What's hot in GEO right now.

Six months after launching Instant Checkout with Shopify, Etsy, and Walmart, OpenAI is moving transactions back to dedicated retailer apps inside ChatGPT. The Agentic Commerce Protocol stays as the discovery layer. Translation: AI discovery is locked in as the new battleground, but checkout is still being figured out. Brands that won early on discoverability have a head start — catalog quality is the moat that persists regardless of where checkout ends up living.

Named DTC brands are going live inside AI chat interfaces week by week. David's Bridal's CTO framed it as “the Amazon effect” — being present where shoppers start their search. The bridal category isn't an accident. High-consideration DTC verticals (bridal, beauty, home, supplements) are where AI discovery plays hardest. If a named competitor in your category goes live first, they own the prompt for months before you catch up.

The core update completed its 13-day rollout on April 8. SEMrush Sensor hit 9.5/10 volatility at peak. Most affected: DTC blogs, ingredient guides, and comparison pages competing with AI Overviews for informational queries. Small publishers lost 60% of search referrals year over year. If your DTC traffic is down and rankings look stable, the revenue is going to AI answers — not to competitors on page 1.

Perplexity just hit $450M+ ARR with a 50% month-over-month revenue jump. The competition is a founder-acquisition play — every startup that builds on Perplexity becomes a distribution surface. For DTC brands, the read-through is simpler: Perplexity has the capital, the traffic, and the momentum to keep pressing into product discovery. Showing up in its answers matters more this quarter than last.

Analysis of 20.9 million shopping keywords shows AI Overviews are now on 14% of shopping searches — up from 2.1% in November 2024. The bigger tell: only 17% of sources cited in AI Overviews also rank in the organic top 10. Five out of six citations are coming from pages that aren't on page 1 of Google. Traditional SEO leaders aren't winning AI citations. Structured data, entity authority, and citation-optimized content are.