Despite relentless headlines about AI chatbots reshaping the web, a new survey released today finds that most American consumers still begin their shopping journeys on Google - and that ChatGPT, for all its momentum, captures barely one in fourteen product searches.

Smarty Marketing, a New York-based SEO agency, published the results of a consumer survey this month showing that product discovery behavior in the United States has not shifted dramatically toward AI platforms. Google leads all channels with 56.68% of respondents preferring it as a starting point. Amazon follows at 28.96%. ChatGPT sits in third place at 7.26%, with Reddit at 4.56%.

The data were collected from 1,295 US residents and updated on May 12, 2026. The survey focused specifically on intent-based shopping channels - platforms consumers turn to when they have decided to look for a product - deliberately excluding social media to isolate direct-purchase-intent behavior.

A survey designed around intent, not general browsing

The methodology matters. By limiting the scope to intent-driven platforms, Smarty Marketing separated passive content discovery from active product search. That distinction means figures like ChatGPT's 7.26% represent consumers actively choosing the AI platform to start a buying journey, not incidentally encountering a product mention in a conversation.

According to Smarty Marketing, respondents were 46.31% female, 34.48% male, and 19.21% preferred not to disclose gender. Employment status skewed toward full-time work at 56.48%, with 28.45% working part-time and 9.66% unemployed, retired, or on leave. The geographic spread covered all 50 US states, and the survey was last updated on May 12, 2026.

The survey also reveals a gap between perception and behavior. According to the findings, 43.94% of respondents said they generally use search less because they can ask an AI platform. Yet 39.54% said they had never used an AI platform for shopping research at all. Both figures coexist in the same sample - a tension that illustrates how consumer sentiment about AI can diverge from actual usage patterns.

Google dominates in 45 of 50 states

At the state level, Google wins in the vast majority of US markets. According to Smarty Marketing, the only exceptions are Arizona, Delaware, Nebraska, Nevada, and Vermont, where consumers reported turning to Amazon first when beginning a product search.

This near-universal preference for Google across geographic contexts runs counter to assumptions that demographic or regional concentrations of early technology adopters might accelerate AI platform adoption in specific markets. In cities, suburbs, and rural areas alike, Google retains the top position. According to the survey, suburban residents do show a higher tendency to use ChatGPT for product research than urban or rural respondents - but even within that segment, ChatGPT does not displace Google as the first port of call.

The finding carries practical implications for advertisers running Google Shopping campaigns. As ads continue to penetrate deeper into Google's free listing grids, the sheer volume of purchase intent arriving through Google remains the dominant commercial surface. The Q1 2026 State of Search report by Datos, which drew on large-scale clickstream data, measured AI tool share at 1.72% of desktop search visits in Q1 2026 - still well below 2% despite accelerating growth.

ChatGPT leads the AI tier, but from a narrow base

Among the 60.46% of survey respondents who reported ever using AI for shopping decisions, ChatGPT accounted for 48.36% of AI platform usage. The full breakdown, according to Smarty Marketing, is:

  • ChatGPT: 48.36%
  • Gemini: 27.92%
  • Microsoft Copilot: 9.92%
  • Claude: 6.79%
  • Perplexity: 3.81%
  • Other AI platforms: 3.20%

That means ChatGPT commands roughly half the AI-shopping audience - a notable lead over Google's Gemini at 27.92%. However, the base is important: this 48.36% figure applies only to the 60.46% who have ever tried AI for shopping. Applied across the full sample, ChatGPT's active share of all shopping search starts lands at approximately 7.26%, the figure cited in the top-line results.

OpenAI has moved aggressively to expand ChatGPT's commerce capabilities over the past year. The platform introduced shopping features in April 2025, reporting over 1 billion weekly searches processed. It subsequently launched instant checkout via a Stripe partnership in late September 2025, enabling transactions directly from ChatGPT conversations. By September 2025, the platform had also improved its ability to detect shopping intent and reduce hallucinations, with OpenAI reporting a 45% reduction in factual errors when web search is enabled.

None of that investment has yet translated into a share of product discovery that competes with Google's 56.68% in this survey.

Amazon's structural role often gets overlooked in the AI debate

One of the more striking elements of the Smarty Marketing data is where Amazon sits in this picture. With 28.96% of respondents using it as their primary shopping search start, Amazon is Google's primary competitor in product discovery - not ChatGPT, and not any AI platform.

That fact tends to get obscured in industry coverage that frames search behavior as a binary contest between Google and AI chatbots. The Smarty Marketing survey reframes it: the contest, at least for purchase-intent traffic, is Google versus Amazon first, with AI a distant third.

Amazon has been expanding its own AI infrastructure aggressively. Alexa for Shopping launched on May 13, 2026, consolidating the Rufus AI shopping assistant with the Alexa+ personalization layer into a single interface available to all US customers on the Amazon Shopping app, the Amazon website, and Echo Show devices. Rufus reportedly helped over 300 million customers research and buy products in 2025. Amazon has been simultaneously building agentic commerce connections to external AI platforms while defending its own data through bot-blocking policies - a dual posture that reflects the competitive pressures documented in the survey data.

Generational patterns: Google leads, but Gen Z is moving

According to Smarty Marketing, Google is the preferred starting platform across all generational cohorts. However, the data shows that Gen Z and Millennials are adopting ChatGPT and Reddit for shopping research at higher rates than Gen X and Baby Boomers. The older generations remain more heavily concentrated around Google and Amazon, with comparatively minimal AI platform usage.

The observation aligns with broader behavioral research. A notable finding from the survey is that, for general uses beyond shopping, all generations report using search less because of AI tools - even if that perception has not yet fully materialized in actual shopping discovery behavior. That gap between felt behavior change and measured platform choice suggests AI's influence on search is partly psychological, shaping how consumers think about their own habits before it has fully reshaped those habits in practice.

Similarweb data from January 2026 documented ChatGPT holding 66% of US AI chatbot traffic while Gemini posted the largest year-over-year growth rate among major platforms - context that helps explain why Gemini's 27.92% AI-shopping share in the Smarty Marketing survey is notable even if it trails ChatGPT substantially.

What does 7.26% actually mean for marketers?

The figure is worth examining carefully. ChatGPT at 7.26% of shopping search starts is not negligible. In a market where Google has historically commanded over 90% of general search, a third-place finish at 7.26% among intent-driven shopping searches within roughly one year of shopping feature launches represents a pace of adoption that paid search professionals should take seriously.

The Datos Q1 2026 report measured AI tool share at 1.72% of desktop visits overall - a different metric than the Smarty Marketing survey's focus on stated first-choice behavior. Both data points together suggest AI platforms are growing faster as "considered" tools (platforms consumers might choose for a shopping decision) than as general visit-share destinations.

How ChatGPT product results are selected, displayed, and ranked has become a practical concern for brands. Unlike Google Shopping or Amazon, where paid placement determines visibility, ChatGPT's product selection algorithm runs without advertising placements, weighing factors including customer ratings, price competitiveness, and relevance to the specific user query. That means the optimization levers are different, and brands competing for AI discovery need to consider their ratings, review volume, and data feed quality rather than bidding strategy alone.

There is also a newer concern on the manipulation side. Research published in February 2026 documented a growing industry of businesses paying to influence what AI chatbots recommend, through tactics practitioners have labeled generative engine optimization (GEO). According to that analysis, visitors arriving from AI chatbots spent more time on sites, viewed more pages, and converted at rates 23 times higher than traditional search visitors - a figure that, if it holds, explains why brand investment in AI visibility is accelerating even when raw traffic share remains small.

The GEO angle: why this survey matters for SEO strategy

Smarty Marketing occupies an interesting position as the publisher of this research. The firm offers GEO services - AI optimization for content - alongside its traditional SEO practice, making the study both a genuine consumer behavior data point and a frame for the strategic question its clients face. That context does not invalidate the findings, but it is worth noting when evaluating the conclusions.

Ann Smarty, co-founder of Smarty Marketing, has written about the implications of the survey data in the report itself, noting that consumer habits are "not that easy or quick to break" and that whether AI platforms will take the lead remains unclear. The survey data supports that view: behavioral change at scale is measurable but not yet dominant.

Google's new AI search guide published in May 2026 addressed the technical mechanisms now central to how Google surfaces content in AI Overviews and AI Mode, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and the query fan-out technique. That guidance reinforces the idea that Google is actively adapting its search architecture to retain relevance as user expectations shift - which may help explain why its hold on shopping discovery remains as strong as the Smarty Marketing data suggests.

Platform rankings: the full picture

The overall ranking of shopping discovery platforms, by stated consumer preference, according to Smarty Marketing's 2026 survey:

  1. Google: 56.68%
  2. Amazon: 28.96%
  3. ChatGPT: 7.26%
  4. Reddit: 4.56%

Reddit at 4.56% is a noteworthy entry. The platform has been a growing destination for pre-purchase product research, particularly among younger consumers who distrust brand-produced content and seek peer recommendations. Reddit rose from third place in Q1 2025 to second among post-search destinations in the Datos Q1 2026 data - suggesting its trajectory in product research may be steeper than its current 4.56% starting-point share implies.

The complete absence of Bing, Perplexity, and Google Shopping as separate entries from the stated preferences in the survey is also telling. Despite Bing's role as the search infrastructure underpinning ChatGPT's web retrieval, and despite Perplexity's growing visibility in the marketing press, neither registers as a primary destination for US consumer shopping journeys in this sample.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Smarty Marketing, a New York SEO agency co-founded by Ann Smarty, conducted and published the survey. The subjects are 1,295 US consumers representing a cross-section of genders, employment statuses, and geographic locations across all 50 states.

What: A consumer survey measuring where Americans begin their product search journeys in 2026. Google holds 56.68% of stated first-choice preference; Amazon holds 28.96%; ChatGPT holds 7.26%; Reddit holds 4.56%. Among the 60.46% of respondents who have used AI for shopping, ChatGPT leads at 48.36%, followed by Gemini at 27.92%, Microsoft Copilot at 9.92%, Claude at 6.79%, and Perplexity at 3.81%.

When: The survey was last updated on May 12, 2026, and the findings were announced to the media today, May 21, 2026.

Where: The survey covers US consumer behavior nationally, with state-level breakdowns showing Amazon leading over Google in Arizona, Delaware, Nebraska, Nevada, and Vermont only. Suburban residents show the highest propensity for ChatGPT use among geographic segments.

Why: The research addresses a central question for the marketing and advertising industry: whether AI platforms have begun displacing traditional search in purchase-intent moments. The answer, at this sample and this point in time, is that they have not - but generational shifts, expanding AI commerce infrastructure, and a 43.94% share of respondents feeling they use search less because of AI tools suggest the gap between perception and measured behavior could narrow.

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