Agentic Commerce News for the Week of 9/27-10/3 (week 40/52)
While ChatGPT Instant Checkout dominated the news cycle, we highlight:
The big news this week in Agentic Commerce was the release of ChatGPT Instant Checkout. If you missed it we had initial coverage here and then are two posts into a three post deep dive (Part 1 and Part 2).
ChatGPT Checkout dominated the news cycle, so this is a good time to look past that and see what interesting news came out that we may have missed.
Up first, SimilarWeb dropped an update to their AI Tracker with some interesting new data.
SimilarWeb Drops Fresh GenAI Data!
SimilarWeb is out with a very fresh drop of their AI Tracker which as data as recently as last week: 9/26/25. This is the first data drop that we’ve had since ChatGPT-5. Here’s the entire report which is a really good read with much much more data→
and here are the datapoints that got my attention:
Overall GenAI Traffic DAUs
Here’s the six-month trend:
As a reminder, the perspective on this is deceptive: from April the GenAI daily audience has grown from 225m to 280m - that’s amazing growth in a short time and the headline is it’s largely coming from Google Gemini which took a huge surge in the last month.
Note: If you’re having trouble reconciling this with the ChatGPT 700/800m datapoint, it’s apples and oranges - Similarweb is daily users, that ChatGPT is monthly data.
Year Ago Share (Oct 2024)
This Year Share (Oct 2025)
On the surface this looks bad for OpenAI - growth is flat-ish and they have dropped share from 89% to 74%. But not all DAUs are created equal. A large percentage of ChatGPT’s DAUs pay a subscription plus they are monetizing other ways as well.
On the Gemini side, Google isn’t really monetizing those users and in fact they are largely defensive - keeping them from defecting to ChatGPT and I believe every time someone does an ‘answer engine’ prompt on Gemini vs. a ‘search engine’ search on Google, it’s a negative revenue event for them.
I also have a hard time believing this is Gemini proper and it makes me wonder if this includes AI Mode users. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t include AI Overviews. Google releases Gemini data so we should hear in late Oct/early Nov when they announce Q3 results, whats’s going on here from the horse’s mouth.
In any case, the takeaway is that Answer Engines, and thus, Agentic Commerce continue to grow rapidly.
We had another great datapoint drop this week that we broke early on the Retailgentic Pod that supports this.
CI&T: Agentic Commerce Reaches 74% Adoption!
On Sept 25th we dropped our podcast with retail analyst Melissa Minkow where she revealed a new survey they completed post ChatGPT-5 that showed a pretty big jump in the percentage of GenAI users embracing Agentic Commerce. Prior to this datapoint, we had datapoints from other surveys (Adobe, et al) pointing to 35-60% adoption with a mid-point of around 50%.
Friend of Retailgentic, Kiri Masters found the report that just dropped and put together this chart with the details→
There’s a lot more great insights in the report, you can access the whole thing here→
and don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast and the substack while we’re thnking about it:
OpenAI: Now the Most Valuable Private Company at $500B Valuation Plus Employees Cash Out (some)
This week OpenAI had an offer of secondary shares. This is where an external investor that wants shares in the company is allowed (usually through a process called a tinder offer) to buy shares from employees.
Highlights from the tinder offer:
Big name investors like Thrive Capital, SoftBank and MGX were the buyers
OpenAI employees sold $6.6B of stock out of $10.3B authorized, a signal employees continue to have internal conviction - 36% remained, 64% sold.
OpenAI last raised in March 2025 at a valuation of $300B and now its valuation has rocketed 66% in 6 months to $500B. Investors were excited that OpenAI revealed it’s first-half 2025 revenue was $4.3B - more than all of 2024 - the company’s revenues are growing extremely rapidly and at a tremendous scale
This valuation and expectations are such that OpenAI needs to keep growing that fast or faster. I think this is driving the company’s embrace of Agentic Commerce via ChatGPT Instant Checkout which is a new monetization path for those 700m monthly users who are actively shopping using ChatGPT anyway.
Perplexity Opens the Gates on Comet
It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of the Comet agentic browser and so far having tried all the offerings, it stands head and shoulders above the rest. It has become my defacto browser and saves me hours of busy work daily. This week they announced that Comet has gone ‘GA’ (General Availability in software lingo), so now there’s no excuse not to give it a try. If you missed it here’s the livestream where I had Comet doing 4 different yet complex shopping tasks for me.
PayPal’s Instant Product Discovery (Via Honey)
Back in 2020, PayPal paid $4B to acquired Honey. Honey is a browser extension that detects when you are on an ecommerce site and surfaces offers, promo codes and more. Think of it as a super-affiliate program.
To implement this, systems like Honey have to build ginormous databases of popular products, where they are sold and their prices. Flash forward 5 years, you know what would be a cool idea? Put a Chat interface on that database so in addition to the offers being in a browser extension, deal loving shoppers (like our friend Alex Rampell, who loves CamelCamelCamel that does something similar, but also older tech) can ‘Chat with the deals’.
PayPal calls this Instant Product Discovery and it’s coming soon to Honey users. Here’s a screen shot where they show a user looking for headphones and Honey’s AI interface gives a conversational list of products and prices/deals as part of the conversation.
Google Shopping’s ‘Ask Stores’ Exclusive Poshmark AI Experiment
X user David Kyle discovered this interesting experiment on Google Shopping→
Basically within the Google Shopping experience, you can have a product-focused chat with that merchant’s inventory, or store via this ‘Ask stores’ feature. Here’s a zoom in on how it pops up→
Once you hit Get Advice, you see this prompt from Poshmark telling the user about the feature and the types of conversations.
You may argue - “Scot, this is old-school Google Shopping, not Agentic Commerce, wth?” and I get it, but my guess is Google is trying to figure out how to bridge the monetization gap between AdWords and Agentic. One way to do that is to charge a % of sales, like we see ChatGPT doing. Another way is to offer Merchant’s a suite of selling tools, called Merchant services in the biz. This is what Shopify and Etsy do and it now drives the bulk of their monetization.
My guess is this is an experiment that, if it goes well, we could see make it into the Agentic Commerce features that Google announced at Google I/O.
Speaking of those features (our coverage here), they were announced and demoed in Mid-May. It’s been 5 months and while some of the minor features are live, there’s no sign of the Agentic checkout. In that timeframe ChatGPT launched ChatGPT-5, scores of other things and a complete checkout system with a huge launch customer and more in the wings. It’s October 4th, we have 55 days until black Friday. Time to get this out there even if it’s a limited release/beta type experience!
That’s a Wrap…Coming up Next Week on Retailgentic.
That’s all the Agentic Commerce news this week. Next week on the Retailgentic substack we’ll have Part III to wrap up our ChatGPT Instant Checkout Deep Dive. We’re taking a week off of podcasts for everyone to catchup, but we have some great guests right around the corner so stay tuned and…
Happy Agentic Commercing!