Forrester dropped a report this week with a headline designed to scare retailers. The retail website as we know it is dead. And IMO, they’re mostly right, but the nuance is more interesting than the headline.

Hint: It’s dying, but only if businesses don’t adapt to the changing B2C buying trend.

Forrester claims that answer engines like ChatGPT and Gemini are sidelining traditional retail sites. Shopping is going conversational, intent-driven, and splintered in ways that destroy site visitor tracking. Over a quarter of US online adults used ChatGPT to search for products last month. That’s not a rounding error, but instead a clear signal that buyer behavior has changed.

“Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!” – Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism, first series (1865), preface

B2C is in the ‘dark funnel’ too

This shift will hit anyone relying on discovery and browsing for sales the hardest. High-consideration, comparison-driven purchases like furniture, electronics, and unfamiliar brands are exactly the kind of research-heavy decisions people are now outsourcing to AI. This shift in behavior is likely more pronounced in complex financial services such as insurance, mutual funds, and retirement planning. If a shopper can ask ChatGPT “what’s the best mid-range stand mixer” and get a confident, synthesized answer with a buy link, your beautifully designed product page was never in the equation.

The B2B buyer isn’t the only one starting their research in the ‘dark funnel’. The B2C buyer starts there as well.

If you’re a reader of Consumer Reports, RTings, or Wirecutter, you’ve experienced the analog version of this shift in buyer behavior. A source that gives unbiased reviews and comparisons for people who want to know which one to buy to get a good value.

Loyalty removes the middleman

However, what Forrester buries and fails to mention is that brand loyalty still routes directly to you. When shoppers know what they want and trust the seller, they skip the middleman. Whether it is AI or otherwise. The website isn’t irrelevant. It’s just not where the shopping journey starts anymore. Someone aware of your brand but doesn’t know your products, or has no reason to trust you, is going to ask around.

Going forward, that most likely means asking an AI agent.

And that’s the real threat. You’re not losing loyal customers. You’re losing discovery of your brand by new customers. Something else, like Claude or ChatGPT, will determine whether that new customer should look at your website. Or not.

The retailers who adapt early will stop defending the website as the center of everything and start treating it as one node in a much bigger graph. Where the integration, availability, and accessibility of the website to AI agents becomes very important. That means clean product data, intent-mapped product structure, and presence in channels the business does not own. The ones who don’t will keep optimizing their homepage while traffic quietly drains away.

The question isn’t whether to have a website. It’s whether your website is doing anything a chatbot can’t communicate better.