Chatbots and AI shopping tools that generate gift ideas and recommend products could disrupt affiliate marketing and distort attribution in the 2025 holiday shopping season and beyond.
Ecommerce shops that rely on affiliate traffic for low-cost shopper acquisition during the peak holiday season should closely monitor traffic and sales volume and consider a backup plan if affiliate traffic falls short of expectations.
The reason for this potential disruption is that AI is typically easier for shoppers. Type “gift ideas under $50 for a 10-year-old gamer” into ChatGPT, Grok, or Gemini, and you will get a relatively straightforward answer, not a list of sites for further research.
While such a list may provide more in-depth information or product details, generative AI is easier to use.
This is especially true on Google Search when the results include the AI Overviews summary. Zero clicks needed.
Ecommerce marketing managers may want to watch affiliate production during the 2025 holiday season to gauge AI’s impact.
Lost Traffic
Shoppers who ask AI for products or services effectively bypass affiliate review and recommendation sites. Skipping affiliate content could lead to lost or unattributed traffic.
Each could impact a store’s revenue, although lost traffic could hurt most.
Lost traffic. Affiliate content, such as gift guides or product roundups, may attract a smaller fraction of the consumer holiday audience in 2025.
The big affiliate review sites — Wirecutter, The Inventory, or BestProducts.com — have historically thrived by capturing search traffic for “best X” or “gift ideas for” queries, especially around Black Friday and Christmas.
AI search tools, such as ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews, offer similar content without clicking to a separate website. Fewer clicks lead to fewer readers, which could equal fewer ecommerce sales via the affiliate channel.
While observers have raised this concern, the outcome is speculation. If AI does disrupt affiliate traffic, the 2025 peak shopping season might be the first indication.
Attribution. The second problem relative to AI and the affiliate channel is attribution.
AI’s shopping recommendations are almost certainly trained on and derived, at least partially, from affiliate channel content.
Emarketer’s Sara Lebow put it this way in a May 2025 article, “sites like the New York Times’ Wirecutter offer curated recommendations ChatGPT can scrape, personalize, and regurgitate.”
If true, this might mean that some of the sales an ecommerce shop earns via search or AI this Christmas are, at least in part, the result of affiliate efforts.
In the near term, that is a bonus to merchants: sales without commissions. Over time, however, it is a disincentive. If affiliates earn less, they likely will produce less or find other ways to profit without ecommerce referrals. The result could be less traffic and fewer sales.
Opportunities
I see three ways ecommerce operators can respond to affiliate marketing changes:
- Collaborate with affiliates,
- Create content,
- Find alternatives.
Collaboration. Affiliates are acutely aware of AI’s disruptive potential and are seeking alternatives. Ecommerce merchants can collaborate with these partners to test and invest in some of these options.
For example, affiliates have long used advertising arbitrage to find readers, deliver traffic, and ultimately earn commissions. For good reason, merchants often place restrictions on how and what an affiliate can advertise. But stores and affiliates could work together, perhaps using hybrid commission models or multi-touch attribution to make it easier and less risky for affiliates to buy ads.
Separately, many affiliate sites have robust email lists. These lists were once complementary traffic drivers, but they represent an owned audience. Merchants can buy ads or advertorials in these email broadcasts with a hybrid commission — part fixed, part percentage.
Create content. Ecommerce merchants concerned about the demise of affiliate traffic could also produce more of their own content. Affiliates have proven the value of content to attract shoppers.
Find alternatives. Merchants can seek alternatives to affiliate marketing for similarly low customer acquisition costs.
One such alternative could well be ChatGPT, which could add affiliate revenue through its shopping recommendations. Emarketer suggested this might take the form of paying review sites a flat fee or sharing affiliate revenue with review sites when the AI result draws from their content.
First Test
AI will not kill affiliate marketing, but it will change the traffic mix and attribution math.
The 2025 holiday season may be the first clear test of whether ecommerce brands can adapt fast enough, rebalancing their partner portfolios, optimizing for AI discovery, and building direct connections to customers, so they are not wholly dependent on any single referral channel.