21% of ChatGPT Conversations Show Commercial Intent: Four Usage Patterns Identified

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Agentic Commerce | Lead Merchant Positioning

AI Commerce Lead Merchant: Why Etsy Wins 98.5% of Citations and Sephora Just 8.7%

Bain forecasts $300–500B in US agentic commerce by 2030. Whether your brand wins that revenue depends on a metric most retail teams aren't tracking yet: how often you appear as the featured merchant in an AI shopping result.

Etsy is the lead merchant 98.5% of the time in ChatGPT product events. Sephora 8.7%. The agentic-commerce metric retail teams aren't tracking yet.

We looked. Across 23,948 ChatGPT product events with offer data (US + GB) — roughly 29% of product events have offer/merchant fill — we measured something simpler than share of voice and more decisive than visibility: which retailer is shown first.

The lead-merchant slot is the one a user actually clicks. Everything else is "+ others" — buried, contextual, and largely commercially inert.

Source for external benchmark: Bain & Company — 2030 Forecast: How Agentic AI Will Reshape US Retail, December 2025.