This Week in M&A Issue #205

OpenAI has introduced a new feature called Instant Checkout, bringing shopping directly into ChatGPT.

U.S. users can now buy items from Etsy sellers without leaving the chat, with the program soon extending to more than a million Shopify merchants. The news sent Etsy shares soaring 16% and boosted Shopify stock more than 6%.

Instant Checkout supports single-item purchases for all U.S. ChatGPT users, with multi-item carts and international rollout on the horizon. Instead of clicking away to a retailer’s site, shoppers can now tap “Buy” inside ChatGPT, confirm payment via Apple Pay, Google Pay, Stripe, or credit card, and finalize their order in seconds.

The system runs on the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), an open-source framework developed with Stripe. Rather than handling orders itself, ChatGPT securely passes payment details to the merchant’s existing checkout, fulfillment, and customer service systems. For subscribers with payment details already saved in ChatGPT, the process becomes nearly instant.

OpenAI has stressed that its results are “organic and unsponsored, ranked purely on relevance,” though it will charge sellers a small transaction fee.

This positions ChatGPT not just as a search and recommendation tool, but as a full shopping channel that could challenge the dominance of Google and Amazon in product discovery and online retail. With over 700 million weekly active users, a significant share of whom already ask shopping-related questions, the integration could reshape online retail by turning casual product searches into instant purchases.

Competitors are moving in the same direction. Perplexity, Microsoft, and Google are experimenting with their own shopping tools, setting the stage for a clash over who controls the future of AI-driven commerce.

For OpenAI, Instant Checkout is both a play for consumer convenience and a much-needed revenue stream as it faces growing infrastructure costs. For merchants, it opens a direct channel to millions of shoppers already engaging with ChatGPT daily, blurring the line between conversation and commerce.

Despite the hype around AI-powered search, Google remains overwhelmingly dominant.

ChatGPT now processes about 66 million “search-like” prompts per day, while Google handles roughly 14 billion searches daily, making Google around 210 times larger. Rand Fishkin broke down these stats in his latest video.

While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reported that ChatGPT’s total prompts hit 2.5 billion per day by July, only around 21%, or 66 million, are actual search-intent queries. That’s far below Google’s daily volume of 14 billion searches, or the 5 trillion searches Google processed in 2024.

Much of ChatGPT’s growth comes from API integrations, where businesses embed GPT into apps and products, rather than from direct “search” use.

BrightEdge reports that AI-driven search contributes to less than 1% of web referrals, and according to TollBit’s State of the Bots Q2 2025 report, Google sends 831x more visitors to websites than AI systems. Even smaller search engines like DuckDuckGo reportedly generate more referrals than ChatGPT.

In the past year, Google referrals fell slightly from over 90% of external traffic in Q2 2024 to 84.1% in Q2 2025, yet AI apps contributed just 0.102% of referrals. Click-through rates from AI interfaces were 91% lower than the top-10 organic search results, meaning it took roughly 135 AI scrapes to produce a single human visitor.

For businesses and marketers, this is a reminder that SEO remains critical. AI tools may influence certain niches more than smaller search engines, but Google still dominates discovery and drives the vast majority of web traffic.

AI Overviews and chat-driven search can shift attention, but for now, focusing on where your audience actively searches remains key.

Google has launched a new Small Business Hub designed to help entrepreneurs and SMBs navigate the fast-growing world of AI and digital tools.

Rather than jumping between multiple platforms, business owners can now access everything in one place, whether it’s claiming a Google Business Profile, listing products in Merchant Center, running Google Ads or YouTube campaigns, or setting up Google Analytics.

The hub also highlights Google Workspace’s AI-powered features and offers beginner-friendly training, help guides, and starter website options. This creates a clear path for new users: claim your profile, add products, launch ads, and track performance. For small teams or solo founders, this removes much of the complexity of getting started.

Agencies and consultants also benefit. Instead of sharing a patchwork of links, they can now send clients to a single, centralized resource. While the tools themselves aren’t new, the packaging makes Google’s ecosystem far more user-friendly and highlights AI-driven workflows that streamline everyday tasks.

Google stresses the importance of these tools for SMBs. According to its research, 82% of small businesses credit digital ads with driving revenue growth, and 79% say online tools help them compete with larger competitors. With AI now embedded in platforms like Google Ads and Merchant Center, businesses can sharpen their targeting, automate campaigns, and stand out in crowded markets, capabilities once reserved for big brands with deep pockets.

The real test will be whether Google keeps the hub updated with new products, partner offers, and resources. If it does, this could become the go-to destination for small businesses to launch, manage, and grow, freeing them to spend less time on setup and more time on strategy.