Hey everyone,
Welcome back for another bite to chew on.
Here’s the 2026 worry sitting in a lot of founder Slack channels:
Someone asked ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini for the best product in your category, and the shortlist named your competitor, not you.
Buying behavior is moving from search to answers.
Fewer clicks on Google, more people asking a model and taking the shortlist it hands back.
And you can’t blog your way onto that list, because AI barely trusts what a brand says about itself.
It ranks what other people publish about you: reviews, listicles, mentions.
Affiliate partners produce exactly that content.
Quick context: UpPromote is a data-backed affiliate & influencer marketing platform built for Shopify, used by 250,000+ merchants with $2B+ in tracked affiliate revenue. And they just published a FREE playbook on building it on purpose.
We put this exact question to Jay Hunter, CEO of K2O by Kylie Jenner, and paired it with what we’re seeing firsthand at Obvi.
Let’s get into it.
On the menu:
Why the buying moment moved from Google to ChatGPT
Why AI cites other people, not your homepage, and where Jay says the models actually look
How a partner network becomes the content engine, and how to track it when attribution gets muddy
The new buying moment
Search used to be the whole top of the funnel: rank, get the click, win the session. That loop still exists, but it’s not the one growing.
58% of online shoppers now use AI to find products (up from 25% in 2023), and Shopify reported that AI-referred orders grew 11x in a year.
Jay has watched the shift from inside two brands (7 years at MaryRuth’s on an $80M budget, now K2O):
“I just think now people are asking ChatGPT or Claude: hey, what is actually the best hydration product I should take?”
He already has a name for the discipline that follows:
“It’s sort of the new school SEO. It’s how you optimize for AI to pick your brand to be the one that gets recommended.”
In search, you could be #4 and still get traffic.
In an AI answer, you’re in the shortlist or you’re gone.
The model names three brands, the shopper picks from those three. And ChatGPT shoppers buy 31% more often than shoppers from plain search, because they arrive with a question already formed and a recommendation already in hand.
This isn’t a brand-awareness vanity project, it’s demand capture.
Most brands haven’t even checked: only 16% look at how they show up in AI today.
Open ChatGPT this afternoon, ask for the best option in your category in your customer’s words, then ask Perplexity and Gemini. Write down who gets named and which sources get cited. For most Shopify brands, it’s a competitor you already lose sleep over, plus a roundup site you’ve never pitched.
The citation gap
Google rewarded you for publishing, so brands treated their own domain as the source of truth.
AI doesn’t work that way.
About 85% of what a model says about a brand comes from other websites, not its own.
You can publish 100 blog posts and stay invisible in ChatGPT while a smaller competitor with the right partners gets named again and again.
A homepage is an ad; a review, a listicle, or a YouTube roundup is closer to evidence.
Publisher and video pieces (articles, reviews, roundups, YouTube tests with transcripts, Reddit threads) are what AI cites; a creator’s voice is what closes the sale once the answer names you.
As Jay puts it,
“It helps substantially to hear a voice that you trust, follow, or admire.”
If a competitor has 40 people writing about them and you have none, the model isn’t choosing the better product.
It’s choosing the better-documented one.
The partner network
You can’t assign your way onto other people’s domains at scale.
You can through partners who already write, film, and publish, and who get paid when the content converts.
Each piece a content-first partner publishes is both a sales channel and a citation sitting on someone else’s domain: a YouTuber who tests your product, a newsletter that includes you in a roundup, a writer whose comparison piece gets linked in the Reddit thread the model reads.
No program yet? Not a blocker, UpPromote’s playbook walks through building one in five steps with AI presence designed in from day one.
Already running one? Most existing programs were built for last-click revenue, not third-party coverage.
The upgrade is a 90-day plan: audit who’s actually publishing, find the content partners quietly driving mentions you can’t see, and shift the pay mix so reviews and lists get rewarded, not just coupon conversions.
On tracking, we’ll be straight with you because we’re living it at Obvi right now.
We’ve been pumping out articles so that when someone asks a model for the best flavored collagen, there’s something for it to find. The frustrating part is the data: a lot of AI traffic isn’t tracked properly yet, and these models can bypass affiliate tracking on the way to your store.
The clean incrementality answer doesn’t exist yet.
Jay’s fix is directional, not surgical:
“I’m not the biggest attribution guy.”
By his estimate, a consumer touches your brand 8 to 12 times before buying (an email offer, a creator they follow, an AI answer):
“Which one gets the attribution? The reality is I think you need all three.”
So he tracks one thing:
“Are we showing up in more AI spots today than we were yesterday? If that’s the case, I know it’s at least helping.”
UpPromote’s playbook gives you the structure to run that check like a system.
A scored program audit, a 90-day rollout, and a 30-prompt protocol for tracking AI citations across the questions your customers actually ask.
If the partner content you’re paying for is what the models cite, recruit more of those partners.
If it’s not, change who’s in the program.
Sum It Up
AI isn’t ranking your website. It’s ranking what other people have already said about you, and affiliate partners are how you build that third-party trail on purpose.
The shift: the buying moment moved from the search bar to the answer, and the answer has no page two. Jay calls optimizing for it “the new school SEO.”
Trust: models lean on Reddit, articles, and news, not your homepage. Publisher-style partners get you cited; the creators your customer follows close the sale the answer opens.
The engine: recruit content-first partners or upgrade the program you already run, and track it the way Jay does: are you in more AI answers today than yesterday?
If a model is recommending your competitor today, the fix is not another blog post on your domain. It is more people, on other domains, saying your name in public.
Check out the playbook for more secret insights - it’s FREE.
Let us know how we did...
All the best,
Ron & Ash