The recent stabilization in user loyalty toward specificartificial intelligence (AI) platforms represents a massive shift for the digital advertising ecosystem.
As users move past the novelty of jumping from one bot to the next, many have begun tosettle into routines with preferred chatbots.
The implications for advertisers are reshaping the traditional marketing funnel.
AI assistants have become a dailyhabit for many users who appear to stick with the same ones, and prefer to become more familiar with them rather than hop around.
So what does that mean for advertisers, referral traffic towebsites, and budgets for media buys?
First Page Sage, a U.S.-based agency that supports search engine optimization (SEO) and generative engine optimization(GEO), compiled data from 16 unique sources to estimate ChatGPT’s use and retention rates as of September 2026.
Since eachthe agency’s model used a weighted average of all sources, with the weights based on the
Then itapplied its model to the following 12 months to create a snapshot of ChatGPT’s use trends.
The data estimates 904 million users when combining OpenAI ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot — upfrom 805 million in August 2025.
As of August 2026, ChatGPT owns 60.5% AI search market share and 6.4 billion visits.
Top consumer industries where customers are usingChatGPT to assist with making purchases includes travel and hospitality in which First Page Sage estimates has had an impact of $1.48 trillion within the past year. While at most 47% of themembers of an industry use ChatGPT in their purchasing journey, that number has increased in each of the last 10 months.
The consumer shopping experience could become CHatGPT ratherthan the retail website, but in March OpenAI updated its policies to allow merchants to use their own checkout experiences and technology, while continuing to develop deeper native commerceexperiences.
ChatGPT allows the user to set up a stock or tracking alert for specific items.
I set up an alert on a specific dress. It tells me daily if the price has dropped or hascome back in stock in my size. You also can set up an agent to check multiple stores, check prices, and make the purchase on a human’s behalf, giving the green light up front under strict rules,such as under a certain price.
In the case of agentic buying, this means ChatGPT would handle the transaction and the person would never need to go to the merchant’s website.
