Our new report, Death Of The Retail Website As We Know It (Agentic Commerce Transforms Retail Strategy), takes you deeper into our findings. Forrester clients: Register for our webinar on June 30 or watch the replay!

 

Retail websites are being sidelined by something that is more conversational and better aligned to how people want to shop: answer engines like ChatGPT and Google Gemini. That shift is already reshaping where shopping starts. According to Forrester’s February 2026 Consumer Pulse Survey, over a quarter of US online adults used ChatGPT to search for products in the past month.

The Retail Website Monopoly Is Over

For three decades, the retail website has owned non‑marketplace digital commerce. That era is ending. Shopping is becoming conversational, more splintered, and intent-driven, and traditional retail websites are struggling to adapt as answer engines gain traction and siphon off traffic and sales. Retailers must accept that traditional retail website experiences no longer sit at the center of every digital shopping journey.

Answer Engines Are Early But Influential

It is tempting to dismiss answer-engine commerce as immature and write off their sales as a rounding error. It is fair to note that current purchase activity is limited, with some answer engines abandoning their early native checkout efforts.

But retailers ignore answer engines at their peril. What really matters is the speed of adoption now and the trajectory:

  • This is the floor, not the ceiling. Adoption is early, but interest is significantly higher than current usage.
  • Behavior trains expectations. Conversational shopping teaches consumers to use natural language, and they will expect that everywhere, including on retail sites.
  • Traffic quality is improving. Shoppers arriving from answer engines tend to convert better than traditional search referrals.

Shopper Intent Now Shapes The Buying Journey

Evolving shopper intent drives new consumer preferences, and diversified shopping-channel selection is evolving shopper intent. Shoppers choose the channels in which they begin a shopping journey based on what they are trying to accomplish in the moment:

  • High consideration favors answer engines. Research-heavy purchases and unfamiliar products pull shoppers toward answer engines that compare, summarize, and explain.
  • Brand-loyal purchases lead straight to retailer sites. When shoppers know the brand or plan to buy something expensive, they often start on the brand or retailer site.
  • Commoditized buys flow to marketplaces. Repeat, low-cost purchases still default to marketplaces like Amazon, where ease and price dominate.

Websites Won’t Die, But Their Role Evolves

Will websites really die? Probably not, but they will have to change. Answer engines won’t replace sites outright, but they are redefining experiences for certain shopping intents and creating new expectations for consumers, including natural language conversational shopping.

This shift rewards pragmatism over purity. Focus on actions that keep you adaptable during a period of shifting channel and consumer-behavior equilibrium:

  • Anchor strategy in shopper intent. Let intent, not channel loyalty, dictate investment priorities.
  • Reinvest in product fundamentals. Clean, comprehensive product data is now table stakes everywhere.
  • Plan assortments by channel. Decide which products belong where, and push curated data into non-owned environments deliberately.
  • Test continuously. GenAI-driven experiences require constant tuning as both models and behaviors evolve.

The retail website is not disappearing, but its role is changing. Leaders who accept that early will spend less time defending the past and more time designing what comes next.

Read the full report: Death Of The Retail Website As We Know It. Register for our webinar on June 30 or watch the replay afterward. Stay tuned for Forrester’s interactive tool, “Opportunity Assessment For Answer Engine Selling: Forrester Five C’s Checklist” to determine whether this is a top priority, worthy of a limited experiment, or best for a “watch and wait” list. For deeper discussion on how agentic commerce and answer engines affect your portfolio, you can request a guidance session.