, a broken tracking tag or a site release can all look like a Google problem from a distance.

If the dates do line up, read the spam policies honestly against your site. Common culprits include thin pages made at scale, AI content published without anyone checking it, and links bought or swapped to game rankings. Fix what applies, then wait for the rollout to finish before judging the result. Making big changes mid-update makes it very hard to tell what worked.

Most businesses and marketing agencies don’t have an attribution problem, more a ‘we believe whichever report flatters us most’ problem. Every platform claims credit for the same sale. Add them up, and you’ve often sold more than you actually did.

You don’t need an enterprise measurement stack if you’re not enterprise size. Run one simple incrementality test on your biggest channel. It sounds scary, but switch it off, or cut it hard, in one region or for a set period, and compare sales against areas where you didn’t. It won’t be perfect, but it will tell you more than another month of platform-reported ROAS.

Finally, brand marketing is performance marketing wearing a fake beard and glasses: it shows up later, and it shows up in the numbers. Don’t ignore it while only chasing the people at the bottom of the funnel.

Creating desire for a brand isn’t always easy, as there are more tangible returns in demand capture activity within performance marketing. However, investing in long-term brand activity designed to gradually improve one or more of the three highlighted areas can deliver significantly more growth long term.

For an online business, attachment lives in unglamorous places: delivery that turns up when promised, an easy reorder, a returns process that doesn’t feel like a punishment, emails people actually want to open. So start by checking your repeat purchase rate, and how it’s moved over the last year. If it’s flat or falling, that’s probably a better place to invest than another campaign aimed at people who’ve never heard of you.

And the AI angle matters. If AI search tools favour brands people already want, then demand capture alone gets harder over time. Brand work is slow, but it’s becoming part of how you get found.

You don’t always need a redesign to sell more. Often you need to understand why people hesitate, and remove the reason.

Pick one principle and test it properly. Put reviews next to the add-to-basket button rather than at the bottom of the page. Show the higher-priced option first so the others feel reasonable (anchoring). Pre-select the delivery option most people choose anyway (the default effect). Then measure whether it changed what people bought, not just what they clicked.