Selling to the assistant – Dominic Monn

Dominic Monn

For a long time, buying something online still involved a surprising amount of manual labor and human decision-making.

You had to understand the category well enough to know what to search for. You had to work out which sources to trust. You had to translate your requirements into filters and keywords that a search engine could grasp. Only after that did you arrive at the vendor’s website, where the company finally got its chance to explain why it was the right choice.

If you hit a dead end, you had to get human support. Maybe a family member who knew the space, or a new thread on Reddit.

Not a smooth process, but a human one. Once you landed on that website, a company could still make its case. You might choose an inferior product on paper in order to support a smaller team, or go with a brand that simply looked more polished.

As of 2026, that journey is changing quickly.

Blind trust

At MentorCruise, this has become visible in the numbers.

A year or two ago, our buying journey looked like a normal marketplace journey. More than 65% of people found us through search engines. Some came through word of mouth, reviews, comparison pages, or competitors. When they landed on the site, they used a traditional marketplace interface: profile cards, categories, search, filters, reviews, pricing, availability.

Before booking a mentor, people would save half a dozen profiles, compare them across tabs, sometimes get second thoughts, and look up our reviews on third-party websites. You could see this in site analytics as people jumped from A to B to C and back to A.

That journey is no longer the default.

Today, more than 36% of our users find us through ChatGPT and other AI assistants. Only 30% of users still report going through the old search engine path.

It is tempting to read this as just a change in referrer. I do not think that is right. It changes the state of the buyer when they arrive.

A search visitor arrives with an open question and a need for information.

An AI-referred visitor often arrives with a formed recommendation. They may already know your competition, how you compare, and what people say about you online.

They have already asked something like: “I need help moving into product management” or “I’m stuck in my engineering career.” They may have refined the search with constraints like “I’ve already tried this bootcamp” or “My budget does not allow me to take a full certificate course.”

The assistant explains the category, compares possible paths, and sometimes recommends us. By the time the person reaches MentorCruise, part of the selling has already happened somewhere else.

That is useful when the assistant gets it right. It is dangerous when it does not.

The sale before the visit

The website is no longer guaranteed to be the first serious sales surface. For a growing slice of users, the website is where they go after the important part of the decision has already been shaped.

Adobe Analytics saw traffic from generative AI sources to U.S. retail sites rise 12x in February 2025 compared with July 2024. Adobe also found that 39% of surveyed U.S. consumers had used AI for online shopping, especially for research, deals, gift ideas, and shopping lists.

Adobe also found that AI-referred visitors were more engaged, viewed more pages, and bounced less than non-AI traffic. That matches what I see in our own data.

For most categories, AI is not yet replacing the transaction. But it is starting to replace the entire path leading up to it: the part where people figure out what they want, form a shortlist, and research the company behind it.

Flying blind

This also creates a measurement and attribution problem.

Assistants are shaky in adding consistent tracking to their links, and in many cases strip or omit tracking and referrer data entirely. These clicks can show up the same way as someone who typed your URL directly into the address bar.

A user might ask ChatGPT for the best way to find a mentor, get recommended MentorCruise, search the brand name on Google, click the organic result, and sign up.

Analytics may call that organic search. But Google did not create the intent. It captured the navigation.

A 2026 paper called “From Prompt to Purchase” studied opt-in clickstream data connected to users’ ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini conversations. The authors found that when an assistant recommended a brand to a user with no recent observed engagement, same-name Google searches, brand-site visits, and brand-specific retailer-page visits all increased.

This is probably already happening to many companies, and marketing teams are missing it.

Answering differently

The same shift is happening once users arrive.

When people come to MentorCruise, many no longer want to browse through dozens of profiles. They do not want to learn how the platform works. They want to describe their situation and be guided.

So our own assistant now helps...