While you were busy closing out the year, AI platforms were busy building checkout buttons, cutting clicks, and paying publishers.

If we had to boil down Q4 2025 into three core themes, they would be:

1. AI platforms transformed into transaction engines: ChatGPT showed that discovery is no longer the endgame—purchase and product usage is.

2. Zero-click search became standard: Google continued cannibalizing the search empire it built.

3. Publishers started playing ball: Content publishers started jumping on the AI bandwagon (for a fee).

Here’s what happened in AI search last quarter—and what it means for your strategy.

ChatGPT entered the ecommerce game

What happened

Technically ChatGPT launched Instant Checkout on September 29, but we’re giving it a pass.

Users can now do more than just discover products, prices, availability, sizing, and reviews in ChatGPT Shopping—they can also add products to their cart and check out without visiting a merchant’s website.

What it means for your AI search strategy

This is an especially big one for ecommerce companies.

OpenAI said individual products won’t be penalized if a brand doesn’t integrate with Instant Checkout, but integration will be a ranking factor for merchants themselves.

If your competitors integrate with Instant Checkout and you don’t, you could be at a visibility disadvantage.

Google AI Mode kept killing the click

What happened

Google continued the global rollout of AI Mode in October 2025, expanding to 35 new languages and 40-plus new countries and territories.

Preliminary research indicates that AI Mode searches end in fewer clicks than AI Overviews, which were already substantially eating into click share. Google AI Mode has 100M-plus monthly active users. AI Overviews has more than 2B.

What it means for your AI search strategy

The march toward a zero-click world continues.

If you’re already taking AI search seriously, stay the course. If you’re not, start. The customer journey is increasingly reliant on AI consuming your content and summarizing it for users who never click through.

If you can’t remember the last time you audited how AI platforms interpret your products and services, you’ve got a new Q1 priority.

Google Gemini proved the third time’s the charm

What happened

Google launched Gemini 3 in November 2025—following the release of Grok 4.1 the day before and preceding Claude Opus 4.5 later in the month and GPT-5.2 in December.

The market reaction was highly positive (Alphabet’s stock price jumped 6% and exceeded $300 for the first time). Meanwhile, consumer demand was so high that Google temporarily cut free access because its servers couldn’t handle it.

What it means for your AI search strategy

The popularity of Gemini 3 is a helpful reminder that there’s not one AI platform to rule them all. At least not yet.

ChatGPT has the largest user base, but other platforms have significant and growing audiences.

As a data study from the Scrunch team exploring usage of AI Overviews versus AI platforms indicated: If you want to build a solid AI search strategy, it pays to think multi-channel. That means monitoring performance across multiple platforms.

Publishers started opting in to AI search

What happened

Meta signed deals with various publishers—including CNN, Fox News, USA Today, and others—to feed news to Meta AI in December 2025. This came on the heels of the pilot launch of Microsoft’s Publisher Content Marketplace in September 2025.

No, the lawsuits haven’t ended (The New York Times and Chicago Tribune sued Perplexity for copyright infringement in December, and the NYT’s lawsuit against OpenAI is ongoing). But AI platforms and publishers were making moves on the licensing front at the start of winter.

What it means for your AI search strategy

AI platforms are starting to pay for premium content.

This is yet another signal about what gets cited by LLMs and what doesn't. Quality, authority, and source credibility matter.

You might not be CNN, but you can still position your brand as an authority worth citing by creating expert-level content in your niche and building relationships with publications that AI platforms use as sources (research from Stacker and Scrunch shows that content picked up by multiple news outlets can increase AI citation rate by up to 325%).

It’s also worth considering how you can scale mentions across cited sources.

ChatGPT unveiled its app marketplace

What happened

This story really kicked off in October 2025 when OpenAI revealed its ChatGPT Apps SDK (aka the toolkit developers need to create apps for ChatGPT).

But ChatGPT didn’t open up to all app developers until December 2025, telling devs that they could start submitting apps for review and publication while also introducing a new app directory.

What it means for your AI search strategy

This is yet another example of AI companies becoming intermediaries between brands and their customers.

Whether publishing an app via ChatGPT will help AI search performance is still very much an open question.

But if your goal is getting your app discovered in ChatGPT, OpenAI previously indicated that citations will be a signal.

Scrunch product launches in Q4 2025

AI platforms weren’t the only ones busy in Q4.

Scrunch was building to help brands monitor AI search, extract actionable insights, and optimize performance, including:

Agent traffic

We reintroduced Agent Traffic in October, giving you the ability to easily track and understand how AI user agents are crawling your website.

How much AI traffic your site is getting, which agents are visiting most frequently, whether agents are training, indexing, or retrieving, and which webpages are most popular. All a click away.

AI Search Trends

We launched our AI Search Trends feature in November to help you see what people are asking AI about (and how your brand measures up in the responses).

You can select business-relevant topics (or let our AI suggest them for you), see estimated prompt volume for each topic over time, and view the percentage of AI responses that mention your brand (or your competitors).

Suggested Competitors

We launched Suggested Competitors in December, making it easier to identify the competitors you should keep an eye on in AI search.

Scrunch automatically analyzes prompt responses and AI search trend data to identify the brands competing for the prompts you care about and lets you add them to your watchlist (and backfill historical prompt data) with the press of a button.

Copilot support

We launched support for Copilot in December, bringing the total number of AI platforms supported in Scrunch to eight (including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, and Meta AI).

All the real-time monitoring and actionable insights we offer for other platforms, now for Copilot.

Stay tuned for our Q1 2026 digest.

Get started with Scrunch

Start reaching more customers on AI platforms. Start a 7-day free trial or get in touch to see Scrunch in action.