AI Is Upending Marketing on Two Fronts

Harvard Business Review features research by Maximilian Kaiser and Christian Schulze on the value of ChatGPT referrals for e-commerce. The article by Stefano Puntoni discusses how AI is transforming marketing through both generative AI tools and AI-powered consumer interfaces. It highlights findings from their study using first-party data from over a thousand websites, showing that ChatGPT referrals generate revenue per session that falls between social media referrals (top of funnel, low intent) and search (high intent), positioning LLM-driven traffic as a distinct and emerging channel in the digital marketing landscape.