New usage reports show AI assistants answering a growing share of product search queries

Fresh industry data published this week points to a steady climb in the share of product-related search queries being answered directly by AI assistants, with several independent measurement firms now putting the figure in the low double digits globally and higher in the shopping-heavy categories merchants compete on.

Three patterns stand out from the reports. First, comparison-style queries ("best X for Y", "X vs Z") are shifting to assistants fastest, because these questions map naturally onto the answer formats AI models produce. Second, queries with a clear commercial intent -- price, availability, shipping -- increasingly end in a citation rather than a click to a search listing. Third, the shift is not limited to one engine: ChatGPT, Perplexity, and assistant responses inside general search are all showing the same direction.

For merchants the practical consequence is direct. A sizable and growing share of product discovery now happens without a traditional results page at all, which means the visible "cited set" of three to five sources an assistant names is becoming a primary surface, not a niche experiment. Winning a citation earns placement inside the answer; missing it means being entirely absent from the discovery moment.

The merchants already ahead in this environment share a few habits: they state price, stock, and shipping directly in readable text; they keep every surface consistent so an extractor can trust the page end to end; and they recheck their pages after every promo or price cycle so a stale fact does not quietly drop them out of the cited set.

When assistants answer a growing share of product queries, citation placement stops being a nice-to-have and becomes a core visibility metric -- and it is one merchants can actually manage. Visora's free scan at geovisora.com/audit reads your product URLs the way an assistant does and shows which fields are clean, missing, or conflicting, so you can see exactly what is protecting (or costing) you a place in the answer before the shift accelerates further.